The phenomenon of addiction ultimately concerns existential themes. In fact, most serious mental health disorders reference existential problems, the most famous of these concerning the question “to be or not to be”. Freud was eventually compelled to develop a “Thanatos” idea to explain why an otherwise healthy organism would be inexorably drawn to its own self-destruction. He posited the death drive as a way to balance his “pleasure principle,” but in addiction both drives push in the same direction.
Addiction has a strange profile: it flirts with destruction, but it also stops short of total annihilation, because its parasitic nature requires a functioning participant; you can’t get high if you’re dead. So, in the classic formula an addiction oscillates , which is important: its progression is not typically linear, but more of a “downward spiral” that alternates cycles of pleasure and suffering.
The classic hallmark of addictive cycles is that the upside is entirely frontloaded, conditioning the participant’s body into a need-response, before the edge wears off and that need-response becomes habitual. From there, the body prompts the participant into attempting to achieve cessation of need but, like a hunter’s knot, the trap tightens with each unsuccessful attempt. Addicts call this trap “chasing the dragon,” the dragon being the original upswing of pleasure. Usually addicts will compensate for pleasure-entropy – i.e. tolerance – by increasing the relative volume of drugs used, which draws the trap yet tighter, and greatly increases risk of systemic failure.
Naturally, as the trap tightens the addict adapts, and a fragile homeostasis occurs, with only a trickle drawdown – more of a leakage, or slow-bleed, really – as long as the addict continues to “function” within cyclic balance. We sometimes call this a “functioning addict”. But the cycle is really a wobble, and all wobbles will eventually collapse into systemic breakdown sooner or later.
Consider what happens when these adaptations are centralized, internalized, conditioned, and functionally sustain the participant for many years. Inevitably the participant’s psychology is influenced by the necessity of adaptation. On bottom a physical-need-response fuels addiction cycles; on top, the personality generates ideas, perspectives, and belief systems that leverage decisions leading to reliable relief of cravings.
These personality-patterns typically constitute the bulk of what we demonstrably call “addiction” in a person: the twisted orientation to life, death, and meaningful activity that baffles healthy people and encourages the viewpoint that addicts are not simply physically addicted but also mentally ill.
There we have our existential puzzle: a person who appears to seek and embrace a means of slow deletion. In fact, they have been caught in a trap and aligned to its rules, to the extent that their logic no longer appears comprehensible outside of trapped conditions.
Existentially, this situation can stretch to reflect all potential “traps” in which we find ourselves, culminating in the trap of all traps, that of having to live a life! “I didn’t ask to be born” is the cliche teenage complaint. As adults we are compelled to fill-in that blank: for what true purpose are we living?
People who are attracted to addictive pleasures often have meager, ineffective answers to this question. This is one reason why recovery theory was initially built on religious foundations, because religion frames purpose and meaning very effectively. The AA program for example posits that the lever of recovery is 12 th Step activity, which is to help others overcome their addiction problem. This turns out to be an excellent approach in part because it concretizes practical purpose in altruism, and there are few social healing methods more powerful than this. To rely on one’s usefulness to a community as a fulcrum of personal worth is peak societal integration, which always denotes mental health.