Category: Addiction as Symptom

Success, Addiction, and Civilizational Neurosis by Brenton L. Delp Around the anniversary of Kurt Cobain’s death, the culture remembers him too quickly as icon, victim, or martyr. But Cobain remains more important than remembrance. He is diagnostic. He reveals something about a civilization that can recognize a gift, reward it, amplify it, and still destroy…

by Brenton L. Delp The consciousness that cannot bear itself is not simply a weak consciousness, nor merely a diseased one. It is a divided consciousness: a form of inward life compelled to remain with itself beyond what it can humanly sustain. It does not merely feel pain. It must witness its own pain, manage…

by Brenton L. Delp Mother, Repetition, and Feminine Redemption An absurd film, of an absurd world, done brilliantly. The symbolic center of Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die becomes much clearer once one sees that Ingrid is the Man from the Future’s mother. That fact shifts the film from a merely clever science-fiction comedy into…

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…

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…

by Brenton L. Delp Addiction has generally been approached within two explanatory frameworks: the medical and the moral. Contemporary neuroscience explains addiction in terms of dopaminergic reinforcement, neural plasticity, and behavioral conditioning, while moral or spiritual models interpret it as a disorder of will, meaning, or character. Both perspectives illuminate important dimensions of the phenomenon….

Substance Use Disorders and the Historical Formation of the Modern Self To ask whether addiction is a timeless human weakness or a uniquely modern crisis is to ask a deeper question: has the structure of the self changed? Alcohol, opium, cannabis, and stimulants are not inventions of the industrial age. Fermentation predates writing. Opium circulated…

Toward a Structural Understanding of Compulsion Most definitions of addiction describe what it looks like: repeated use despite consequences, loss of control, craving, tolerance. These descriptions are clinically useful, but they leave the central question untouched. They tell us how addiction behaves without explaining why it becomes necessary. A philosophical definition must go further. It…

When Resurrection Becomes a Drug (Abridged) There is a promise that keeps returning in modern life. It is not the promise that suffering will someday be redeemed, but that suffering can be ended now. Not endured, not worked through, not transformed over time—but stopped. This promise appears in substances, in technology, in optimization culture, and…

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….

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,…

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…