“…an addiction that cannot be controlled is dangerous.”
(Karin Alvtegen)
Possessing a wide range of manifestations, from the chemical to the social, addiction is an integral part of modern humanity.
Even a wide enough range of social-psychological, pedagogical and corrective services offered on the addiction help market does not provide the desired result – deliverance for both addicts and their environment.
Indeed, we have to agree that it is not only complicated but also practically impossible to get rid of an addiction.
The only way is to transform it.
But transformation is achieved at the cost of titanic efforts to attract the Dependent’s consciousness into the ‘zone of dependence’ and to keep it (consciousness) there, or it is shifted when the mental activity that serves the dependent strategy shifts to other spheres of activity.
One might suggest that addiction is a “lack of meaning and significance” in the human “self” itself and, consequently, the dominance of irrationality in thinking.
Consequently, the primary unacknowledged purpose of addiction is to get rid of frustration through displaced, illusory fulfilment of need.
Who shapes frustration as a cause of addiction without teaching the individual to cope with it and make it a resource for development?
It is not unreasonable to assume that addiction is based on the child’s primary object relations, in which the mother has the most advantage.
Consequently, addiction is a ‘labyrinth of relationships’ between mother and child, in which the foundations of the child’s self, or more accurately, its ‘self-body’, are formed. Perhaps the mother’s strategies of initial adjustment to the child, and her subsequent strategies of detachment (separation), are the foundations of dependency.
Winnicott defines the phenomenon of the ‘good mother’, stating that: “A good mother (not necessarily the child’s mother) is someone who actively adapts to the child’s needs (from the first days of life), and this adaptation gradually wanes, according to the child’s growing capacity to respond to the lack of adaptation (as a decrease in the mother’s care) and her tolerance for frustration (as the child experiences this decrease). Naturally, the own mother is more likely to make a good mother for the child than some other person, since proactive adjustment requires easy and conflict-free prior experience with the child. But the success of infant care depends on devotion, not skill or intellectual giftedness.
Exactly, a “good mother” sets the basis for two unchangeable conditions that determine the quality of a person’s later life – the ability to experience loss (care) and tolerance (tolerance) to frustration, where loss is the resilience of the human self and frustration tolerance is the ability to withstand and overcome one’s impossibility, inability under any circumstances.
Dependence is non-acceptance of oneself, one’s impossibility and playing any dramas of life through one’s Body. And it is the Body that acts as the primary strategy for making vital decisions. Dependence is always unaware of itself. It is a “phantom” of one’s life.
The involvement of consciousness in the strategy of addiction is tolerance of oneself. It is labour, “dying”, and rebirth for oneself.
<< Back to the list of articles
