Category: Addiction as Symptom

When situated within the broader horizon of modernity, the placebo effect ceases to appear as a marginal curiosity of clinical medicine and instead emerges as a symptom of a deeper anthropological tension: the persistence of meaning as a causal force within a civilization that officially denies its legitimacy. Modernity’s self-understanding depends upon the purification of…

Meaning, Expectation, and the Biology of Healing Within medical science, the placebo effect refers to genuine physiological and psychological changes that arise not from the pharmacological properties of a treatment, but from the meanings, expectations, and contexts surrounding it. Long dismissed as a confounding variable or a methodological nuisance, the placebo effect is now recognized…

Dracula and the Cultural Logic of Addiction Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897) can be read as one of the earliest and most coherent cultural articulations of addiction—not as a pathology located in an individual brain, but as a systemic logic that reorganizes desire, identity, and social order. Long before addiction was framed in pharmacological or behavioral…

From Ritual Excess to Existential Compulsion Alcohol has been present in Western societies for millennia, and excessive drinking is neither new nor uniquely modern. Yet alcoholism, as it is now understood, is a distinctly modern phenomenon. The difference lies not in physiology or access to alcohol, but in the symbolic, theological, and cultural worlds in…

Twelve-Step Theology and Cinema as Metaphysical Discourse Our discussion has repeatedly argued that modern addiction cannot be adequately understood as a medical disorder, moral failing, or behavioral compulsion alone. Rather, addiction emerges historically as a response to a civilizational rupture: the collapse of transcendence in Western modernity coupled with the persistence of metaphysical longing. Alcoholism,…