The Logic of Addiction

State of the Art. Cutting Edge. Cultural Psychology and Addiction.

Category: Addiction and Modern Subjectivity

  • Alchemy, Resurrection, and the Long Unfolding of Modernity

    (Complete Version) Our project has argued that modern addiction is not merely a medical contingency but a historically intelligible answer to a specific spiritual condition: the completion of transcendence and the relocation of “the Absolute” into operational systems (technique, administration, pharmacology, optimization). In that condition, obligation remains, but its traditional guarantees do not. The modern…

  • Addiction, Clinical Responsibility, and the Limits of Cure

    Toward an Institutional Ethic of Treatment Addiction is not an anomaly within modern culture but one of its most coherent symptoms. Any clinical or institutional approach that treats addiction as an isolated pathology—whether moral, behavioral, or neurobiological—fails to grasp the conditions that make addiction structurally necessary. What appears clinically as compulsion and loss of control…

  • Addiction as Cultural and Psychic Diagnosis

    Toward a Treatment Model for Addiction Addiction cannot be treated adequately until it is diagnosed adequately. Contemporary models typically frame addiction as a brain disease, a behavioral disorder, or a moral failure. Each perspective captures a partial truth, yet none explains why addiction has become so pervasive, structurally persistent, and culturally central in modern life….

  • Wolfgang Giegerich’s Answer to Jung

    Completion, Not Compensation Any serious contemporary account of addiction that still draws on depth psychology must reckon with the fault line between C. G. Jung and Wolfgang Giegerich. This is not a matter of interpretation or emphasis. Giegerich’s work represents a direct intervention into Jungian thought—one that corrects, completes, and in crucial respects overturns Jung’s…

  • Does Jung’s Research Reveal Patterns in the Historical Unfolding of the Psyche?

    Carl Gustav Jung’s psychology is often misunderstood as ahistorical, inward, or mythological in a purely symbolic sense. In fact, one of Jung’s most radical and consistent claims is that the psyche unfolds historically and becomes intelligible only through its historical manifestations. Jung does not treat history as a backdrop against which psychic life happens; rather,…

  • Obligation After Transcendence (Revisited)

    To Begin an Answer to Nihilism The collapse of transcendence does not abolish ethical obligation. It abolishes only the metaphysical guarantees that once explained why obligation binds. What remains is obligation without justification—demand without promise, claim without cosmology. The biblical tradition does not resist this condition. It anticipates it. Nowhere is this clearer than in…

  • On the Absence of Premodern Counterexamples

    A likely objection to the present framework concerns its apparent historical exclusivity: namely, whether the psychic structure here designated Born Man admits of premodern or non-modern analogues, thereby undermining its claim to modern specificity. Traditions such as Stoicism, late antique inwardness, Indian non-dualism, Buddhist reflexivity, Greek tragedy, or medieval mysticism may appear, at first glance,…

  • Modernity, Alienation, and Addiction: A Hegelian Genealogy

    Contemporary addiction is typically approached as a medical disorder, a behavioral pathology, or a moral failure. Each of these frames captures a dimension of the phenomenon, yet none explains why addiction emerges with such structural regularity in modern societies, nor why it so often appears precisely where freedom, autonomy, and rationalization are most advanced. To…

  • Addiction After the Death of Meaning: Part II

    A Critique of the Medicalized Recovery Model Contemporary addiction treatment is dominated by a medicalized framework that defines addiction as a chronic, relapsing brain disorder. According to the U.S. National Institute on Drug Abuse, addiction is characterized by “compulsive drug seeking and use despite harmful consequences,” and recovery is understood primarily as symptom management: abstinence,…

  • Obligation After Transcendence

    The Ethical Condition of Born Man If Born Man cannot return to religion without falsification, the ethical question becomes unavoidable: what, if anything, obligates him? The disappearance of transcendence does not abolish ethical demand; it abolishes only the forms by which obligation was once justified. What replaces religion ethically within our current situation is therefore…