From Depth Psychology to Civilizational Logic
The original thesis The End of Addiction: A Depth Psychological View of Alcoholism was written at a historical threshold. It belongs to a moment when the inherited explanatory frameworks surrounding addiction—disease, sin, morality, spirituality—were still in active competition, still capable of organizing intelligibility. The work’s ambition was not merely clinical but civilizational: to recover addiction from reductive explanation by restoring teleology, archetypal depth, and the question of the God-image to the phenomenon of alcoholism. That ambition remains valid. What has changed is the world in which the argument now speaks.
At the time of writing, addiction could still plausibly be framed as a deviation: from health, from virtue, from wholeness, from integration. The tension between the disease model and the language of sin, however inadequately resolved, nevertheless presupposed a shared assumption—namely, that addiction represented a failure relative to a normative human telos. Whether framed medically or theologically, addiction was still understood as what should not be happening. This assumption no longer holds.
In the intervening decade, the cultural field that once sustained this opposition has collapsed rather than evolved. Addiction is no longer best understood as pathology within an otherwise functional symbolic order. It has become one of the primary ways contemporary consciousness manages itself. The question is no longer why some individuals fall into addiction, but why modern life itself increasingly requires addictive structures in order to remain livable.
This shift does not invalidate the original thesis; it reveals its deeper significance. What appeared in 2014 as an inquiry into alcoholism’s meaning now reads, in retrospect, as an early diagnostic incision into the logic of modern consciousness itself.
The original thesis correctly rejected reductionist accounts of addiction, particularly those that confined causality to material substrates alone. Drawing on Aristotle’s four causes, it demonstrated that addiction cannot be adequately understood without attending to form, finality, and symbolic meaning. At the time, this move functioned as a corrective: an insistence that addiction must be interpreted, not merely treated.
Today, the same framework reveals something more unsettling. The failure of modern explanatory models is no longer accidental. Addiction resists reduction because it is not a malfunction within the system; it is one of the system’s most successful adaptive strategies.
Neuroscience, psychopharmacology, and behavioral economics have not eliminated addiction; they have normalized it. Desire is no longer repressed but engineered. Dissociation is no longer pathological but optimized. Compulsion is no longer a breakdown of will but an infrastructural necessity of consumer, digital, and pharmacological culture. The unconscious has not been integrated; it has been industrialized.
In this context, the older debate between disease and sin appears historically limited. Both models presuppose a subject who could be otherwise—healthier, more virtuous, more whole. Contemporary addiction, by contrast, operates in a landscape where subjectivity itself is fragile, fragmented, and externally regulated. Addiction no longer marks deviation from the norm; it increasingly is the norm.
The most prescient dimension of the original thesis lies in its treatment of final causality. Addiction was not approached merely as compulsion but as movement—an orientation toward something. In Jungian terms, it was read as an expression of libido seeking transformation, even redemption. The alcoholic’s craving was understood as distorted teleology: a longing misdirected toward chemical transcendence in the absence of symbolic containment.
That insight remains crucial, but its implications have darkened. In the present cultural moment, addiction’s telos is no longer union, wholeness, or reconciliation with the unconscious. Its final cause is far more modest and far more devastating: relief from subjectivity itself. The addictive act does not promise transformation; it promises suspension. Not meaning, but silence. Not integration, but erasure. This shift marks a decisive break from earlier depth-psychological assumptions. The problem is no longer that the God-image is split and awaiting integration, but that transcendence itself has been evacuated and replaced with chemically induced simulacra. Alcohol no longer functions as spiritus contra spiritum in any redemptive sense; it functions as spirit without spirit—an anesthetic against the burden of interiority.
The original thesis devoted sustained attention to the evolution of the God-image, particularly its repression of darkness and the feminine, and the consequences of that repression for psychic life. Drawing on Carl Jung and the alchemical tradition, it argued that addiction constellates precisely where symbolic reconciliation has failed.
What has changed is not the validity of this analysis, but its object. The contemporary subject no longer struggles with a fractured God-image so much as with its disappearance. The sacred has not been denied; it has been replaced. Experience itself—intensity, immediacy, sensation—has become the absolute (absolute positivity). Chemical substances function as sacraments in a world that no longer believes in mediation. In this sense, addiction is no longer a rebellion against moral order or divine law. It is the faithful enactment of modern metaphysics: a world in which meaning must be felt instantly or not at all, and in which interior silence is intolerable.
The decisive shift, then, is not theoretical but diagnostic. The original question—Is alcoholism a disease or a form of sin?—belongs to a world that still believed deviation could be corrected. The contemporary question is more unsettling: Why does modern consciousness require addiction in order to function at all? Once this question is posed, addiction can no longer be treated as an anomaly. It must be understood as a structural solution to conditions of meaninglessness, temporal acceleration, and the erosion of symbolic containment. Addiction is not the failure of modern subjectivity; it is one of its most coherent expressions.
Brenton L. Delp MA
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