Love and Addiction - 3. A General Theory of Addiction - A General Theory of Addiction

Written by Stanton Peele

In these terms, then, an addiction exists when a person's attachment to a sensation, an object, or another person is such as to lessen his appreciation of and ability to deal with other things in his environment, or in himself, so that he has become increasingly dependent on that experience as his only source of gratification. A person will be predisposed to addiction to the extent that he cannot establish a meaningful relationship to his environment as a whole, and thus cannot develop a fully elaborated life. In this case, he will be susceptible to a mindless absorption in something external to himself, his susceptibility growing with each new exposure to the addictive object.

Our analysis of addiction starts with the addict's low opinion of himself and his lack of genuine involvement in life, and examines how this malaise progresses into the deepening spiral which is at the center of the psychology of addiction. The person who becomes an addict has not learned to accomplish things he can regard as worthwhile, or even simply to enjoy life. Feeling incapable of engaging himself in an activity that he finds meaningful, he naturally turns away from any opportunities to do so. His lack of self-respect causes this pessimism. A result, too, of the addict's low self-esteem is his belief that he cannot stand alone, that he must have outside support to survive. Thus his life assumes the shape of a series of dependencies, whether approved (such as family, school, or work) or disapproved (such as drugs, prisons, or mental institutions).

His is not a pleasant state of affairs. He is anxious in the face of a world he fears, and his feelings about himself are likewise unhappy. Yearning to escape from a distasteful consciousness of his life, and having no abiding purpose to check his desire for unconsciousness, the addict welcomes oblivion. He finds it in any experience that can temporarily erase his painful awareness of himself and his situation. The opiates and other strong depressant drugs accomplish this function directly by inducing an all-encompassing soothing sensation. Their pain-killing effect, the feeling they create that the user need do nothing more to set his life straight, makes the opiates prominent as objects of addiction. Chein quotes the addict who, after his first shot of heroin, became a regular user: "I got real sleepy. I went in to lay on the bed.... I thought, this is for me! And I never missed a day since, until now." Any experience in which a person can lose himself—if that is what he desires—can serve the same addictive function.

There is a paradoxical cost extracted, however, as fee for this relief from consciousness. In turning away from his world to the addictive object, which he values increasingly for its safe, predictable effects, the addict ceases to cope with that world. As he becomes more involved with the drug or other addictive experience, he becomes progressively less able to deal with the anxieties and uncertainties that drove him to it in the first place. He realizes this, and his having resorted to escape and intoxication only exacerbates his self-doubt. When a person does something in response to his anxiety that he doesn't respect (like getting drunk or overeating), his disgust with himself causes his anxiety to increase. As a result, and now also faced by a bleaker objective situation, he is even more needful of the reassurance the addictive experience offers him. This is the cycle of addiction. Eventually, the addict depends totally on the addiction for his gratifications in life, and nothing else can interest him. He has given up hope of managing his existence; forgetfulness is the one aim he is capable of pursuing wholeheartedly.

Withdrawal symptoms occur because a person cannot be deprived of his sole source of reassurance in the world—a world from which he has grown increasingly alienated—without considerable trauma. The problems he originally encountered are now magnified, and he has gotten used to the constant lulling of his awareness. At this point, dreading reexposure to the world above all else, he will do whatever he can to maintain his protected state. Here is the completion of the addiction process. Once again the addict's low self-esteem has come into play. It has made him feel helpless not only against the rest of the world, but against the addictive object as well, so that he now believes he can neither live without it nor free himself from its grasp. It is a natural end for a person who has been trained to be helpless all his life.

Interestingly, an argument which is used against psychological explanations for addiction can actually help us understand the psychology of addiction. It is often contended that because animals get addicted to morphine in laboratories, and because infants are born drug-dependent when their mothers have taken heroin regularly during pregnancy, there is no possibility that psychological factors can play a part in the process. But it is the very fact that infants and animals do not have the subtlety of interests or the full life that an adult human being ideally possesses which makes them so uniformly susceptible to addiction. When we think of the conditions under which animals and infants become addicted, we can better appreciate the situation of the addict. Aside from their relatively simple motivations, monkeys kept in a small cage with an injection apparatus strapped to their backs are deprived of the variety of stimulation their natural environment provides. All they can do is push the lever. Obviously, an infant is also not capable of sampling life's full complexity. Yet these physically or biologically limiting factors are not unlike the psychological constraints the addict lives with. Then, too, the "addicted" infant is separated at birth both from the womb and from a sensation—that of heroin in its bloodstream—which it associates with the womb and which in itself simulates womb-like comfort. The normal trauma of birth is made worse, and the infant recoils from its harsh exposure to the world. This infantile feeling of being deprived of some necessary sense of security is again something which has startling parallels in the adult addict.

Criteria for Addiction and Nonaddiction

Just as a person can be a compulsive or a controlled drug user, so there are addictive and nonaddictive ways of doing anything. When a person is strongly predisposed to be addicted, whatever he does can fit the psychological pattern of addiction. Unless he deals with his weaknesses, his major emotional involvements will be addictive, and his life will consist of a series of addictions. A passage from Lawrence Kubie's Neurotic Distortion of the Creative Process dramatically focuses on the way personality determines the quality of any kind of feeling or activity:

There is not a single thing which a human being can do or feel, or think, whether it is eating or sleeping or drinking or fighting or killing or hating or loving or grieving or exulting or working or playing or painting or inventing, which cannot be either sick or well.... The measure of health is flexibility, the freedom to learn through experience, the freedom to change with changing internal and external circumstances . . . the freedom to respond appropriately to the stimulus of reward and punishment, and especially the freedom to cease when sated.

If a person cannot cease after being sated, if he cannot be sated, he is addicted. Fear, and feelings of inadequacy, cause an addict to seek constancy of stimulation and setting rather than to chance the dangers of novel or unpredictable experience. Psychological security is what he wants above all. He searches for it outside himself, until he finds that the experience of addiction is completely predictable. At this point, satiation is impossible—because it is the sameness of sensation that he craves. As the addiction proceeds, novelty and change become things he is even less able to tolerate.