An Existential Perspective on Addiction Treatment: A Logic-Based Therapy Case Study

Abstract

In this essay I argue that a comprehensive understanding of addiction and its treatment should include an existential perspective. I provide a brief overview of an existential perspective of addiction and recovery, which will contextualize the remainder of the essay. I then present a case study of how the six-step philosophical practice method of Logic-Based Therapy can assist with issues that often arise in addiction treatment framed through an existential perspective. Addiction, whatever its form, has always been a desperate search, on a false and hopeless path, for the fulfilment of human freedom.-Medard Boss (1983, p. 283) All theories of addiction, whether implicitly or explicitly expressed, have ontological and epistemological foundational suppositions (Richardson, 2005; Slife, 2005). 12 These foundational 1 Questions of an ontological and epistemological nature usually relate to what is known as a person's Weltanschauung or worldview (Slife 2005).