Revised
“There are those who forget that death will come to all. For those who remember, quarrels come to an end.”
— The Dhammapada
Addiction cannot be adequately understood when it is treated solely as a problem belonging to isolated individuals. What is commonly referred to as spiritual malady should not be conceived as a private deficiency or personal acquisition, but as the contextual condition within which addiction appears, is sustained, and takes on its characteristic form in modern life. Spiritual malady names not an inner flaw of the addict, but a cultural and logical condition that precedes the individual and into which he is born.
This is, first and foremost, a linguistic and conceptual problem. How we speak about addiction determines what we are able to see. To address addiction truthfully requires that we speak not only about the addict, but about the world in which addiction has become a meaningful and even necessary response. In this sense, addiction cannot be separated from the broader cultural condition of nihilism that both supports and, more precisely, constitutes it.
Here a crucial distinction must be made between facts and truths. Facts describe measurable phenomena, behaviors, and outcomes. Truths, by contrast, concern the logical and symbolic structures that give those phenomena their meaning. Modern approaches to addiction tend to privilege facts while overlooking truths. Yet addiction, as lived reality, cannot be grasped at the level of empirical description alone, because it is not merely something that happens to individuals, but something that happens through them.
Language is not a neutral instrument in this regard. It is an attempt to render experience communicable—to give form to the appearance of the Other in a way that can be transmitted, endured, and reflected upon. On the one hand stands the subjective experience of the addict; on the other stands the cultural and historical background that shapes that experience in advance. These are not two separate domains. The background is not merely influential—it is operative. In many respects, it is the condition being expressed.
Most treatment models focus almost exclusively on the individual: his body, his mind, his behavior, his choices. What is largely absent is any serious attempt to situate the individual within the cultural and historical logic that gives rise to addiction as a widespread phenomenon. To do so would require the clinician to occupy a position closer to that of a cultural psychologist or psychological historian—one capable of thinking addiction not only clinically, but symbolically and historically.
From this perspective, spiritual malady is not something the addict has. It is something he is already immersed in—an ideal and notional structure that confronts him as an Other. It is always already there, shaping experience while remaining largely unrecognized. Addiction, then, does not originate solely in the body or the psyche of the individual, but also—and decisively—outside him, in the form of a cultural world that has lost its capacity for symbolic mediation and meaningful finitude.
I am aware that some of the terms employed here may appear unfamiliar or unconventional, and that others may be used in ways that diverge from their common usage. This is unavoidable. Where existing language proves inadequate, it must be reworked. Accordingly, I will use the language that best allows the subject of chemical addiction to be thought rigorously, even when this requires introducing concepts that may initially resist easy understanding. Where necessary, these concepts will be clarified as the argument unfolds.
Brenton L. Delp