State of the Art. Cutting Edge. Cultural Psychology and Addiction.
The clinic exposes what rhetoric conceals. Here addiction is neither spiritual warfare nor tragic romance. It is repetition, negotiation, pharmacology, containment. If anything stands indicted, it is the fantasy that suffering carries hidden grandeur. These essays confront treatment stripped of narrative rescue and expose the structures — medical, economic, psychological — that manage what they cannot redeem.
The Stories Treatment Tells Treatment, in every age, speaks in the language its civilization permits. In societies governed by sacred cosmologies, healing was framed as restoration to divine order. In moralistic cultures, it was framed as repentance. In early medical modernity, it was framed as correction of pathology. Each of these frameworks rested upon a…
Why Sobriety Is Not a Return but a Refusal The World After Certainty Any serious account of recovery must begin not with the individual but with history. The modern person does not suffer in the same symbolic universe that shaped premodern understandings of illness, sin, or transformation. The frameworks that once rendered suffering intelligible—cosmic teleology,…
In the Epistle of James, endurance is not presented as a virtue among others, nor as a means toward tranquility, insight, or salvation. It is presented as an ethical demand whose consequence is transformation rather than relief. “Let endurance have its full effect,” James writes, “so that you may be mature and complete, lacking in…