Addiction
Addiction is the general model of everyday life in the 21 st century. The term is on everyone's lips and it has become prominent in contemporary discourse, replacing concepts such as passion or habits. Addiction is also considered a symptom of the imperative of enjoyment in today’s societies.
Types of addiction
A person can enjoy drugs without anyone else around, and any activity can become a drug: sports, sex, work, smartphones, social media, video games, just to name a few.
In the clinic, we are seeing patients who have started to appropriate the term to seek help for "non-substance addictions ": pathological gambling, internet addiction, sexual addictions (hypersexuality), compulsive shopping, workaholism, affective dependencies, and more. In all of these cases, the individual experiences an uncontrolled compulsion. Someone who has an addiction can only enjoy something in
a repetitive, limitless manner.
However, for some people, we can talk about compulsive consumption of a single substance. Current clinical practice finds that subjects suffering from addiction often consume various substances throughout their lifelong issues with it, although one substance may be predominant at some point. In other cases, we
can see the continuity of a particular type of consumption, for example, smoking, vaping, drinking, snorting drugs, and more.
The common denominator of addiction
What do substance and non-substance addictions have in common? Repetitive enjoyment is the common denominator that unites these different forms of addiction, all of which are characterized by complaints about the individual losing control and the activity having a compulsive component. In all of them, we can observe an effect in the body, which takes shape in the sensation of enjoyment that the substance
produces: the effect of anticipation and craving, the tension prior to the action, and the sensation of subsequent release. Although the physical experience varies (injecting a substance is not the same as playing a slot machine), all of them are marked by a fixation on an addictive mindset that refers to a circuit of enjoyment and the compulsion to repeat it. Hence, there is an "enjoyable substance" even though they are called "non-substance addictions".
Problems with uniform addiction therapies
With certain therapies a person may stop using a substance they were dependent on, and this may lead them to believe that the therapy has been effective. However, a short time later it may become clear that, although the person has given up alcohol for example, they still have their addiction in another form, either with a new substance, with the compulsive use of sedatives, or with another new addiction. Displacing addiction from one object to another can be the result of a treatment which, despite producing a change, does not do away with the addictive mindset.
Psychoanalytic treatment for addiction
The role that addiction plays for each individual is what will allow us to specify the singular aspect that it entails for the subject. Psychoanalysis works on a case by case basis without falling into the trap of uniform treatment for all. Progress is based on the signifiers that the patient provides to the analyst, who will encourage the patient to work through their words. The function of the addiction may be completely different even for people who seek help for the same type of addiction.