.7.
The Meaning of Addiction ~ Addiction and the Search for Meaning
The pioneering Swiss psychologist Carl G. Jung played a crucial but unintentional role in the formation of Alcoholics Anonymous. In a sense, AA was Jung’s great-grandchild. Bill Wilson, co-founder of AA, related the story in a letter to Jung many years after the fact.’ Wilson wrote the letter in 1961, the last year of Jung’s life.
The message that finally released Wilson from the grips of his own alcohol addiction, Wilson wrote Jung, was delivered to him by Edwin (”Ebby”) T., an old friend and frequent drinking compan¬ion. Ebby, in turn, had received a similar message from a man named Roland H., who had become active in the Oxford Group, an evangelical movement of the time (which eventually changed its name to Moral Rearmament). The man from whom Roland had received that message was Carl Jung.
The story really begins earlier in the 1930s, when Roland H., having sought in vain to control his drinking through various other means, finally became a patient of Jung’s. After about a year, he left Jung’s care “with a feeling of much confidence” (as Wilson puts it), only to relapse again in a short time. In desperation he returned to Jung, who frankly admitted there was nothing more he could do for him. According to Wilson’s account, Jung told Roland that there was no hope of recovery in cases of alcoholism such as his, except for one rather slim chance. That was that Roland “be¬come the subject of a spiritual or religious experience-in short, a genuine conversion.” AA owes its existence to the fact that Roland H. shortly experienced just such a conversion.
In his reply to Wilson’s letter, Jung gives his own judgment about the meaning of alcoholism. As Jung sees it, in the case of his patient Roland H. (and, by implication, all alcoholics, to one degree or another), “his craving for alcohol was the equivalent, on a low level, of the spiritual thirst of our being for wholeness; expressed in medieval language: the union with God.” Jung goes on to share his conviction that “the evil principle prevailing in this world leads the unrecognized spiritual need into perdition if it is not counter¬acted either by real religious insight or by the protective wall of human community.” He then concludes his letter by observing that the Latin term for “alcohol” is spiritus. Thus, he writes, “you use the same word for the highest religious experience as well as for the most depraving poison. The helpful formula therefore is: spir¬itus contra spiritum [spirit against spirit].”
There is nothing special about alcoholism that would confine Jung’s insight to it. It can be extended to cover addiction in general.
Although his language, tone, and vantage point are all very dif¬ferent, Jung’s remarks remind one of William S. Burroughs’ obser¬vations on how one becomes a drug addict. We have already noted Burroughs’ remark that one does not intend to become a drug addict, one just drifts into addiction for lack of any other motiva¬tion. It is as if addiction will rush in to fill the vacuum unless strong contrary motivation is present (by way of Jung’s religious insight or sense of community, for example).
As we have noted more than once before in reference to Burroughs’ comments, drug addiction, alcoholism, and other addic¬tions are certainly not voluntary states. That is, at least in all but the most exceptional cases, no one sets out to become an addict. Nevertheless, as we have also emphasized, one does not become an addict altogether despite oneself, either. Rather, through their own acts addicts ad-dict themselves. They speak themselves over to their addictions in their own repeated choices, however distorted the perceptions underlying those choices may be, as we discussed in the preceding chapter.
Along with speech itself, addiction in the full sense is a distinc¬tively human phenomenon. As Stanton Peele and other authors have observed, it is not at all easy to get rats or other animals to isplay signs of full addiction.2 In their natural state, or anything even remotely resembling it, there is no evidence of addiction in rats, for example. It is only under the most unnatural laboratory conditions that rats can be induced to dose themselves compulsively with even the most supposedly addictive drugs. Whenever options are available, rats invariably prefer some other, more regularly rat¬like behavior. Only the most severely stressed-out rat will shoot up repeatedly.
In contrast to rats, getting human beings to become addicted is remarkably easy. Whereas one really has to force rats to become addicted, about all one has to do to human beings is to give them a chance to become addicts. That, and take away any strong block against addiction, as both Jung and Burroughs observe.
The nineteenth-century German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche remarks that what we humans find intolerable is not pain as such. We can, in fact, tolerate a great deal of pain. What we find intoler¬able, he notes, is meaningless pain.
We need to take Nietzsche one step further. For human beings, we need to add, meaninglessness itself is painful. The lack of any clear sense of meaning in life is all it takes to set us off in search of something to fill the gap.
What makes addiction so tempting is precisely that it promises to fill that gap. The problem is that addiction’s promises are hollow. Unfortunately, however, once we find that out it is already too late. We are already hooked.
Addicts and Saints
To find meaning in life (or to give it meaning, if one prefers that way of speaking) is not a matter of possessing, but of giving up. It is not a matter of clinging to one’s own, but of letting it all go.
In the third century of the Current Era, a young man named Anthony lived in upper Egypt. By the standards of the day, his parents’ farm and the income it provided made the family prosper¬ous. Anthony’s parents died when he had just entered adulthood. He inherited all of their estate, as well as responsibility for his younger sister.
His parents were committed Christians, and Anthony and his sister were raised to be devout. Shortly after his parents’ death, Anthony proved that he had learned his lesson well-too well, per¬haps, at least by worldly standards.
On one of his regular visits to church not long after his parents’ death, Anthony had an experience that changed his life forever. The Gospel text for that day was the story of the rich young man who approaches Jesus to ask how he can attain salvation. Jesus tells him that he must follow the well-known commandments and live a devout life. The young man replies that he has done so since his childhood. Jesus then tells him that he lacks only one thing to attain salvation. He must go and sell all he has, and then give the proceeds to the poor and come follow Jesus himself. The young man leaves in obvious dejection.’
Listening to this Gospel story, Anthony felt himself spoken to directly. He was the rich young man. Like him devout as though by right of birth, Anthony had always lived a godly life. Yet his attachment to his worldly inheritance stood in the middle of his way. That earthly inheritance was blocking him from claiming his heavenly one. Anthony knew what he had to do.
Rushing from the church, he immediately sold his parents’ farm and all his other property to give the proceeds to the poor. How¬ever, concerned for the welfare of his sister, he kept out just enough to provide for her future.
But then, on his next visit to church, the text for the sermon contained the verse: “Do not be anxious about the morrow.”4 Stricken, Anthony rushed out to give away his last bit of wealth, the part he had held back for his sister.
Thereafter, he gave his ‘ sister into the care of a group of women in the town who were attempting to live a holy life together as a community and entered into the solitary life for himself. Before long, he quit the precincts of the town altogether and retreated into the desert, first to an old tomb, later to a more distant deserted fort, and finally even deeper into the wasteland. (Soon other spiritual solitaries sought him out, and small communities of monks sprang up near him. In Christian tradition, St. Anthony is remembered as “the Father of monks,” a principal source of Christian monasticism.)
Many of us would no doubt find Anthony’s behavior incompre¬hensible, but the addicts among us would understand. (I suspect that William Burroughs and St. Anthony would have gotten on well with one another, despite the former’s decidedly non-Christian stance.) Saints and addicts share the same intensity of devotion, the same passion for oblation, for offering oneself up as a living sacrifice. In sum, the passion to give oneself up by speaking oneself over to another is the same.
In both, saints and addicts, there is also the same refusal to settle into complacency. Neither for the saint nor for the addict in us is the response of the young man in the Gospel story acceptable, the cautious response of worldly prudence. It is precisely such caution, such worrying about tomorrow, that St. Anthony emphatically re¬jects when he gives away even what he had at first held back as insurance against his sister’s future needs. Addicts are no more inclined to cling to such insurance than St. Anthony was.
That same episode in the story of St. Anthony also shows how saints do not stop at actions that affect only themselves. They do not hesitate (or, if they do hesitate, they sooner or later overcome such hesitations) to do things that directly affect others, even those for whom they have moral responsibility and to whom they are bound by blood and affection. St. Anthony casts his sister’s life into the balance right along with his own.
Addicts are the same. For the sake of their addictions, they do not balk at risking the security of those close to them. They will¬ingly risk their loved ones’ security right along with their own. In such regards, the genuine opposite of the addict is not the saint, but the lukewarm, complacent, comfortably “decent” person repre¬sented by the rich young man of the Gospel.
It is easy, of course, for such lukewarmness to masquerade behind the facade of “moderation.” True moderation, however, has noth¬ing in common with such tepidity. In fact, moderation is really an extreme of its own. Aristotle already knew that. According to him, the general nature of “virtue” is that it is a mean between ex¬tremes-the extreme of too much of a given trait, on the one hand, and too little of it, on the other. So, for example, Aristotle says that courage is a mean between the vice of cowardice, where there is so much fear that we are overwhelmed by it, and the vice of foolhardiness, where there is too little fear to keep us out of situ¬ations we have no business entering.
Viewed from that perspective, then, virtue is a mean. However, says Aristotle, we can easily shift our perspective a bit. Instead of looking at virtue in terms of the vices it allows us to avoid, we can look at it in terms of the excellence it allows us to achieve. Viewed that way, virtue is seen actually to be the extreme of excellence itself, whereas the vices of excess and deficiency appear as no more than two different ways we can fall short of excellence .5 In an earlier chapter we noted Aristotle’s pertinent observation that there are countless ways to miss the mark, but only one way to hit it dead center.
The hesitancy of the rich young man in the Gospel is not that of the courageous person who pulls back before ill-considered rash¬ness. It is, rather, the anxiety of the fearful person. (Perhaps many of us owe the fact that we are not addicts to the same pusillanimity.)
On the other hand, when St. Anthony gave away the last of his inheritance, leaving even his own sister without any resources of her own, he was not acting in a rash, foolhardy fashion. He was not at all unaware of the risks involved, blinded to them by his initial enthusiasm. If that were the case, his would indeed have been an action of foolhardiness. But Anthony was fully aware of the danger to which he was exposing his sister. That is why he held the money back in the first place. When he did finally give even that remnant up, it was in response to God’s voice admonishing him through the scriptures (or, if one prefers, in response to the voice of his own conscience). That voice spoke against the voice of Anthony’s own fears and reservations, calling him to go forward unreservedly, no longer looking back over his shoulder. For Anthony, not to have heeded that admonishing voice would have been an act of cowardice, not wise caution.
Most of us, when we first hear the story of Anthony, probably see it as extreme. And it is extreme. The question, however, is whether it is the extremity that belongs to vice, or the extremity that belongs to virtue. When we place his behavior in its own proper context, allowing it to have for us the same meaning it had for Anthony, we see that the latter is at issue. We may indeed find Anthony’s actions all but incomprehensible. We may even judge him to have been delusional. Nevertheless, we must finally judge him to have been a brave man, rather than a foolhardy one. Cer¬tainly the course of action he chose to pursue was not at all the “safe” way to go. However, there is nothing “safe” about virtue, as history repeatedly teaches us. We need only think of such rela¬tively recent examples as Martin Luther King Jr. or Nelson Mandela to understand that. As for the possibility of Anthony’s being delusional, the fictional character of Don Quixote shows how little one needs to be free of delusion in order to be an admirable person.
When we view them from the outside and out of the context of meaning that they have for those directly involved, the actions of addicts (and codependents) are often as incomprehensible as St. Anthony’s actions are to most of us. Observations such as Jung’s about the spiritual meaning of alcoholism suggest, however, that addiction may result from missing the mark of virtue, rather than from aiming at vice-but certainly not from contenting oneself with the comfortable, easy “decency” of the rich young man of the Gospels.
Addiction and the Holy
The Hebrew word for “holiness” is qodesh. What that literally means is “separateness.” The holy is that which is set apart, that which is “wholly other,” to borrow a well-known phrase from Rudolf Otto, a twentieth-century philosopher of religion. Our word absolute says the same thing. Absolutus is the past participle of the Latin verb absolvere, which consists of ab, meaning from, away from, and the root verb solvere, which means to loosen or dissolve. Something that is absolutus is something that has been loosened and set apart from something else. The holy is that which has been set apart from everything else, set loose from all connections to anything other than itself, separated out as radically other and unique. (It is the absolutely ab-solved, in effect.)
Addiction has about it something of the holy. In Addiction and Grace, a book that we have mentioned before, the psychiatrist Ger¬ald May calls addiction “the sacred disease of our time.”6 He is thinking of addiction similarly to the way Jung thought of alcohol¬ism when he said it was an expression of the same longing that, in medieval language, is called the longing for God-a longing for “wholeness,” said Jung.
That is another meaning of “holiness.” The holy is what is whole.
Our modern English word holy comes from Middle English hool, which meant healthy, unhurt, entire, whole.
The two meanings of “holiness” (being set apart and being whole) belong together. What is set apart, ab-solved, is what is protected, kept untouched, inviolate. By being set apart, it keeps its “integrity,” which literally means “untouchedness.”
Addiction sets addicts apart. The alienation that is a fundamental experiential characteristic of addiction sets them apart from others and from themselves. That characteristic points directly to the dis¬own-ment that is the very essence of addiction, and which radically separates addicts not just from their families, communities, and everyday selves, but also from everything “proper” to them-every¬thing that could be called their “own.”
Illness of any sort sets a person apart. To be ill means to be absolved from the daily round of healthy, active life. One of the traditional Christian sacraments is anointing the sick. Such anoint¬ing is not some attempt magically to restore health. It is, rather, a way of acknowledging the set-apart-ness, the holiness, that attaches to the sick as such. By anointing with oil in a ritual setting, the community as a whole, through the celebrant, marks the sick with an “effective sign” of their sacredness, the signifying of which actu¬ally sanctifies (sacramentalizes) those on whom it is bestowed.
As illness, addiction already sets addicts apart, making them dif¬ferent, special. But addicts’ disdain of everyday complacency and comfortable conformity to social norms also marks them as differ¬ent even from the sick in general. The apparent extremism of addic¬tion, when viewed from the standards of the everyday, marks addicts as distinctively as the comparable extremism of the saints marks them.
The very uncanniness of addiction, the frightening foreignness of it to our everyday understanding, testifies to the connection of addiction to the holy. It is not that addiction itself is holy, at least not in the same way that God is holy in Judeo-Christian-Islamic thought. Rather, the holiness that belongs to God in that tradition is the mark the missing of which shoots one over into addiction. But just as the sinner is closer to heaven than the self-righteous, conventionally upright person, so is the addict closer to holiness than the person who avoids addiction only at the price of never reaching for the absolute. Only repentance separates the sinner from salvation, whereas the self-righteous person refuses even to acknowledge that there is any need for repentance. Similarly, in order finally to hit the holy mark, the addict who, in the words of the old Peggy Lee song, would rather keep drinking, or drugging, or otherwise practicing addiction, “if that’s all there is,” just needs to learn where to look truly to find the “more” he or she has always been seeking.
The book Alcoholics Anonymous says that AA members are not saints. It says that they can claim only “progress, not perfection.”7 That may well be, but still the alcoholic or other addict stands in the shadow of the saint. In contrast, those who have never been addicted only because they lack enough passion for it are not even
in sainthood’s vicinity.
The “Grateful Alcoholic”
Some AA members use that self-identification when they introduce themselves before speaking at an AA meeting. “Hi!” they will say, “I’m Joe” (or Jean, or Fran, or whoever), “and I’m a grateful alco¬holic.”
But what is there to be grateful for in being an alcoholic?
Even if, as addicts, alcoholics do stand in close, albeit perverse, proximity to saints, there is no denying the misery, pain, and suffer¬ing that go with alcoholism. Not just for codependents, but above all for alcoholics themselves, alcoholism is anything but a desirable condition. No one in his or her right mind would wish alcoholism on anyone.
Most AA newcomers are not at all grateful for being alcoholics. For that matter, most are not grateful for much of anything when they walk into their first AA meeting. The last place in the world they want to be is where they are-in a room full of sober ex¬drunks who seem happy to be that way. And for a long time many newcomers continue to ask “Why me?” They bewail their fate. Pitying themselves fiercely, they wonder aloud why they have to be alcoholics when they see others “drinking with impunity,” as it is
put in Alcoholics Anonymous.
Eventually, however, if such newcomers “keep coming back,” as they are told to do at the end of almost any AA meeting anywhere, they will find their attitude changing. They will begin to be happy in their own sobriety. They will find themselves not just being sober, but actually enjoying it. They will see their lives improve in many unexpected ways, and they will begin to appreciate the tremendous freedom that comes from no longer having to pick up the next drink.
When they reach that point, newcomers might even come to speak of how “grateful” they are for a variety of things: for finding their way to AA, for learning how to live without alcohol, for having discovered or rediscovered a relationship to a “higher power,” or whatever. At this stage they may even be willing to characterize themselves as grateful in general. However, most are still unwilling to express any gratitude for their alcoholism as such. They may say such things as that they are grateful for their recovery from alcoholism, and for all the good things that accompany recov¬ery. But they still insist that they are not grateful for their alcohol¬ism as such. If they had had their way, they will say, they would never have suffered from alcoholism in the first place, so they would never have needed to “recover” from it, either.
AA members may never grow beyond that stage. They may live generally happy, productive, and, above all, sober lives from that point forward, without their attitude towards their alcoholism un¬dergoing any further change. Some, however, do grow beyond that stage into a stage of being grateful for their alcoholism itself.
There is an old joke about how to teach a mule something. First you have to get an axe handle and whack him over the head with it as hard as you can, the joke goes. That way you’ll get his atten¬tion. It may be that some of us are just so mulish by nature or circumstance that the only way whatever powers are responsible for our ultimate welfare can get our attention is by whacking us over the head with a large enough axe handle. For some of us, alcoholism or some other equally destructive addiction may be the only axe handle large enough for the purpose.
Being hit in the head with an axe handle hurts, to be sure. There’s no denying that. But if that’s what it takes to get our attention so we can be pointed in the right direction to find what we’ve always been looking for (even if we never even knew we were looking for it), then we might very well be grateful for it anyway.
Addiction as the Cure for Idolatry
Addiction gets the addict’s attention. The deeper the addiction, the more exclusively it captures the addict’s attention. In the deepest forms of addiction, the addict barely pays attention to anything else.
Then, when the addiction has really captured the addict’s atten¬tion, the addict is finally ready to learn something. Addiction then turns out to be even more than the axe handle that was big enough to get the addict’s attention. Addiction also turns out to be the teacher of the lesson the learning of which justifies all the effort to attract that attention.
The lesson addiction has to teach is if “all there is” were the sorts of things Peggy Lee sings about in her song, then there really would be no reason not to keep right on drinking and drugging; but that’s not “all there is.” What there really is only starts to become clear when one takes all that-takes all those things the song is about-and throws them away.
An addict is a person who always wants more. Not “more of the same,” more of the daily round of gains and losses, of goods and services that suffice for most of us most of the time, but “more” in the sense of something altogether different, something no longer measurable by such everyday standards-something “more than all that.”
It is because addiction involves this longing for the incommensu¬rably “more” that it strikes the well-to-do no less than the destitute. Addiction is an equal opportunity disowner. For the adolescent on the streets in the ghetto, addiction promises an escape from the dead-end hopelessness of the cycle of poverty. It offers something more. But it is no less the case that addiction promises escape from the restrictive complacency of middle-class suburbia, or from the hollowness of conventional success, so that it can also appeal to the person who apparently “has it all.” Addiction provides a ghoulish answer to the question of what to give such a person. Once again,
it offers something more.
Addiction is the “algebra of need,” as Burroughs says in his well¬known novel Naked Lunch.9 Addictive need is a need that can never be satisfied by any amount of money, approval, power, wealth, health, speed, or risk. That is because it is a need, as Jung saw, that nothing less than God (to use “medieval language,” as Jung calls it) can satisfy. As Gregory Bateson in effect also per¬ceived, addiction is the living out of such an incommensurable need. For that very reason, as Bateson saw further, it is the process that progressively weans addicts away from any substitutes for the abso¬lute. Once addicts live the addictive process through to its natural end-an end, however, that may all too often prove to lie “the other side of death,” as Bateson remarks-they are at last freed from all illusion that there can be any substitutes for God (or nir¬vana, the Self, the Void, or whatever other name one uses for the same ab-solute no-thing that alone can satisfy the addict’s need).
Viewed from that perspective, addiction is the cure for idolatry.
The rich young man of the Gospels, the one whose attachment to his wealth keeps him from salvation, is a fitting image of an idolater whose idolatry has truly become hopeless. The problem with his idolatry, what makes it so hopeless, so closed to the very possibility of recovery, is precisely that it is so comfortable to him. He is completely at home with his wealth. He enjoys the many fine things it allows him to have, including the good conscience that comes with the regular almsgiving and the other accompaniments of righteous living that his wealth makes possible for him-and not only possible, but even easy. It is his very wealth that allows him to be “good.” Thanks to his wealth, that very goodness really costs him nothing.
In contrast, were the same young man to come into a genuinely addictive relationship to his wealth, a ray of hope might paradoxi¬cally shine into his hopelessness. His wealth might then cease to be a mere instrument for his pleasure and for preserving his good image of himself. He might cease to value it for what it could bring him. He might come to relate to it as an end in itself. All his thoughts might come constantly to return to his wealth, and to turn around it. He might sell all his own comfort, and the comfort of those dear to him, for its sake. His wealth might become, for him, the absolute. It might become the God he passionately worshiped, demanding everything of him-instead of what his wealth actually is for the rich young man in the Gospel story: the comfortable means for him to maintain his complacency.
Soren Kierkegaard draws a portrait of the comfortable, upright, righteous, churchgoing citizen of nineteenth-century Danish Chris¬tendom, who has every particle of proper theological doctrine down pat, but whose professed Christianity costs him nothing. Kierkegaard contrasts such passionless self-righteousness with the condition of a superstitious, pagan idol worshiper, who has every bit of theological doctrine wrong, but who puts his whole heart into passionate devotion to his idol. The deluded idol worshiper, says Kierkegaard, is far closer to God than the correct-thinking citizen of Christendom. The very passion and wholeheartedness of the former’s worship brings him into proximity to God, says Kierkegaard. In contrast, combined with his cold sense of righ¬teousness, the very correctness of view and behavior of the member of nineteenth-century Christendom drives him away from God.
Kierkegaard’s idol worshiper is an addict. If he ever “hits bot¬tom” in the addictive process, then he will find himself right where he has always wanted to be: in the bosom of God himself. Para¬doxically, when lived out to its end in such a fashion, the process of addiction proves itself to be a process of iconoclasm, the destruc¬tion of idols. Because it pushes addicts always to seek an incom¬mensurable “something more,” addiction never lets addicts settle down in anything less than the absolute, the way the rich young man of the Gospels and Kierkegaard’s member of Danish Chris¬tendom settle down in their comfortable righteousness.
The Meaning of Addiction
As we saw in the preceding chapter, addiction in essence is an enslaving disownment. It is an existential condition that, primarily through one’s own, never consciously thought-out actions, divests one of ownership over one’s own life. Addicts are no longer their “own persons.” They have come to belong to their addictions.
However, what we have been discussing in this chapter is that the impetus behind addiction is to be found in a radical dissatisfac¬tion with everyday “reality,” a dissatisfaction with anything rela¬tive. Addiction reveals a longing for the absolute.
If it were not for that longing, addiction would lose all its appeal. It would cease to have the experientially tempting, tranquilizing, and disburdening qualities that draw potential addicts into addic¬
tion in the first place. That, perhaps, is the major reason that rats and other animals prove impervious to addiction in their natural conditions, displaying addictive (or at least addiction-like) behav¬iors only under the most artificially confining laboratory conditions. It may be because they lack what Camus called the “wild longing in the human heart” that they are not at risk of becom¬ing addicts.
By appearing to offer “something more”-”more” in a nonaddi¬tive way incommensurable with the reality of everyday-addiction promises to still that longing. It creates the illusion of having found one’s way home, having at last found the “one thing lacking” to make one whole. It is the illusion of having entered the state of pure communion one has always been seeking, the illusion of hav¬ing found God himself-or the way to do without God altogether.
To address that perpetual human longing for “something more” is the offer through which addiction tempts us. To have stilled this longing feeling is the illusion with which addiction tranquilizes us. To bear it is the burden of which addiction disburdens us. Together, the tempting, tranquilizing, and disburdening qualities of addiction are the hook by which addiction hooks us.
As soon as it has hooked us, the emptiness of addiction’s offer begins to become apparent. So does the illusoriness of the feeling it gives us; and it begins to lay upon us a new and far heavier burden. By then, however, it is too late. After all, by then we are hooked; addiction now proves to have alienated us from ourselves and others, and above all from the object of that very longing without which addiction could never have hooked us at the start. When we struggle to “come to ourselves” again, like the prodigal son in another Gospel story, addiction only entangles us all the more. All the while it dissembles its operations, perpetuating itself through our very efforts to free ourselves from it.
Thus, as Jung saw, addiction proves to be a distortion or perversion of the longing for what is radically “more.” As we noted at the beginning of this chapter, Jung attributes the perverting of this longing to “the evil principle prevailing in this world” working on “the unrecognized spiritual need” in question. We return to the role that the failure to recognize the spiritual need at issue plays in addiction in the final part of this book, when we consider what responses are appropriate to addiction, but here we only wish to borrow Jung’s idea of an inexplicable “evil principle” at work in turning spiritual longing into addiction.
We need only to borrow that idea, not keep it. Furthermore, we borrow it only to set the stage for introducing another idea, one that Jung himself does not mention. That idea, common to all nondualistic religious traditions, including Christianity, is that the opposing positive power is so great and so uncanny as always to be able to turn even the worst machinations of Jung’s negative “evil principle” against its own intentions, and to bring good rather than evil out of them. By this idea, the devil has always lost the game in advance, even before it begins. His opponent is somehow, in utterly unforseeable ways, always able to turn the devil’s very most cunningly evil moves into even greater good.
So, in the case of addiction, the very process of enslavement, if only followed out to its natural end, brings the addict into the very opposite condition, that of liberation. At the heart of disownment, one is unexpectedly brought into one’s own. By stripping addicts of everything, even and above all themselves, addiction eventually leaves them with nowhere else to turn except toward “God as one understands God,” to paraphrase a crucial expressions from AA’s Twelve Steps. By radically dis-owning addicts of themselves, addic¬tion ends up stripping them of everything that stands in the way of their becoming what in God’s eye they already are, and have always been, to borrow another phrase, this one from the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins. The addict who has finally hit bottom has “nothing left to lose,” which, to end this spate of borrowings by taking a line this time from Janis Joplin, is just another way of saying that such an addict is finally free. At that point addicts are given the rare opportunity to live their own lives, and live them abundantly, no longer letting any idols live them out for them.
Thus, when the addict finally “hits bottom,” addiction turns out to be a paradoxically liberating process of enslavement in which one comes to oneself through losing oneself utterly. In that sense, the meaning of addiction is freedom.
However, freedom-genuine freedom-can never be forced on anyone. It always comes in the form of a choice.
Addiction eventually confronts addicts with a clear and funda¬mental choice. It is fundamental because it consists of the choice of either choosing to have a choice in the first place, or of refusing to choose at all. Thus, in another sense than what we have just been considering, the “meaning” of addiction depends upon the specifics of the given case. What addiction in any given actual case turns out to mean depends on what one does, when one has finally “hit bottom.” At that point one is at last confronted with the fact that one truly does have a choice. But one can either accept that fact by actually choosing, and thereby reclaiming choice itself as one’s own, or turn one’s back on choosing by remaining in the addiction (and all the self-pity that so easily goes with it).
The meaning of addiction is freedom precisely because addiction drives the addict to such an existential turning point. From that point on, however, the meaning of addiction is up to the addict.
Comment: As humane beings we need to see the phenomena of widespread drug addiction and addiction in general as part of what we need to combat in the world. ~ Che Peta
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