Towards a phenomenological understanding of addiction

Abstract

The question “What is it like to be addicted?” is considered in a phenomenological approach. Normally in the psychiatric discourse addiction is understood as following more or less the original paradigm of “dependency”. This paradigm claims that the addicted depends lifelong and unchangeable upon his drug or “psychotropic technique”. Innerperspective understandings as well as therapeutic interests contradict this unchangeability in their attempt to help the addicted achieving goals such as harm reduction or teetotalism. Strictly understood this would lead to a contradiction in terms of the psychiatric understanding of addiction. Solutions to this problem rely on the dynamics in the process of becoming addicted. In this sense a possible understanding of addiction is presented. Via the idea of “the psychotropic technique becoming absolute” – which can especially be found in the writings of William S. Burroughs – both sides of the psychiatric understanding are combined and integrated. The addicted self and its self-awareness are then understandable as a “fragile monoidentity”. Implications of such an understanding are discussed.