Category: What Is Addiction? A Philosophical Definition
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The Political Shadow: Jung, the Absolute, and Political Tribalism
by Brenton L. Delp Modern political tribalism is not merely a failure of civility. It is not simply that Americans have become rude, impatient, misinformed, or trapped inside media bubbles. These are symptoms of a deeper psychological and spiritual problem. Political identity has increasingly become a vessel of ultimate meaning. It no longer functions only…
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Mediation and Reflexivity: How Consciousness Becomes Known to Itself (Condensed Essay)
By Brenton L. Delp Many of the central problems of modern life—identity, meaning, addiction, anxiety, alienation, and the search for purpose—cannot be understood without understanding two philosophical ideas that are often overlooked: mediation and reflexivity. Though these terms sound abstract, they describe some of the most fundamental structures of human existence. Together they help explain…
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Mediation and Reflexivity: The Between and the Return of Consciousness
By Brenton L. Delp Two of the most important words for understanding philosophy, religion, psychology, and the modern condition are also two of the easiest to pass over too quickly: mediation and reflexivity. Both words name movements of consciousness. Both describe the way human beings come into relation with reality, with meaning, with themselves, and…
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Soul, Psyche, Anima, Mind: A Philological History of Inwardness
by Brenton L. Delp Modern psychology inherited a word before it inherited a science. That word was not originally behavior, cognition, adjustment, ego, or even unconscious. It was soul. Long before psychology became a clinical discipline, a laboratory method, or a therapeutic profession, it belonged to a family of words that named life, breath, inwardness,…
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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…
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From Dionysus to Diagnosis
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…