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What are the key psychological dimensions of addiction, and of the freedom and growth which are the antitheses of addiction? A major theory in psychology is that of achievement motivation, as summarized by John Atkinson in An Introduction to Motivation. The motive to achieve refers to a person's positive desire to pursue a task, and to the satisfaction he gets from successfully completing it. Opposed to achievement motivation is what is called "fear of failure," an outlook which causes a person to react to challenges with anxiety rather than positive anticipation. This happens because the person does not see a new situation as an opportunity for exploration, satisfaction, or accomplishment. For him, it only holds out the threat of disgrace through the failure he believes is likely. A person with a high fear of failure avoids new things, is conservative, and seeks to reduce life to safe routines and rituals.
The fundamental distinction involved here—and in addiction—is the distinction between a desire to grow and experience and a desire to stagnate and remain untouched. Jozef Cohen quotes the addict who says, "The best high . . . is death." Where life is seen as a burden, full of unpleasant and useless struggles, addiction is a way to surrender. The difference between not being addicted and being addicted is the difference between seeing the world as your arena and seeing the world as your prison. These contrasting orientations suggest a standard for assessing whether a substance or activity is addictive for a particular person. If what a person is engaged in enhances his ability to live—if it enables him to work more effectively, to love more beautifully, to appreciate the things around him more, and finally, if it allows him to grow, to change, and expand—then it is not addictive. If, on the other hand, it diminishes him—if it makes him less attractive, less capable, less sensitive, and if it limits him, stifles him, harms him—then it is addictive.
These criteria do not mean that an involvement is necessarily addictive because it is intensely absorbing. When someone can truly engage himself in something, as opposed to seeking out its most general, superficial features, he is not addicted. Addiction is marked by an intensity of need, which only motivates a person to expose himself repeatedly to the grossest aspects of a sensation, primarily its intoxicating effects. Heroin addicts are most attached to the ritualistic elements in their use of the drug, such as the act of injecting heroin and the stereotyped relationships and hustling that go along with getting it, not to mention the deadening predictability of the action that narcotics have.
When someone enjoys or is energized by an experience, he wishes to pursue it further, master it more, understand it better. The addict, on the other hand, wishes only to stay with a clearly defined routine. This obviously does not have to be true for heroin addicts alone. When a man or woman works purely for the reassurance of knowing that he or she is working, rather than positively desiring to do something, then that person's involvement with work is compulsive, the so-called "workaholic" syndrome. Such a person is not concerned that the products of his labors, that all other concomitants and results of what he does, may be meaningless, or worse, harmful. In the same way, the heroin addict's life does include the discipline and challenge entailed in obtaining the drug. But he cannot maintain respect for these efforts in the face of society's judgment that they are nonconstructive and, worse, vicious. It is difficult for the addict to feel that he has done something of lasting value when he works feverishly to get high four times a day.
From this perspective, while we might be tempted to refer to the dedicated artist or scientist as being addicted to his or her work, the description doesn't fit. There may be elements of addiction in a person's throwing himself into solitary creative work when it is done out of an incapacity to have normal relationships with people, but great achievements often require a narrowing of focus. What distinguishes such concentration from addiction is that the artist or scientist is not escaping from novelty and uncertainty into a predictable, comforting state of affairs. He receives the pleasure of creation and discovery from his activity, a pleasure that is sometimes long deferred. He moves on to new problems, sharpens his skills, takes risks, meets resistance and frustration, and always challenges himself. To do otherwise means the end of his productive career. Whatever his personal incompleteness, his involvement in his work does not diminish his integrity and his capacity to live, and thus does not cause him to want to escape from himself. He is in touch with a difficult and demanding reality, and his accomplishments are open to the judgment of those who are similarly engaged, those who will decide his place in the history of his discipline. Finally, his work can be evaluated by the benefits or pleasures it brings to humanity as a whole.
Working, socializing, eating, drinking, praying—any regular part of a person's life can be evaluated in terms of how it contributes to, or detracts from, the quality of his experience. Or, looked at from the other direction, the nature of a person's general feelings about living will determine the character of any of his habitual involvements. As Marx noted, it is the attempt to separate a single involvement from the rest of one's life which allows for addiction:
It is nonsense to believe . . . one could satisfy one passion separated from all others without satisfying oneself, the whole living individual. If this passion assumes an abstract, separate character, if it confronts him as an alien power . . . the result is that this individual achieves only a one-sided, crippled development.
(quoted in Erich Fromm, "Marx's Contribution to the Knowledge of Man")
Yardsticks like this can be applied to any thing or any act; that is why many involvements besides those with drugs meet the criteria for addiction. Drugs, on the other hand, are not addictive when they serve to fulfill a larger purpose in life, even if the purpose is to increase self-awareness, to expand consciousness, or simply to enjoy oneself.
The ability to derive a positive pleasure from something, to do something because it brings joy to oneself, is, in fact, a principal criterion of nonaddiction. It might seem a foregone conclusion that people take drugs for enjoyment, yet this is not true of addicts. An addict does not find heroin pleasurable in itself. Rather, he uses it to obliterate other aspects of his environment which he dreads. A cigarette addict or an alcoholic may once have enjoyed a smoke or a drink, but by the time he has become addicted, he is driven to use the substance merely to maintain himself at a bearable level of existence. This is the tolerance process, through which the addict comes to rely on the addictive object as something necessary to his psychological survival. What might have been a positive motivation turns out to be a negative one. It is a matter of need rather than of desire.
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