Category: Addiction & Clinical Suffering
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The Collective Unconscious and AI
A person sits before a screen and asks a question that has resisted years of private thought. The answer arrives, and something in it gives form to what had remained obscure. The person objects, supplies a missing distinction, brings forward an experience the answer overlooked. Another response follows. Gradually, an argument emerges that neither the…
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Jung and the Modern Burden of Soul
by Brenton L. Delp From the Discovery of the Unconscious to the Responsibility of the Individual Jung’s psychology begins before Jung. It begins when the modern subject ceases to appear transparent to itself, when inherited accounts of soul no longer secure the unity they once promised, and when philosophy, psychiatry, experimental psychology, and the study…
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Therapeutic Hope and Nietzsche’s Nihilism
by Brenton L. Delp Therapeutic hope is not the belief that everything will turn out well. It is the conviction that a person’s life remains open—that suffering, illness, addiction, loss, or failure does not exhaust what that life can become. Hope does not deny the seriousness of the present situation. It allows someone to face…
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The Existential Side of Addiction
by Brenton L. Delp Relief from the Burden of Consciousness There are moments in addiction when the usual explanations seem to recede. No crisis has occurred. No one has argued with the person. There is no obvious trigger in the room. The body is not in acute withdrawal. Work may have gone reasonably well, food…
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Beyond the Twelve Steps: Recovery, Community, and the Future of Peer Support
by Brenton L. Delp Alcoholics Anonymous is one of the most successful voluntary organizations in modern history. Since its founding in 1935, it has helped millions of people achieve and maintain sobriety. Countless lives have been saved through its meetings, its fellowship, and its insistence that one alcoholic can help another where professionals, institutions, and…
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Bloodletting, Psychic Relief, and a Historical Reflection into Symptom Management
by Brenton L. Delp The modern act of cutting is usually approached through the language of pathology, crisis, and psychiatric risk. Those dimensions are real and should never be minimized. Yet history permits another perspective. For much of antiquity and the medieval world, the deliberate release of blood was not regarded as mutilation but as…
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Addiction as Micro-Absolute
by Brenton L. Delp Addiction is usually described as excess, dependency, compulsion, pathology, or maladaptive habit. Each of these descriptions captures something real. Yet none reaches the peculiar dignity the addictive object acquires within the life of the addict. Addiction does not merely bind. It enthrones. The substance, act, or ritual becomes more than a…
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What Is Addiction? A Philosophical Definition
by Brenton L. Delp Addiction is often defined today under the authority of medical science, and not without reason. The medical model did not become dominant by accident. It became dominant because it corrected older brutalities. It helped displace the view that addiction is simply vice, weakness, or bad character. It named dependence, craving, relapse,…
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More About Alcoholism
by Brenton L. Delp Margo’s Got Money Troubles ”There would be 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…
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Spirit, Spiritual Malady, and the Logic of Addiction
“There are those who forget that death will come to all. For those who remember, quarrels come to an end.”— The Dhammapada “This essay proceeds from the assumption that addiction is not a personal failure or clinical anomaly, but a historically intelligible response to modern forms of consciousness”. To say this is not to deny…
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Toward a Philosophical Definition of Addiction (Revised)
by Brenton L. Delp Most definitions of addiction begin too late. They begin with what can be seen: repeated use despite consequences, loss of control, craving, withdrawal, tolerance, relapse. These descriptions are not false. They are clinically necessary and often diagnostically precise. They allow institutions to classify, practitioners to intervene, and sufferers to be recognized…
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Consciousness, the DSM, and the Somatic Turn
by Brenton L. Delp The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fifth Edition, published by the American Psychiatric Association in 2013 and later revised as the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fifth Edition, Text Revision (2022), represents the most systematic effort of modern psychiatry to classify disturbances of thought, mood, and behavior. Organized into roughly twenty diagnostic…