Lacanian Psychoanalysis,Addiction and Enjoyment

Introduction

In her important work on the genealogy of alcoholism, The Diseases of the Will, Mariana Valverde draws attention to the ways in which discourses on alcoholism and addiction, since their formation, have been haunted by the abstraction of free will, closely linking them to liberal and moral assumptions about rationality and self-control (Valverde, 1998: 19). Bombarded by the cultural imperative to become autonomous and to regain one’s sanity, the addict was early on interpellated by modern bio-political regimes as a morally lacking and deviant subject whose ‘natural’ or ‘essential’ freedom had been enslaved by excessive habits and bodily urges. In other words, the addict was targeted as an element within a societal discourse of addiction governed by the node or centre of will, and in response to this, Valverde provides a compelling argument for the need to critically decenter (in the sense, of deconstructing, de-essentializing and de-territorializing) the totalizing tendencies of addiction discourse.

Valverde’s argument is in this sense not only part of an emerging field of critical addiction studies, which systematically challenges similar assumptions in addiction discourse and practice (Fraser et al., 2014; Reinarman and Granfield, 2015). It also feeds into ongoing social scientific debates in both addiction and body studies, which have questioned essentialist or naturalised understandings of different social phenomena (Blackman, 2021: 26; Keane, 2002). And even if addiction science overall is increasingly moving towards more complex models, critical addiction scholars insist on the countless ways in which the tendency to reinstall abstract and universalizing assumptions appears to creep back into explanatory frameworks of addiction discourse. Thus, they point to the need to interrupt existing models of addiction, and to contrast these with more decentered ontologies and discourses on human (and non-human) behaviour. In line with this, Valverde suggests that critical thinking must abandon the totalizing notion of addiction and interrupt the moralising and normative consequences of addiction discourse, in favour of perspectives that dissociate behaviour typically associated with addiction from discourses of disease and freedom, instead considering them part of ongoing processes of habituation (Valverde, 1998: 35; also see Sedgwick, 1994). Although the present article generally shares these concerns of critical scholars, and agrees that we today need to develop more decentered understandings of social phenomena, it opposes the way in which this critique of addiction is currently almost synonymous with rejecting the term addiction, as if it were an inherently totalizing or essentialist concept. This has unfortunately led to a situation where there is overall little interest among critical scholars in developing alternative understandings of addiction based on decentered theoretical frameworks. In contrast to this, the present aim is to explore an account of addiction that simultaneously acknowledges addiction as a particular form of experience and retains the critical impulse of decentered ontologies.

The decentering of addiction as a disease of the will in critical studies of addiction is linked to several more general theoretical concerns in fields like affect and body studies. As such, it has been dominated by two interconnected critiques of addiction discourse and existing models of addiction. To begin with, there is the rise of social constructionist frameworks that began to appear in the 1970s. These frameworks, like social constructionist perspectives on the body, stressed the contingent character of addiction as an originally historical and cultural product rather than a transcultural universal (Room, 1985). In this way, social researchers, for instance, reframed alcoholism as a social accomplishment (Schneider, 1978), and situated the ‘discovery’ of addiction in the context of Western ideals of self-control, individualism and productivity (Levine, 1978). During the 1980s and 1990s, a more systematic constructionist approach paved the way for an understanding of how ideals of freedom and consumer sovereignty were masked by the tendency in medical, therapeutic and popular discourses to treat addiction as an essentially individual phenomenon, often reducing it to a naturally occurring and pre-given entity. As Eve Sedgwick suggested, in a frequently cited paper, the proper object of addiction was intimately connected to a late-modern propaganda of the will indicating a pathological lack of certain normative qualities linked to the naturalised notion of a healthy free will (Sedgwick, 1994: 132–133). Echoing this idea, many influential works in critical addiction studies have viewed addiction discourse less as a product of scientific evidence than one of highly effective, societal processes (Berridge, 1984; Keane, 2002; Peele, 1989; Reinarman, 2005; Room, 1997; Valverde, 1998). Similar arguments appear to have sharpened the critical edge of social scientific addiction studies. Guided by frameworks such as Foucauldian perspectives on governmentality, discourse analysis and deconstruction, central notions of addiction discourse – such as the ‘addicted personality’ – have largely been dismissed as ‘technologies of the self’ that ultimately have the role of reproducing societal norms and relations of power (Keane, 2002; Valverde, 1998). Developing alternative, social constructionist accounts of addiction as a decentered phenomenon has not been a prominent objective of this research.

More recently, addiction has been problematised through a material turn (related to the emergence of perspectives like new materialism, post-humanism, Science and Technology Studies, etc.) that began to gain traction in the humanities and social sciences around the turn of the millennium. More explicitly connected to concerns in current body studies and affect theory (Blackman, 2021: 48), this research insists on the open and indeterminate character of bodies and desires and attends to the ways in which addiction territorializes bodily and affective processes of becoming. Developing the earlier critique of addiction in social constructionist research, materialists like Suzanne Fraser challenge – along the lines of John Law’s work in Science and Technology Studies – the singular notion of addiction in order to defend heterogeneity and indeterminacy by creating ‘mess’ (Fraser, 2020: 9). Yet this materialist turn in critical addiction studies also retains the social constructionist critique of abstract, essentialist assumptions in psychology and biology. Thus, even if it occasionally repeats the new materialist critique of social determinism and language-based agency, it nonetheless targets addiction as an ongoing societal epidemic, although it is now framed as a process of addictification or addicting, which is seen to produce addiction as a rigid, narrow and linear phenomenon through the enactment of various ‘collateral realities’ of free will and determinism (Fraser et al., 2014: 238). Although more frequently framed as a material practice than a discourse, addiction discourse is still considered a unifying apparatus that denies the inconsistencies, contradictions and weak evidence that surround definitions of addiction (Garriot and Raikhel, 2015: 479; Keane and Hamill, 2010; Vrecko, 2010). The material turn in this sense echoes the social constructionist critique of the essentialist ontology of addiction.

Although the present article recognises the important contributions of critical addiction studies, it also claims that the general orientation of the critique has prevented a systematic reflection on how a decentered ontology might improve our understanding of the phenomenology of addiction as a specific form of lived experience. In contrast, the article calls for a mobilisation of decentered frameworks in order to transform current understandings of addiction. Turning more specifically to recent developments within Lacanian psychoanalysis, it suggests that the latter provides tools for both a critical and affirmative approach to addiction, and is equipped to meet the theoretical challenge of formulating an account of subjectivity in line with current ideas on becoming, indeterminacy, heterogeneity, and so on. Based on the general idea that the phenomenology of addiction deserves a rigorous decentered social analysis, it approaches addiction as a form of subjectivity intimately linked to questions of bodily affect, symbolic practice and social order. In this regard, the article is related to ongoing attempts to interrogate the lived experience of suffering among addicts, which as Darin Weinberg has claimed, is often neglected in decentered accounts (Weinberg, 2013: 176); ¹ to efforts among scholars to address the phenomenology of addiction on the level of subjectivity, interaction, and embodiment (Denzin, 1993; Kemp, 2018); and not least to Bruce Alexander’s research on addiction as part of larger structural processes of disintegration in modern society (Alexander, 2008).

The psychoanalytical response to the challenge of reductive explanations of human behaviour was already from its beginning to treat the subject as a kind of radically unknown cause. Interestingly, as Lacanian psychoanalyst Rik Loose notes in his important work The Subject of Addiction: Psychoanalysis and the Administration of Enjoyment, Freud’s famous discovery of the unconscious was intimately related to his early experimenting with and observations of the effects of cocaine. Based on these observations, Freud concluded that, if we are to understand the effects of drugs, accounting for subjective experience is indispensable:

The text Über Coca [. . .] reflects a passionate belief in the magical properties of the drug cocaine. [. . .] The properties of cocaine, which initially attracted Freud to the drug, were its ability to increase the capacity to work, to allow people to do without food for long periods, and to increase physical strength. [. . .] When Freud referred to experiments with cocaine on himself and others, he mentioned that individuals react differently to the drug. He realised that there was no uniform effect. Freud would come back to this in his other papers. In his last paper on cocaine, Craving for and Fear of Cocaine, he related these different effects of cocaine to individual variations in excitability and ‘a factor of individual disposition’. (Loose, 2002: 11)

Although Freud would later abandon his initial interest in medical explanations for his specialised focus on this ‘factor of individual disposition’, this shift was a consequence of his emerging perception that some unconscious part of the subject played an important role in the effects of substances. Like contemporary cognitivist neuroscience, psychoanalysis in this sense claims that conscious desires – like addictive desires – are results of non-conscious processes, and thus cannot be taken at face value. However, as Freud suggested in The Interpretation of Dreams, such manifest desires are rarely direct expressions of natural needs, but overdetermined products of complex relations between social, psychological and bodily processes. Moreover, unlike most frameworks in cognitivist neuroscience, psychoanalysis therefore suggests that unconscious processes represent a highly dynamic form of agency. ² Lacan terms this awkward and obscure agency the subject of the unconscious, so as to state the contradiction of an apparatus that both entails the original messiness of various unconscious interpenetrating processes and a kind of subjective directionality. In this perspective, the directionality (or, perhaps, non-directionality) expressed through the typical experience of addiction as loss of control is considered an overdetermined effect, situated in the messiness of the subject of the unconscious (Lacan, 2002: 155). ³ It is this unconscious subject that the present article takes to be the (non)centre of the Lacanian account of addiction.

Independent Enjoyment Versus Symbolic Freedom

The article argues that it is important to observe how the Lacanian account of addiction retains the binary between freedom and enslavement that many critical scholars today question. For Lacanian psychoanalysis, addiction remains a problematic experience (a symptom), which needs to be accounted for in all its specificity. Still, this does not entail a view according to which addiction is seen as a pathological deviation from a healthy, normal, or natural being. Symptoms are here rather considered the rule of human existence. Thus, if addiction in this section is to be opposed to symbolic freedom or existence, it is not because the latter is considered healthy or unproblematic. If addiction and symbolic existence offer two opposing solutions to what Lacan considers a fundamental problem of jouissance (hereafter, enjoyment) in human existence, it is also important to note that they are both considered impossible and imperfect. To understand the particular problem of addiction in this sense then requires a brief introduction of this vital notion of enjoyment.

One way of introducing the concept of enjoyment would be to situate it in ongoing discussions of affect. For instance, enjoyment comes close to Lawrence Grossman’s discussion of affect as ‘the engine of articulation’, which – although not exactly non-representational – involves a certain limit or surplus of signification (Grossman, 2010: 318–328). For Lacan, the question of how the subject deals with enjoyment in symbolic existence is vital. To the extent that enjoyment is always related to the limit of signification, the subject never grasps it adequately. Subjectivity, rather, is just so many ways to relate the ‘register of the real’ (to which enjoyment is often linked in Lacanian discourse) to the register of ‘the symbolic’. But insofar as this relating is structurally inadequate (making enjoyment in subjective experience always not enough or too much), enjoyment always embodies something impossible in experience. According to Lacan, the impossible work of finding a solution to this problem is primarily done on the level of unconscious processes, through the establishment of unconscious fantasies. These fantasies then condition conscious experience. This is why Slavoj Žižek, for instance, has argued that fantasy works as a kind of Derridean condition of (im)possibility that conditions subjective experience and symbolic order, at the same time as it marks these with an original impossibility.

The above account admittedly simplifies Lacan’s understanding of the subject’s encounter with enjoyment, because enjoyment is not merely something that evades the subject. Conceived as related to the ‘beyond’ of the Freudian pleasure principle, it also involves the more original, affective register of the drives. In this regard, enjoyment presents the subject with an originally ambiguous and traumatic pleasure-in-displeasure, which unlike normative or idealised pleasure contains an excessive pleasure that the conscious subject and the symbolic order cannot tolerate (Laplanche and Pontalis, 1973: 214; Loose, 2002: 174). This traumatic excessiveness is often exemplified through Lacan’s account of the unlimited mode of enjoyment characteristic of infantile existence. Here, the infant is described as being caught in a primordial discord, a fragmented and dispersed bodily state (a split body, or, corps morcelé), unable to distinguish itself from the external world of others (Lacan, 2002: 6). In effect, the subject has no means to resist the enjoyment of others, which then invades and traps the subject in a symbiotic enjoyment.

Lacanian psychoanalysis argues that the symbolic break with enjoyment offers a way out of this symbiosis. As Lacan (2002) famously states, the fundamental role of castration is to refuse infantile enjoyment so that another version of it ‘can be reached on the inverted ladder of the Law of desire’. ⁴ Castration establishes a distance between a conscious subject and a prohibited or repressed enjoyment, a distance that, paradoxically (insofar as it is forced), liberates the subject from the excessive presence of enjoyment (Lacan, 1981: 210). If there is a Lacanian version of free agency, it has to do with the space opened up by this separation between the subject and her enjoyment. From now on, the castrated subject is forced to satisfy enjoyment on the level of desire by filling this lack (Lacan, 2002: 155; Žižek, 1989: 122) – not that desire does away with enjoyment completely. But turning enjoyment into a symbolic question, enjoyment becomes something lacking and enigmatic related to what Lacanian psychoanalysis terms ‘the desire of the Other’ – that is, the question of the subject’s enjoyment becomes merged with the desire of those others through which a given social order appears for the subject.

Turning to addiction more specifically, Lacanian psychoanalysis understands it as a tendency to simplify the question of enjoyment. Treating enjoyment as if it was merely a question of regulation of quantitative flows, the addict separates the question of enjoyment from the intersubjective and relational realm of the Other. She uses enjoyment in a way that avoids the fundamental role that symbolic order and language has in human experience, according to Lacan. As such, addiction is sometimes described as a ‘no’ or ‘break formation’ that aims to establish a form of independence from the symbolic order on the level of enjoyment:

Toxicomania [i.e. addiction] might be defined as follows: it is the search by the subject for an object which can be administered at will, which would satisfy desire and regulate or keep jouissance at an ideal level. ‘Administration at will’ implies that this object can function for the subject in a way which is largely independent of the Other. [. . .] The desire of the Other is problematic for addicts; indeed, as we have seen, they choose to avoid desire [. . .] and instead they take the side of jouissance. (Loose, 2002: 174)

As this quote from Loose suggests, addiction is not opposed to will and the attempt to control enjoyment. On the contrary, he defines it as an administration at will, which implies an attempt to directly gain mastery over enjoyment without the detour through the symbolic. The Lacanian understanding of addiction here parallels Freud’s description of the function of masturbation. Like the latter, addiction challenges the authority of the symbolic order in terms of an auto-affective effort to derive pleasure outside the demands that society places on the individual. In fact, by describing masturbation as ‘the primary addiction’ that other addictions merely seek to replace, Freud emphasised their shared aim of gaining direct control over one’s enjoyment (Freud, 1950: 272; Loose, 2002: 30; Naparstek, 2018: 47). In this sense, addiction and masturbation both oppose what Lacan sees as the alienating impact of symbolic laws and prohibitions (which include what sociology often refers to as norms) that establish the particular versions of enjoyment acceptable to a given society. Unfortunately, this direct access also means that, on the level of enjoyment, the addict becomes increasingly disinterested in others. Thus, the consequence of the addict’s independence and escape from the limitations and restrictions that the symbolic order puts on enjoyment is not full satisfaction. Rather, it risks reintroducing a traumatic, intrusive and excessive enjoyment (Laurita, 2018: 142; Loose, 2018: 30; Naparstek, 2018: 52). As Ole Bjerg has put it, the addict has come too close to the object of enjoyment (Bjerg, 2008: 17). Unable to separate her enjoyment from this object-repetition, she gets stuck in the symbiotic object relation, and progressively becomes the instrument of its consummation. In this sense, addiction gradually transforms independence and mastery into enslavement.

This argument allows us to confront the question of how a Lacanian account of addiction might avoid the critique that addiction discourse typically relies on a binary relation between a naturally pre-existing, free and healthy subject, on the one hand, and an unnatural, dependent and pathological one, on the other (Keane, 2002; Reinarman and Granfield, 2015; Valverde, 1998). In her work on the French methadone treatment centres that emerged in the 1990s, Emelie Gomart implicitly appears to argue against a Lacanian understanding of addiction when criticising the so-called ‘specialist discourse’, which according to her dominated this context. For instance, the specialist argument that the addict ‘marries the drug’ to avoid or not ‘go through’ the symbolic Other (Gomart, 2004: 90) almost exactly repeats the account of addiction developed above. However, insofar as Gomart links these ideas to the assumption of a pre-existing subject, she places them within a binary frame, which clearly is at odds with Lacanian psychoanalysis. In fact, her argument that specialist discourse on recovery relies on naturalised assumptions of normal ‘maturation’ (seen as hampered by the immaturity of the addict) is incompatible with Lacanian discourse insofar as its fundamental notion of the split subject of the unconscious radically interrupts common sense ideas of subjectivity as determined by natural processes (Gomart, 2004: 91). Likewise, her claim that the specialists assume that individuals are either free or independent also seems invalid as a critique of Lacanian psychoanalysis. The Lacanian subject becomes ‘free’ not through independence from others, but through a certain independence from its own enjoyment. And while this distance establishes the possibility of a form of free will, it is a will that continues to be unconsciously linked to repressed enjoyment. If anything, then, both free and addictive agency simultaneously imply independency and dependency. Symbolic freedom is caught in the enigmatic desire of the Other and is, hence, partially freed from enjoyment. Addiction, on the contrary, is partially independent from the symbolic, but as such trapped in enjoyment. If psychoanalysis prefers the former, it is because the symbolic break with enjoyment is seen as allowing for an attitude of openness towards the world and its otherness.

Against Symbolic Fatigue: Recovery as Symbolic Re-Enchantment

The claim that subjectivity is established through the force of castration, which produces a lack of enjoyment through symbolic regulations and prohibitions, suggests that Lacanian psychoanalysis provides us with a rather tragic framework on subjectivity. ⁵ There is, however, a brighter side of this process according to Lacan, insofar as castration also gives the subject access to the symbolic (the signifier, language, etc.). Ultimately, this is crucial for understanding how addiction in Lacanian psychoanalysis is linked to a kind of symbolic fatigue, where the subject as a ‘being of speech’ (parlêtre) – due to the excessive presence of the object and the closure that this presence entails in relation to symbolic freedom and desire – is understood to have gone to sleep (Loose, 2018: 31). This points us towards the question of the role of language in recovery, and as we will argue, this attention to language is one that goes beyond contemporary discussions about the need for narrative, meaning and cognitive integration in recovery processes – because symbolic agency, as understood here, is not so much about establishing coherent meaning, as about being hooked on the enigmatic otherness of discourse itself.

An example might illustrate how addiction can be said to involve a suspension of the symbolic dimension of speech. In their clinical work with Samantha, a female heroin addict, Kelly and Malone note how her discourse is marked by a high degree of disintegration. For instance, they describe how Samantha, despite having been in therapy regularly throughout her life, never has spoken of her use of heroin in therapy before entering psychoanalysis. Although she sees her heroin use as a way of handling traumatic memories and feelings from her childhood, she has not symbolically articulated her use and has never been allowed to approach what her use means to her discursively. Thus, her talk of addiction does not affect her way of directly administering her enjoyment outside social relations (Kelly and Malone, 2018: 150). In a similar manner, even if Samantha actively uses writing, this writing is not related to other parts of her experience, particularly her experiences in treatment. Rather, it appears to momentarily suspend feelings of frustration and ‘get everything out of her head’ (Kelly and Malone, 2018: 152).

Kelly and Malone observe how Samantha’s speech corresponds to her addiction insofar as it contributes to her isolation. It is a speech that works in parallel with an enjoyment that strictly operates on the level of the body, by repeatedly suspending her traumatic past by way of increased enjoyment. As such, it does not connect or integrate issues of her enjoyment with her discourse in therapy, her writing, or her feelings about others. Insofar as it does not allow the subject to – as Norman Denzin puts it in his study on alcoholism – bring her inner existence into the world of others (Denzin, 1993: 100), it nicely illustrates the Lacanian idea of how addiction introduces fatigue on the level of symbolic relations. Although it involves a form of speech, it is one that belongs to a subject who relies on an enjoyment not related to others (Gherovici, 2018: 104; Loose, 2018: 30–31; Svolos, 2018: 75), and who progressively loses interest in intimacies other than that with the object of addiction (see Adams, 2008).

In contrast to this addict speech, it is then vital for psychoanalysis to establish a speech that incorporates enjoyment, and this is precisely what desire allows for as it (re)introduces the question of enjoyment in relation to the symbolic Other. Allowing the subject to articulate her enjoyment in terms of an appeal to the Other (Fink, 2014: 168), the aim of Lacanian psychoanalysis is to break the opposition between speech and enjoyment and to form an enjoyment-in-speech, or what Žižek has coined an ‘enjoy-meant’ (Žižek, 1994: 156). And rather than being a process of cognitive integration or understanding, this articulation awakens and re-enchants the subject by introducing her to something in her existence that positions her being in relation to others, to the enigma of enjoyment (Kelly and Malone, 2018; Loose, 2018).

This role of ‘enjoy-meant’ in clinical work with addiction interestingly relates to discussions in contemporary psychology and neuroscience about the significance of narrative in recovery (Lewis, 2015; Maruna and Ramsden, 2004). For instance, neuroscientist Marc Lewis claims that addiction might be described neurologically as a progressive separation of the emotional and motivational ‘wanting system’ from the cognitive, cortical functions of the brain. Recovery, in contrast, hinges on the bringing together of affect and cognition, something that Lewis argues can be accomplished through the use of new stories that allow the addict to re-integrate her life in society (Lewis, 2015: 44–45). This claim is closely linked to psychological research emphasising how addiction emerges through processes of social disintegration and dislocation (Alexander, 2008; Chandler and Lalonde, 1998). Particularly important in this regard is Chandler and Lalonde’s work on native communities in Canada, which found that the incidence of social problems such as addiction was significantly lower in communities where youth had stories to tell that united their personal lives with the narratives of their communities, the conclusion being that narratives help the individual give her life meaning through the connection of her present life to a past and a future. Narrative and life stories are hence believed to provide a vital sense of unity, purpose and meaning for individuals in the face of existential meaninglessness, chaos and trauma (McAdams, 1993; Sarbin, 1986). As Maruna and Ramsden (2004: 145) conclude in an overview of literature covering both recovery from addiction and sexual offender rehabilitation, new individual and collective narratives seem essential for recovery insofar as they allow stigmatised individuals to be redeemed and reintegrated into society. In a similar way, much of the recovery-oriented research has paid attention to the role of new social identities in recovery (Beckwith et al., 2015; Dingle et al., 2015; Jetten et al., 2017).

We might then note how narrative perspectives on recovery, in a similar manner as Kelly and Malone, stress the need for reintegration and meaning in recovery. In both perspectives, it seems vital that clinical work should realign meaning/cognition and desire/affect. And yet, the Lacanian account of such reintegration does not rely on the totalizing trope of coherency, and it disagrees with the claim that recovery should instal a sense of, for instance, a coherent self. Instead reintegration is about the need to re-enchant the life of the addict, and to establish a symbolic life that embraces the mystery and otherness of enjoyment. Because, ultimately, it is this enigma that impels the subject to engage in the process of finding a purpose or meaning of life.

In this sense, Lacanian discourse is one geared towards bodies of enjoyment. Like recently developed body-oriented methodologies, it seeks to produce a storytelling that makes new kinds of bodily reality knowable (Dennis, 2020: 69). However, it also suggests that addiction represents an obstacle to this attempt to make reality knowable. Not that drugs would be inherently incapable of surprising or enhancing how people live with drugs in general (Dennis, 2020: 68; Gomart, 2004). But insofar as an apparatus of addiction has come to organise the experience of a particular subject, the Lacanian position would be that the drugs will offer few opportunities for surprise and otherness. On the contrary, addiction centres, fixes and totalizes experience through its orientation towards a particular object. To re-enchant and surprise this apparatus, one instead needs to engage in that area of psychosomatic experience that is radically indeterminate, namely the domain of unconscious fantasies. It is with this focus on fantasy that psychoanalysis introduces a dimension of radical indeterminacy between subjective, bodily and social reality, which touches on ongoing discussions in body studies (Waterton and Yusoff, 2017). Fantasy, however, is not simply indeterminate. It also introduces relatively stable matrixes that organise the subject’s relations to the symbolic Other. In this sense, aggressions directed at the analyst in the psychoanalytic clinic hint at processes of transference that involve the Other as a representative of the symbolic order as well as images the patient identifies with that are related to her fantasies of what she is to the Other. It is vital not to treat the self-image implied by such aggression as a neutral reflection of the subject’s ‘objective being’ in the symbolic order. Rather, it is an image filtered through to the subject’s unconscious fantasy about what she is to the Other (Lacan, 1981: 214), which is contingent on the subject’s idiosyncratic way of making sense of his or her place in the symbolic order (Žižek, 1989: 105).

Addiction causes certain problems for this Lacanian clinical work with fantasy insofar as it – in its instrumental approach to enjoyment – has done away with similar questions about what the subject is in the desire of the Other, substituting them with the repetition of raw, physical enjoyment. The problem in addiction and recovery is ultimately that the addict has grown emotionally disinterested in symbolically structured fantasies, and thus Lacanian psychoanalysts often note a tendency among addicts to transfer the instrumental approach to the object of addiction, to a similarly instrumental relation to the Other. Thus, according to Lacanian scholars, symbolic ideals – not least in the treatment industry and self-help culture – easily take on the role of substitutes for addiction objects, and thus frequently become new resources for manipulation of enjoyment (Loose, 2002: 249–253, 2018: 15; Svolos, 2018: 81).

Addiction, Actual Neurosis and the Role of New Symptoms in Contemporary Society

If the above discussion has mainly focused on addiction as an apparatus that relates the subject to symbolic order and bodily enjoyment in a way that allows her to avoid the question of the Other’s desire, Lacanian understandings of addiction also typically situate it in a more general critique of modernity. In this sense, it echoes Weber’s famous analysis of modern disenchantment, and treats addiction as part of a broader social process of devaluation of enigma. Lacanian discourse links these processes of devaluation and disenchantment to the failure of our current social order to provide a function – a symbolic law or order – that helps the individual to block his or her enjoyment. This idea goes back to Lacan’s notion of a general decline in the authority of the traditional symbolic order in modern society, signalled by the historical event of the death of paternal signifiers such as God, the absolute subject, absolute truth, and so on, which according to Lacan anchored traditional societies (Lacan, 1992). And in contrast to critical studies of addiction, which often argue that addiction discourse is organised around liberal and essentialist assumptions of a unified, free and rational subject (Keane, 2002: 3–4; Reinarman, 2005: 310; Valverde, 1998: 3), Lacanian psychoanalysis asks how this loss of authority restructures the subject’s relation to enjoyment.

It is in this context that Lacanian psychoanalysis often situates addiction as one version of what Lacan referred to as the new or modern symptoms, which are symptoms that operate directly on the body (Loose, 2018: 28; Svolos, 2018: 78). Unlike the psychoneuroses, ⁶ symptoms such as fatigue, anxiety disorders, eating disorders, self-cutting, and not least addiction are not considered symbolically constituted, and as such not related to the repression of enjoyment. Thus, Lacan links the rapid growth of these symptoms in contemporary society to the modern re-organisation of the relation between symbolic authority and enjoyment (Loose, 2018; Naparstek, 2018; Svolos, 2018; Trobas, 2006). And in accordance with this argument, addiction is related to the way in which modern society increasingly substitutes the paternal signifier of lack for a hedonistic imperative to enjoy (Naparstek, 2018: 47). As a consequence of the modern experience of ‘the death of God’, and the progressive loss of symbolic authority, modern social order loses its centre. This establishes a lack at the core of the order, and it is this empty space that enjoyment comes to occupy.

In a way, this is related to Foucault’s well-known claim that the modern break with the traditional power of the sovereign coincides with an altered attitude towards sexuality in the form of an emancipating drive and belief in the truth of sexuality (Foucault, 2019). Neither Lacan nor Foucault argued that this emancipation indicates a simple break with power, as it also introduces the subject to new forms of power as well as to new truths. Yet what Lacan has to say about this emancipation of sexuality is quite different from Foucault’s view, insofar as he is more interested in the question of what happens to enjoyment in a symbolic order whose symbolic law (prohibition) is increasingly met with disbelief by the members of the order itself, which increasingly turns to the force of enjoyment and hedonist values in its interpellation of its members (Lacan, 1992). For Lacan, these transformations of the structure of the symbolic order and enjoyment increasingly rely on the function of the demands that the so-called superego comes to place on the subject in modernity. From being heavily associated with norms, ideals, and moral values in Freudian psychoanalysis, these superego demands, according to Lacan, increasingly enact the very enjoyment that earlier forms of symbolic order prohibited. As a consequence of this, we get a symbolic order whose relation to the ‘no’ of castration becomes deeply ambiguous. As Žižek has suggested, our current symbolic order is split between the public assertion of the ‘no’ of the official law and an obscene underside of enjoyment that, while contradicting the public law, also has an essential function in supporting the symbolic order (Žižek, 1994: 55). In this sense, the excessiveness of addiction ultimately masks the way in which addiction feeds into those deterritorialisation forces of enjoyment that today drive capitalist societies.

It is in this context that Guy Trobas situates Lacan’s new symptoms as modern everyday solutions to the enigma of being. According to Trobas, the modern individual is increasingly being bombarded with ready-made capitalist, mass-produced answers to this enigma, and these standardised solutions deprive the subject of her particularity, reducing the object of her desire to a pre-fabricated commodity. They provide answers on the question of what the subject is, not on the level of symbolic ideals (ego-ideals), but on the level of a direct and heavily scripted imperative to Enjoy! Like the famous commercial slogan ‘Coke is it!’, these commodified superego demands introduce us to the capitalist fantasy of an object that promises to provide the individual with that enigmatic thing that he or she lacks (Bjerg, 2008; Žižek, 2001: 22). In this sense, the problem of morality changes fundamentally. In fact, it is the impotence – rather than importance – of symbolic law and morality and the interpellation of the subject’s enjoyment that, for Lacanian analysis, characterise the modern predicament.

It is not difficult to see how addiction, as described in previous sections, fits into the Lacanian framing of this contemporary situation of addictification. Its way of avoiding the symbolic question of the desire of the Other and turning to the direct manipulation of enjoyment almost appears to be emblematic of a symbolic order that increasingly calls on the subject to solve the puzzle of her existence on the level of enjoyment. Addiction provides an individualist independence on the level of bodily enjoyment, a private hedonist space for masturbatory auto-affection. Indeed, addiction and hedonist discourse appear to reinforce each other and further the decline of the authority of symbolic order.

Conclusion

There is today perhaps more than ever a need for a decentered social critique of addiction. Insofar as the epidemic of addiction involves a bio-political will to power, a neo-moral project of normativity, or a totalizing and abstract discourse of addicting or addictification, contemporary critical addiction studies seem well equipped to formulate such a critique. But if addiction is also a symptom of societal forces that increase the pressure on the modern individual to enjoy, they leave a lot to be desired.

The present article has argued that Lacanian psychoanalysis theorises addiction in a way that allows for a rethinking of addiction along the lines of a decentered ontology that rejects the one-size-fits-all ideology often present in addiction discourse. It suggests that the notion of addiction is useful as a description of a particular way – a discourse, an apparatus, or subjective structure – of dealing with enjoyment that is particularly pressing to understand today. In this respect, it continues the tradition of treating addiction as a problem that denies the free act, although its notion of freedom is radically uncoupled from essentialist assumptions about the nature of human existence. Insofar as it retains the idea that the subject is at least minimally responsible for her addiction, the Lacanian position stands out from other critical understandings of addiction. The difference can perhaps be formulated along the following lines. In the critical framework, addiction is essentially a top-down process. Whether on the level of cultural, macro processes, or, on the micro level of practice and individual being, addiction is here constructed as caused by a totalizing apparatus, which is attributed to or enacted by different entities. In critical studies, this seems to be the primary problem that we currently face in addiction. That is, the main problem is associated with the abstract category and discourse of addiction, which hence needs to be destabilised, challenged and substituted for other less totalizing or reductive notions such as that of habit (Fraser et al., 2014; Keane, 2002; Sedgwick, 1994: 138; Valverde, 1998).

In the Lacanian framework, however, addictification is more ambiguous in terms of causality, and while it recognises the top-down processes that critical studies interrogate, it nevertheless insists on the bottom-up causality of subjective responsibility. As a consequence, it primarily addresses the subject’s choice of the apparatus of addiction as a way of life, rather than the more limited choice to enact or not enact abstract addiction discourse. This means that the interest is directed towards the choice to form a particular relation to the symbolic order and enjoyment. It also means that addiction represents a very specific form of habituation, which taps into and reinforces contemporary forms of standardised enjoyment in ways that establish a highly abstract being in the world. Thus, addiction would not primarily be an abstract label that masks a more original ‘messiness’ (Fraser et al., 2014), but a label that denotes an excess of abstract enjoyment in our current social reality at the expense of a symbolically organised desire.

Ultimately, the claim of the article is that Lacanian discourse might contribute to our understanding of how addiction, as a particular form of habituation, speaks to something universal in human existence. As a historically and subjectively situated apparatus, it presents us with a particular way of managing something that Lacan approaches as fundamental to human existence, namely the question of our enjoyment in socio-symbolic existence. To address this particular experience as symbolic is not to deny non-symbolic or non-human symbolic forms of experience. It does, however, suggest that it is crucial to account for the role of language and symbolic relations in human experiences like addiction. If Lacanian psychoanalysis defines addiction as a phenomenon that is negatively related to symbolic order, its position on the problem of addiction is quite straightforward insofar as its fundamental claim is that addiction opposes enigma as well as the otherness, openness and uncertainty that come with it.