Chapter 10 The Addictive Personality and “Addictive Trigger Mechanisms” (ATMs): The Self Psychology of Addiction and Its Treatment

Building upon our previous work (Ulman and Paul, 1989) on addiction, we offer a refined and expanded version of our theory of the self psychology of addiction and our approach to the self-psychological treatment of the addictive personality. In support of our revised theoretical conceptualization and therapeutic approach, we offer two new treatment case histories–the cases of JoAnn and Joe.

We conceptualize addiction in terms of what we call “addictive trigger mechanisms,” or “ATMs”. We define an ATM as any substance (e.g., alcohol, drugs, or food), behavior (e.g., compulsive eating or gambling), or person with whom one is obsessively attached. An ATM functions as an archaic selfobject and produces a dissociative alteration of self-experience involving the unconscious organization of subjective awareness by archaic narcissistic fantasies and moods of narcissistic bliss. In other words, from our self-psychological perspective, we view the addict as addicted to a selfobject experience of fantasy and mood triggered biochemically, physiologically, or psychologically by an ATM.

Archaic narcissistic fantasies are affect-laden mental images symbolically