The Logic of Addiction

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

Category: The Loneliness of Man (Complete Collection of Essays)

  • 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:…

  • Midnight Mass and the Completion of Transcendence

    A Second Look Mike Flanagan’s Midnight Mass is often received as a religious horror story—a cautionary tale about fanaticism, blind faith, or the dangers of belief taken too far. Such readings remain trapped within a moral frame the series itself quietly abandons. Midnight Mass is not about the corruption of religion but about what religion…

  • Alchemy, Resurrection, and the Long Unfolding of Modernity

    (Complete Version) Our project has argued that modern addiction is not merely a medical contingency but a historically intelligible answer to a specific spiritual condition: the completion of transcendence and the relocation of “the Absolute” into operational systems (technique, administration, pharmacology, optimization). In that condition, obligation remains, but its traditional guarantees do not. The modern…

  • “MIDNIGHT MASS”

    When Resurrection Becomes a Drug (Abridged) There is a promise that keeps returning in modern life. It is not the promise that suffering will someday be redeemed, but that suffering can be ended now. Not endured, not worked through, not transformed over time—but stopped. This promise appears in substances, in technology, in optimization culture, and…

  • 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,…

  • Obligation After Transcendence (Revisited)

    To Begin an Answer to Nihilism The collapse of transcendence does not abolish ethical obligation. It abolishes only the metaphysical guarantees that once explained why obligation binds. What remains is obligation without justification—demand without promise, claim without cosmology. The biblical tradition does not resist this condition. It anticipates it. Nowhere is this clearer than in…

  • On the Absence of Premodern Counterexamples

    A likely objection to the present framework concerns its apparent historical exclusivity: namely, whether the psychic structure here designated Born Man admits of premodern or non-modern analogues, thereby undermining its claim to modern specificity. Traditions such as Stoicism, late antique inwardness, Indian non-dualism, Buddhist reflexivity, Greek tragedy, or medieval mysticism may appear, at first glance,…