While discussions on addiction often emphasize explanations like reward mechanisms, dopaminergic pathways, and genetic predispositions, there is a crucial dimension I believe is overlooked: the subject’s relationship with their object of addiction. To explain this, I first want to share something I heard from someone who fiercely claimed their addiction.
One day, this person, having overheard someone call them an alcoholic, became very disturbed by the term “alcoholic” and immediately wanted to correct the person who said it. “I am not an alcoholic, the issue isn’t alcohol. I am straight-up kolik, it doesn’t matter what the substance is.” (Translator’s Note: This is a crucial wordplay in Turkish. The speaker strips the “Alko-” (alcohol) from “Alkolik” (alcoholic), leaving the root “-kolik” (which, standing alone as “kolik,” means “colic,” as in an infant’s colic). The speaker creates a word play to identify with the addiction itself, separate from the specific substance.)
I was caught off-guard when I heard this; both by their offense at the addiction being reduced to mere alcohol, and by their desire to make “being addicted” a part of their constructed identity. Of course, in one respect, the use of addiction as a fixed and unshakable identity label—this understanding that they are bound by fate and helplessness must be embraced—has already infiltrated even the steps taken toward “recovery” in this field. Indeed, expressions like “Once an addict, always an addict” and “we were powerless over our addiction” are repeated across many platforms in the mental health field.
That being said, from a Lacanian perspective on psychoses, the “addict” identity, by virtue of its ability to form a link that can prevent the disintegration of the subject, might also be an element that provides a stable ground in treatment (Lacan, 1975-1976/2021).
But is addiction truly something that just happens to someone? What if we look at the person who says, “just once won’t hurt,” and then enters a cycle they “cannot” escape? Why did they do it a second time? After all, there’s no saying, “a second time won’t hurt.” For someone who chooses to be alone with that object once more with every repetition, should the responsibility of this choice truly be ignored?
At this point, it may be good to address the concept of jouissance. This term can be roughly translated into English as “enjoyment”, but from a psychoanalytic standpoint, it points to a pleasure mixed with pain. In this respect, addiction can be seen as an effort to bypass the Symbolic limits, to bypass a relationship with an Other, and to access this enjoyment in the body (Lacan, 1959-1960/1992).
When viewed through this quality of addiction, as an escape from the relationship with the Other, I also want to mention Freud’s conceptualization. Freud literally calls masturbation the “primary addiction” (German: Ursucht). “Masturbation is the ‘primary addiction’ and other addictions (alcohol, morphine, tobacco…) only emerge as its substitute and by taking its place” (1897/1966, Letter 79). We can consider this effort to reach an auto-erotic pleasure—not as an action directed toward desire and life, determined by the pleasure principle, but rather as the death drive of a person surrendering to a pleasure beyond the pleasure principle: a repetition compulsion (Freud, 1920/1955).
Ozzy Osbourne described it well in his song “Suicide Solution”: “Wine is fine but whiskey is quicker, suicide is slow with liquor.”
If we return to desire and life, we can, of course, also talk about one of the general characteristics of the symptom for neurotics in this context. That characteristic is this: the symptom is an attempt to cover over the lack, the cause of the subject’s desire (Lacan, 1964/2013). This patch, made to escape the anxiety aroused by confronting the lack, is, for a subject whose existence is predicated on this very lack, naturally a step that brings them closer to annihilating their essence rather than a step toward their existence and life.
Aronofsky’s (2000) classic film on addiction, Requiem for a Dream, is striking in this regard, both for depicting this painful pleasure and for showing that at every point the addiction is reinforced, the subject is once again making a choice (choosing enjoyment). I also find this film particularly relevant to our topic because it demonstrates, through the character of Sara Goldfarb, that this “inability to be without pleasure” can be sustained through many objects, such as television, food, and prescription drugs, alongside typical examples of addiction.
Returning to my “colic” example: infant colic is characterized by crying (Wessel et al., 1954). But why does a baby cry? The infant, unable to express itself in language, demands what it lacks by crying. Just as the new meaning formed by the letters added to its beginning was added to the “colic” (kolik) center within the word, perhaps the addiction symptom was also added in this person, centering on the lack of the subject crying for what is missing.
References
Aronofsky, D. (Director). (2000). Requiem for a dream [Film]. Artisan Entertainment.
Freud, S. (1955). Beyond the pleasure principle. In J. Strachey (Ed. & Trans.), The standard edition of the complete psychological works of Sigmund Freud (Vol. 18, pp. 1–64). Hogarth Press. (Original work published 1920)
Freud, S. (1966). Letter 79 to Wilhelm Fliess (December 22, 1897). In J. Strachey (Ed. & Trans.), The standard edition of the complete psychological works of Sigmund Freud (Vol. 1, pp. 270–272). Hogarth Press. (Original work published 1897)
Lacan, J. (1992). The seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book VII: The ethics of psychoanalysis, 1959–1960 (D. Porter, Trans.). W. W. Norton. (Original work published 1986)
Lacan, J. (2013). Psikanalizin dört temel kavramı: Seminer XI 1964 (N. Erdem, Trans.). Metis Yayınları. (Original work published 1973)
Lacan, J. (2021). Sinthome: Seminer XXIII 1975-1976 (M. Erşen, Trans.). Metis Yayınları. (Original work published 2005)
Wessel, M. A., Cobb, J. C., Jackson, E. B., Harris, G. S., Jr., & Detwiler, A. C. (1954). Paroxysmal fussing in infancy, sometimes called “colic”. Pediatrics, 14(5), 421–434.