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

Written by Stanton Peele

Given this tension between the private world and what lies outside, the task which the group performs for its members is to bring about self-acceptance through the maintenance of a distorted but shared outlook. The other people who also participate in the group's peculiar vision, or in the intoxication it favors, can understand the addict's perspective where outsiders cannot. Someone else who is drunk is not critical of a drunk's behavior. Someone who begs or steals money to obtain heroin is not likely to criticize someone similarly occupied. Such groupings of addicts are not predicated on genuine human feelings and appreciation; the other group members in themselves are not the object of the addict's concern. Rather, his own addiction is his concern, and those other people who can tolerate it and even help him pursue it are simply adjuncts to his one preoccupation in life.

The same expediency in forming connections is there with the person addicted to a lover. It is there in the use of another person to shore up a beleaguered sense of self and to obtain acceptance when the rest of the world seems frightening and forbidding. The lovers gladly lose track of how insular their behavior becomes in the creation of their separate world, until such time as they may be forced to return to reality. But there is one respect in which the isolation of addicted lovers from the world is even more stark than that of other alienated groups of addicts. While drug users and ideologues support each other in maintaining some belief or behavior, the relationship is the sole value around which the private society of the interpersonal addict is organized. While drugs are the theme for groups of heroin addicts, the relationship is the theme for the lovers' group; the group itself is the object of the members' addiction. And thus the addicted love relationship is the tightest group of all. You are "in" with only one person at a time—or one person forever.

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