The Addicted Self: A Psychoanalytic Reading of Dependency: Addiction, Desire, Culture and Clinical Practice - A Psychoanalytic Approach to Dependency (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9798257055294)

Why do some people develop chemical dependency while most do not? Why does the addict keep using them even knowing they are destroying? And why does simply demanding they stop never working?

This book answers these questions with the rigour of the psychoanalytic tradition - from Freud to Lacan, from Abraham to Winnicott, from Ferenczi to Joyce McDougall - and with the clarity of a clinician who has spent decades listening to subjects in suffering. The Addicted Self is not an abstinence manual, nor a manifesto against drugs. It is a profound investigation into what moves a human being when seeking, in the object of their addiction, what ordinary life fails to offer: completeness, relief, jouissance without mediation, fusion with the lost object.

Organised in five chapters and four supplementary studies, the book covers:

• The psychoanalytic genealogy of addictions - from Freud and cocaine to the Lacanian re-reading of jouissance and lack.
• The clinical distinction between obsession and addiction - drive servitude through opposite pathways
• The neurobiological and psychosomatic foundations of dependency
• Addiction as a civilizational question - Huxley's SOMA, Gurfinkel's Calibanism, the politics of administered pleasure
• Passion as a drug - the addictive relationship, bond therapy, and the possible path of psychic elaboration

This book is for you if you are:

• A psychoanalyst, psychologist or psychiatrist working with chemical dependency seeking to deepen your theoretical framework.
• A student of psychoanalysis, psychology, medicine, or social work looking for a rigorous, non-moralizing approach.
• A mental health professional - social worker, nurse, occupational therapist, CAPS coordinator or therapeutic community staff
• A family member of a dependent who wants to understand, in depth and without judgement, what happens to someone imprisoned by addiction.
• A cultivated reader interested in psychoanalysis, philosophy of mind and contemporary questions of subjectivity.

"Addiction is not a problem of substance - it is a problem of the subject." - William Marcos

Author: William Marcos Silva
ISBN-13: 9798257055294
Publisher: Independently Published
Language: English
Published: 04/12/2026
Pages: 186
Format: Paperback
Weight: 0.49lbs
Size: 8.50h x 5.50w x 0.40d