What is the addictive personality?

 

My client, who has been sober for two years, disagrees with Alcoholics Anonymous’s dismal verdict: Once an alcoholic, always an alcoholic. She believes that after a number of years, to be deter­mined by her, she will not need to own that stigma. I concurred, with this addition: She may cease to be an alcoholic, but she will always be an addict, a dependent. There will forever exist the dependency need because for her, to be alone without some kind of soothing would be to burn forever.

Is there any need to say “always an alcoholic” because there are physical and emo­tional leanings toward that substance? Should we declare: always a pot smoker, always a nail-biter, always a masturbator, always a pornaholic, always a hair-twirler, always a work­aholic, always a severed-headed intellectual, always a Dr Pepper fiend, always a mala­daptive daydreamer, always an LSD or ecstasy or lean junkie, always a gambler or hair puller? Or, always a rage act-outer, always a codependent enabler, always a Sarcastic Disordered person, always an externalizer of blame, always the “neurotic house­wives [who] rarely get up early and finish their housework completely [because] then they would have to face the emptiness of their lives,”* always a domestic vio­lence victim drawn to the “bad object”? There are an infinite number of dependencies possible and seem­ingly neces­sary to human beings. Isn’t it shallow to call a behavior or symp­tom a disorder, when the real disorder is the deficit, the injury that pulled a dependency to it?

I know a married man in his fifties who fears that he will be masturbating even on his death­­bed, that some craving will always be there, some real fulfillment will never have arrived, even at the end of his life. He knows that the behavior poorly fills an empti­ness. He has always embodied the emptiness. I’m sure he and I would rather diag­nose “exis­tential disorder” not “masturbation disorder.”

If we conceive of addiction as dependency, and dependency as the human condition when criti­cal needs are not met during our formation, we’ll lose our myopia that focuses on a behav­ior instead of its source. This approach points to depth therapy, cause therapy, but also points to a radical question: Why would an unmet need, which must always distill to absence of love, be so powerful to force a permanent dependent infra­struc­ture in the person? We have already survived. Why would we need something so implac­ably unless we didn’t actually survive this starvation of love and now need a mechan­ical device, a life support machine to enable us to be? Though too dark to be useful, I suppose, this is my view of human nature and sickness.

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* Arthur Janov, The Primal Scream, 1970 (hence “housewives”), p. 137, Chapter “On Being Normal”.