Psychosomatic subjects and the agencies of addiction

Abstract

Addiction science and public policy have for some time been articulated in conformity with a broader antinomy in Western thought between biological reductionism and liberal voluntarism. Hence, mainstream debates have concerned whether and how addiction might be understood as a disease in the biomedically orthodox sense of anatomical or physiological pathology or whether and how addiction might be understood as a voluntary choice of some kind. The fact that those who staff these debates have appeared either unable or unwilling to consider alternatives to this antinomy has resulted in a rather unhappy and intransigent set of intellectual anomalies both on the biomedical and the social scientific sides of this divide. Perhaps more importantly, it has also resulted in a striking isolation of scientific debates themselves from the vicissitudes of therapeutically caring for those putatively suffering from addictions both within and outside clinical settings. After briefly demonstrating the conformity of debates in addiction science with the broader antinomy between biological reductionism and liberal voluntarism and the anomalies that thereby result, this article considers the scientific and therapeutic benefits of a psychosomatic framework for the understanding of both self-governing subjects and the experience of a loss of self-control to agencies of addiction.

Perceptions of Substance Use Disorder and Associated Sanctions: A Factorial Vignette Experiment

“…While believing "hard drug" use is a choice may seem paradoxical, it makes sense in light of the ongoing debate over how to define addiction (Lewis, 2018;Mate, 2011;Szalavitz, 2016;Weinberg, 2019) and classify SUD as a clinical diagnosis (Hasin et al, 2013). The moral-legal model of addiction puts greater emphasis on individual-choice (Heather, 2017) compared to the disease model which recognizes volitional impairments associated with SUD (Koob & Volkow, 2016).…”

Lacanian Psychoanalysis, Addiction and Enjoyment

“… 1. As Weinberg’s (2013, 2019) recent work illustrates, a decentered notion of subjectivity is not easy to produce. Although his discussions of addiction as a multitude of different subjectivities and psychosomatic embodiments, and definition of addiction as a ‘clash of ecologically grounded psychosomatic subjectivities’ (Weinberg, 2019: 166) are promising, any decentered approach to addiction will struggle with his notion that this clash can be rendered as one between free agencies and addictive alien agencies, between identities ‘we really are’ and are not, that we want to identify with and not, and so on (Weinberg, 2019: 167). …”