by Brenton L. Delp
Margo’s Got Money Troubles
”There would no one to perform sanity for.”
When Margo’s father says that if he got his own place he would surely relapse, the statement sounds at first like simple fear. But it is more revealing than fear. It is a confession about structure. He is not only saying that alcohol tempts him. He is saying that solitude would deprive him of the last social arrangement through which he can still appear coherent. In the presence of others, a damaged person may continue to simulate proportion, humor, decency, restraint. Left alone, he may find that this coherence was never fully his. It was relationally maintained. The other person was not merely company. The other person was the stage upon which sanity could still be performed.
This is one of the less obvious forms of alcoholic insanity. The alcoholic is not always insane in the theatrical or visibly shattered sense. Often he remains perceptive, self-aware, verbally agile, even capable of acute moral perception. But his inward organization is fragile. It depends upon situation, witness, interruption, shame, rescue, and role. He needs someone before whom he can continue to look like a man who might yet be all right. Such a person does not merely lie to others. He borrows himself from them.¹
That is why the fear of “his own place” is so significant. A home of one’s own is supposed to symbolize adulthood, freedom, privacy, dignity. But for the addict it can also mean the removal of all external form. No one sees. No one interrupts. No one silently imposes proportion by merely being there. The room becomes pure permission. In such a condition, relapse is not experienced as a dramatic moral fall. It feels like the return of the only force still capable of organizing inner life. The bottle becomes substitute structure. It gives rhythm, anticipation, ritual, relief, necessity. Where inward order has failed, compulsion enters as counterfeit order.²
This suggests that addiction is not merely a problem of appetite. It is also a problem of unsupported subjectivity. The addict often cannot yet endure his own unaccompanied existence. He requires either an intoxicant or an audience. Alcohol and social performance belong to the same economy. Both protect him from exposure to what he is without mediation. In one case, he chemically softens the encounter. In the other, he theatrically manages it. Neither is freedom. Both are evasions of naked inwardness.
This is why the line reaches beyond alcoholism alone. Modern people increasingly depend upon social performance in order to remain psychically intact. The public self, the curated self, the ironic self, the therapeutic self, the competent self—these are not always false in the simple sense. Often they are emergency formations. They allow a person to continue. They are provisional architectures erected against collapse. A person may not know who he is in silence, but he knows how to behave in front of others. He learns to inhabit legible roles because inward reality has become difficult to bear without them. The addiction may then be to alcohol, to romance, to work, to approval, to the screen, to crisis, or to grievance. The object varies. The form remains: one cannot remain with oneself without supplementation.
Here the Jewish mystical idea of tzimtzum becomes illuminating. In Lurianic Kabbalah, God withdraws or contracts in order to make room for creation, for what is truly other than Himself.³ The point is not divine absence in the modern secular sense, but a paradoxical restraint. Relation becomes possible because total divine immediacy gives way. God does not annihilate Himself; He withholds Himself sufficiently for finite being to emerge. The world exists because omnipresence makes room. In this symbolic register, relation depends upon a disciplined distance. There must be space in which another can stand.
This has a profound psychological analogue. Human relation also requires a kind of withdrawal. One must not crowd the other with one’s need, engulf them with one’s emptiness, or use them as the sole support of one’s reality. To love another requires that one not consume them as psychic scaffolding. But the alcoholic often cannot yet do this. He does not inhabit distance well. He requires the other too immediately. The other becomes not neighbor but regulator, mirror, restraint, witness, alibi. He cannot allow them to stand as genuinely other because he needs them to hold him together. In that sense addiction is anti-relational even when it appears dependent on relationship. It cannot yet permit the free space in which relation becomes real.⁴
One might say, then, that addiction is the failure of inward tzimtzum. The self cannot withdraw from its own immediacy. It cannot create enough interior space for another person to exist as other rather than as function. Nor can it make enough inward room to endure solitude without flooding itself. The drink enters precisely there. It performs, chemically, what the soul cannot yet accomplish spiritually. It creates an altered interval between self and suffering. It loosens pressure. It makes being momentarily inhabitable. That is why the bottle is so powerful. It appears as mercy where inward form has not yet been built.
This is also where Alcoholics Anonymous may be understood with more seriousness than either its defenders or critics often allow. AA is not simply a moral lecture against drinking, nor merely a support group in the shallow sense. At its best, it is a temporary social and spiritual architecture for those who cannot yet stand alone without returning to the bottle. Its official literature presents recovery through admission of powerlessness, reliance on a power greater than oneself, moral inventory, restitution, and continued spiritual practice.⁵ That is to say, it does not merely prohibit alcohol. It attempts to supply an alternate structure of meaning, confession, discipline, and relation.
Understood psychologically, AA functions as a scaffold. It lends language where there had been compulsion, ritual where there had been chaos, witness where there had been secrecy, and repetition where there had been collapse. It keeps a person alive while another interior capacity is slowly formed. In that sense, yes: AA exists, in part, for those who cannot yet endure themselves. But that statement must be handled carefully. It would be crude to say that AA simply ends once one can tolerate solitude. AA’s own literature presents sobriety as an ongoing spiritual condition, not as a merely temporary external aid.⁶ Yet psychologically there is still truth in your formulation. The deepest aim cannot be permanent dependence upon meetings as substitute containment. The deeper aim must be the gradual formation of a self that no longer needs alcohol, performance, or even communal reinforcement in quite the same desperate way.
To put it more strongly: if AA were only another audience before whom one performs sanity, it would fail at the highest level. Its real dignity lies elsewhere. It tries to move the alcoholic from performed coherence to practiced honesty. In ordinary social life, one says, “I’m fine,” and is rewarded for the performance. In AA, one says, “I am not fine,” and the speech itself becomes a beginning of reality. That reverses the modern structure. Instead of needing an audience to conceal disintegration, one enters a fellowship in which disintegration may be spoken. From that confession, a less theatrical sanity may slowly emerge.
Still, the danger remains. Any institution of recovery can itself become a defense if it is used only to avoid the unaccompanied encounter with one’s own existence. The highest success of sobriety cannot be endless dependence upon external witness alone. It must include the capacity to remain sober in private, to endure an empty room, to survive an evening without applause, flirtation, emergency, or collapse. It must include the capacity to exist without intoxication and without performance. Otherwise the object of dependence changes while the structure of dependence remains intact.
That is why Margo’s father’s statement is so profound. He reveals, perhaps without meaning to, that alcoholism is not only the inability to stop drinking. It is the inability to remain inwardly gathered when no one is there to receive the performance. He fears his own place because he fears the removal of borrowed sanity. Alone, he would not only be without supervision. He would be without theater. And without theater, he suspects that the underlying truth would return.
The tragedy is that he is probably right, at least for now. But the tragedy is not the final truth. The final truth would have to be harder and more hopeful at once: that sobriety becomes real only when one no longer requires the gaze of another in order to remain a person. At that point relation becomes possible in a higher sense. One no longer uses the other as a wall against collapse. One can finally let them be other. And one can finally endure oneself.
In that sense, the goal is not mere abstinence. It is inward adulthood. It is the formation of a self that can survive both company and solitude without lying, without theatrics, and without chemical rescue. Until then, alcohol remains tempting not simply because it intoxicates, but because it relieves the burden of having to be.⁷
Notes and References
¹ The formulation here is psychological and interpretive, but it fits the AA description of alcoholism as a condition in which life becomes “unmanageable,” not merely unpleasant. See Alcoholics Anonymous (“Big Book”) and “How It Works.”
² AA’s literature repeatedly frames alcoholism as involving physical craving, mental obsession, and a loss of managing capacity rather than a simple defect of will. See Alcoholics Anonymous and the personal stories collected in Part III.
³ In Lurianic Kabbalah, tzimtzum names the divine “contraction” or “withdrawal” by which God makes room for creation. Britannica summarizes the doctrine as the withdrawal of divine light “in order to make room for the extra-divine.” See also the Sefaria materials on Etz Chaim and tzimtzum.
⁴ The extension from tzimtzum into psychology is my interpretation, not a standard doctrinal claim. I am using the Lurianic image analogically: real relation requires a disciplined making-room for otherness. The theological background for that symbolic move comes from the creation-through-withdrawal motif in the tzimtzum sources.
⁵ AA’s basic text presents recovery through the Twelve Steps, including admission of powerlessness, belief in a power greater than oneself, moral inventory, amends, and continued spiritual practice.
⁶ AA does not officially present itself as merely a temporary bridge until self-endurance is achieved. Its literature describes sobriety as grounded in ongoing spiritual change, openness, honesty, and continuing practice. That is why the claim in the essay is interpretive and psychological rather than an official AA doctrine.
⁷ The claim that recovery aims at a less theatrical, more inwardly grounded sobriety is a psychological reading built from AA’s emphasis on spiritual transformation and honesty rather than mere external compliance.
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