International Dictionary of Psychoanalysis | Addiction

The Latin addictus refers to a person who is bound and dependent as a result of unpaid debts. Metaphorically, this term came to be used for any behavior that results from a heavy dependence on something, such as a drug. A number of common substances or those that can be freely purchased can be used as drugs or become addictive substances: medication, alcoholic beverages, glue, and so on. Psychoanalytically, the power of a particular addiction depends both on the unconscious fantasies that underlie the subject's ingestion, and the substance's actual chemical effect.

Sigmund Freud refers to addiction in an early paper on "Hypnosis" (1891d, p. 106), and in a letter to Wilhelm Fliess of December 22, 1897, he refers to masturbation as the "primary addiction" (1950a, p. 272; 1985c, p. 287). Karl Abraham (1908/1927) studied alcohol addiction. Sándor Radó (1933) associated addiction with a regression to childhood. Otto Fenichel (1945) developed the concept of addiction as a regression to infantile stages, and his descriptions of alcohol as a means of diluting the superego are especially interesting. Herbert Rosenfeld (1965) referred to the manic-depressive signs that underlie addiction, and connected addiction to pathological narcissism of the Self. Donald Winnicott (1951/1953) associated addiction with a pathology of the transitional. Winnicott's transitional object, a creation/discovery of the subject, opens up an intermediary zone of experience, which then expands into play and cultural life, while the transitional object is disinvested and loses its meaning. In addiction, this process of opening up and development is held back, and the transitional object continues to carry out its original function (counter-acting depressive anxiety), in the form of a continuing disavowal. The transitional object is concretized, is "fetishized," and becomes susceptible to replacement by a drug as an object that can be manipulated by the omnipotent subject, enabling him to deny the separation and the resulting depression.

A number of authors who have studied compulsive behavior have included a dependence on alcohol or another substance into their inquiry. Dostoyevsky, in The Brothers Karamazov, provides a clear description of the motivations that underlie addictive behavior, such as sexual dependency and pathological games.

Addiction to a substance is sometimes replaced with another form of dependence, for example, addictions to food, to sex with prostitutes, to gambling, to spree-buying, to physical exercise, to web surfing, or to playing video games (whereby the internal world is projected onto the characters who fight, kill, love, or hate on screen). There is also the addiction to pseudo-religious cults, which serves as a substitute for a dependence on and subjugation to drugs. It is important to note that the other can also become an addictive object (McDougall, 1982), serving as a drug might, to fill holes in the subject's identity.

DAVID ROSENFELD

See also: Alcoholism; Alienation; Cocaine and psychoanalysis; Dependence; Dipsomania; Freud: Living and Dying; Passion.