The Logic of Addiction

State of the Art. Cutting Edge. Cultural Psychology and Addiction.

Category: Psychology

  • Toward a Therapy After the End of Miracles

    Many people arrive at therapy carrying a quiet disappointment they do not know how to name. Addicts feel it when recovery does not unfold as promised. Therapists feel it when insight, technique, and care fail to produce the change they were trained to expect. Somewhere along the way, both sides absorb the same unspoken assumption:…

  • Addiction, Clinical Responsibility, and the Limits of Cure

    Toward an Institutional Ethic of Treatment Addiction is not an anomaly within modern culture but one of its most coherent symptoms. Any clinical or institutional approach that treats addiction as an isolated pathology—whether moral, behavioral, or neurobiological—fails to grasp the conditions that make addiction structurally necessary. What appears clinically as compulsion and loss of control…

  • Addiction as Cultural and Psychic Diagnosis

    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….

  • Wolfgang Giegerich’s Answer to Jung

    Completion, Not Compensation Any serious contemporary account of addiction that still draws on depth psychology must reckon with the fault line between C. G. Jung and Wolfgang Giegerich. This is not a matter of interpretation or emphasis. Giegerich’s work represents a direct intervention into Jungian thought—one that corrects, completes, and in crucial respects overturns Jung’s…

  • Does Jung’s Research Reveal Patterns in the Historical Unfolding of the Psyche?

    Carl Gustav Jung’s psychology is often misunderstood as ahistorical, inward, or mythological in a purely symbolic sense. In fact, one of Jung’s most radical and consistent claims is that the psyche unfolds historically and becomes intelligible only through its historical manifestations. Jung does not treat history as a backdrop against which psychic life happens; rather,…

  • Modernity, Alienation, and Addiction: A Hegelian Genealogy

    Contemporary addiction is typically approached as a medical disorder, a behavioral pathology, or a moral failure. Each of these frames captures a dimension of the phenomenon, yet none explains why addiction emerges with such structural regularity in modern societies, nor why it so often appears precisely where freedom, autonomy, and rationalization are most advanced. To…

  • Why I Use the Term Born Man

    The term Born Man is not chosen casually, nostalgically, or provocatively for its own sake. It is chosen because language itself has become part of the battlefield of appearance, and any serious attempt to think modern self-consciousness must reckon with that fact rather than evade it. The word man in Born Man is not a…

  • Addiction After Meaning: Part I

    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…