The symbolic constitution of addiction: Language, alienation, ambivalence

Abstract

The author offers an articulation of addiction, via existential-phenomenology and Lacanian psychoanalysis, where it is argued that the addicted subject is constituted via a symbolic structuring evolving from societal practices, laws and the effects of language. Language carries a heritage, which bears on the knowledge and practices of designated subjects and practitioners of that discourse. Addiction, as one particular form of embodied existence and knowledgeable practice, finds expression through the speech and habits of the addict. Addiction, it is argued, is symbolically saturated with ambivalence and alienation. Also the addict is described as the complete modern technocratic subject, consumed by the ideology of consumption. The clinical implications are briefly explored where it is noted that two major approaches to addiction, namely 12-step fellowships and motivational interviewing, both attend to language as a critical component of their treatment approach.

Disciplining virtue: investigating the discourses of opioid addiction in nursing

“…The discourse of nursing virtue in this study is imbued with language that produces nurses with addiction as immoral and corrupt and, ultimately, therefore unfit for practice. As Kemp () notes, discursive structures of law, social norms, accepted mores, and attitudes construct the terms of intelligibility in and through which the individual with addiction comes to be understood. We contend that the prevailing discourses of addiction and the prevailing discourses of nursing have combined to produce the nurse with addiction as a “bad” moral subject who has squandered the trust of peers and the public (s)he serves and, more foundationally, countered the constructed image of nursing itself.…”

Splitting of Associative Threads: The Expression of Schizotypal Ambivalence in Daily Life

“…Meehl initially viewed ambivalence as central to schizotypy, although in later formulations he suggested that it had a secondary role in schizotypy as a potentiating factor (e.g., Meehl 1990). Despite its role in the descriptive psychopathology literature of schizotypy and schizophrenia, ambivalence has been surprisingly understudied by psychopathologists and the term has been more readily associated with psychoanalytic models-especially regarding borderline personality (e.g., Kernberg 1977;Kemp 2011).…”