Category: What Is Addiction? A Philosophical Definition

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 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…

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,…