Black holes: Some notes on time, symbolization, and perversion in the psychodynamics of addiction

What is it about?

In day-to-day clinical practice we regularly meet individuals who struggle to endure very painful emotional states and to face these in the here and now. The evasion of the pain felt in the present can lead addicts to attempt, through the use of alcohol and other drugs, to collapse their sense of temporal perception. In this paper I suggest a cosmological analogy to these dynamics of addiction as this may aid in furthering our understanding. It is suggested that in the same way that a black hole represents a region of space from which matter and energy cannot escape, due to the intensity of the gravitational field, addicts appear to collapse intra-psychically into sealed over states of being. Like the black hole, which only becomes apparent due to the effects it exerts on objects around it, the psychodynamic internal world of the addict emerges forcibly in the therapeutic relationship. In this sense addictive transference, issuing from the timeless dynamic unconscious described by Freud (1915) can be viewed as mirroring the seductive attraction of substances and their power to return the user to an infantile period. A period before a chronometric perception of time had been achieved, when attempts were made to pull everything towards and into a primitive and inchoate self structure. In this paper the author explores such dynamics of addiction with reference to clinical cases of individuals attending for weekly psychodynamic psychotherapy in a community based addiction treatment centre.

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Why is it important?

This paper develops the psychoanalytical concepts of splitting, pathological personality organisations and the area of the psyche referred to as the black hole with special emphasis on the addictions

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