“Addiction is excess without satiety”, [1]. This lack of satiety is due to two causes: either an excess of supply that deceives desire by the restyling of the object to infinity — consumer society — or the lack of edge that affects the drive in psychosis as that structure. In both cases, the social link that is deduced from it is affected by the kind of autism that characterizes the modes of contemporary enjoyment: in direct connection with the Thing, they do without the link to the Other: it is the solitude that envelops our contemporaries in what Tocqueville has called democratic individualism: “Individualism is a thoughtful and peaceful feeling that allows each citizen to isolate himself from the mass of his fellow-men and to retreat away with his family and friends; so that, after having created a small society for his own use, he willingly abandons the great society to himself (…) Individualism is of democratic origin, and it threatens to develop as the conditions are equalized “. Tocqueville distinguished individualism “recent and of democratic origin” and egoism “vice as old as the world”, “passionate and exaggerated love of oneself, which brings the man to report nothing to him alone and to prefer himself asset “. And indeed individualism pushed to its extreme logic does not produce individuals completely filled with themselves but rather “threatened by emptiness, insignificance (…) who do not know who they are” [2], anomic (Durkheim). It is in this period of peace and opulence, the “era of emptiness” (Lipovetsky): “Neo-narcissism has not only neutralized the social universe by emptying institutions of their emotional investments it is the Self as well that is this time decapitated, emptied of its identity, paradoxically by its hyper-investment “[3], empty described by Lipovetsky, contrary to the nihilism of Nietzsche (morbid depreciation of all the values superior and desert of meaning “), as” apathy new look “:” God is dead, the great ends are extinguished, but everyone does not care, here is the joyous news, this is the limit of the diagnosis of Nietzsche to the place of the European darkening. But it only took a few years for Marcel Gauchet’s optimism to give way before the Weimar prophet: it is the furious return of the religious as sucked by the emptiness of meaning, religious sense. often the only one able to make return a too much enjoyment of the body. And a number of addictions, as the clinical experience begins to attest, can benefit from the religious sense that makes weight or even manages to eclipse [4].
While waiting for its redemption by meaning, the individual in question is eager to fill up and to miss prostheses (chemically or otherwise) frantically renewed (a new drug a week in the world) that the industry charitably makes available to him... But from selfishness to individualism, it is a different clinic, quantitatively and qualitatively: between the occasional user, recreational, and the dependent addict. It is also a continuity clinic, clinic of the stall of the social bond, which sees the recreational to switch to the dependent on the occasion of a beak met by the subject in his existence: affective rupture, sudden loss, or gain, professional difficulty … We can only quantify it: for it is basically a progressive passage that replaces all external interest, all investment of the social bond, by consumption.
This consumption, to whatever degree it is in quantitative terms, contributes, in its measure, to a stabilization of the relation of the subject to the Other, even if it is by a quasi-complete separation of this Other (because one does not ever get there), a situation that is common in the cases we receive. It is a mortal stabilization, of course — because it contributes to the ruin of the individual — but it is only the asymptote of a tendency that shows to a lesser degree all the situations, including that of The most common drunkenness — where consumption helps to relieve the subject of the weight of his relationship to the Other, that is to say, to this place where a number of phrases, including commandments, which determine its existence in so far as it is a speaking being, that is to say, first spoken by the Other. From the command of the subconscious superego, but no less ferocious to the injurious hallucination, the clinic declines all the possible modalities of this link to the Other which makes of the man, among all the creatures, the most unhappy … and the most toxicophile — even though deliberate drug use is attested in many animals. It may be said that the man, intoxicated by the word that Lacan regarded as a “linguistic parasite”, needs more than others, to purify his infested Umwelt of words (Von Uexküll quoted by Lacan in Lituraterre) and to become an individual like a man. another (see the speech of the Anonymous!), derivatives that Freud named sorgenbrecher (“Breaker worries” [5]). Addiction is thus the measure of the treatment that a certain subject, ill of speech, applies to the ends of a pacifying dehumanization.
The existence of care institutions (addictology or the so-called mental health in general) is therefore justified, not the destabilization that drugs would bring to a subject because it is not — the couple subject-drug operating all that is best — but the destabilization they bring to society by the emergence of individuals whose selfishness exceeds what it can bear the individualism that she carries. Another way of showing that drug addiction, according to J.-A. Miller, is not a personal symptom but a social symptom. It is therefore perfectly normal for the addict subject to be addressed more to the institutions than to the psychoanalyst, in proportion to the severity of his intoxication. If everyone is addicted to the era of consumption, then we are in the era of the addictocratic individual.
[1] Lipovetsky, Gilles, L’ère du vide, Gallimard, 1983,
[2] Marcel Gauchet, http://gauchet.blogspot.fr/2008/02/la-dmocratie-est-malade-de.html
[3] Lipovetsky, Gilles, L’ère du vide, Gallimard, 1983, Chapitre II : Narcisse ou la stratégie du vide
[4] Sidon P. « Raddictalisation express », Revue Horizon, 2017.
[5] Freud S., Malaise dans la civilisation, Paris, Payot, coll. Petite Bibliothèque Payot, 2010.
