Addiction: Theoretical and Psychoanalytic Approaches to the Culture of Addiction

The question of addiction has become a central problematic at the end of the Twentieth Century. Alcoholism and substance abuse are now considered to be social as well as personal modes of behavior that transcend the boundaries between individual psychology and public policy In his article “The Rhetoric of Drugs,” Jacques Derrida argues that addictions can no longer be conceptualized as natural phenomena. Rather, to understand drugs, “a history is required, and a culture, conventions, evaluations, norms, an entire network of intertwined discourses” (2). As in the case of the analysis of gender, we must begin to look at the way that addictions are constructed culturally in moral and ethical discourses.

In order to stress the “diction” in addiction, many theorists have turned away from an essentialist definition of drugs and have begun to articulate a theory of the social construction of substance abuse. However, at the same time that there has been a move toward theorizing drugs as a cultural discourse, there has also been an opposite movement toward seeing drugs as a method of escaping from the social and symbolic order of language and convention. In this view, addictions are a cultural construct that attempts to refuse cultural mediation itself. The more that one attempts to symbolize the structure of drug addiction, the more the drug addict attempts to remove him or herself from the symbolic order.

In many ways the discourse of Twelve-Step Programs participates in this movement toward constructing a social knowledge of and on addiction by helping the addicted subject to forge a new social bond that calls for his or her submission to the Great Other. Whether it is God, or the sponsor, or the drug, or the community of fellow addicts, members of groups like Alcoholics Anonymous (AA) are called to subject themselves to the dominance of a discourse that surrounds them. The result of this structure is what Foucault might call a new form of community-based confession. By re