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Addiction is more than mere excess; it reflects a deep, silent inner struggle. Seen through a psychoanalytic lens, it takes on a different meaning: as the expression of a fundamental lack rooted in childhood, and as a person’s desperate attempt to find meaning in the face of emptiness. This first section explores the origins of addiction, at the intersection of trauma, drives, and early relational experiences.
What if addiction is not simply an excess, but a silent call to fill an absence? From a psychoanalytic standpoint, dependence expresses the language of a body left without symbolic support. Psychoanalysis examines the unconscious roots of addiction, its connection to trauma, and its ties to the maternal bond.
Addiction can be understood as a way of surviving a psychic void. While medicine focuses on substance dependence, psychoanalysis seeks the person behind the symptom. Even the term “addiction,” from the Latin addicere (“to give over” or “to be devoted to”), points to a form of subjugation—not so much driven by pleasure, as one might think, as by a need to survive a primal pain.
Addiction can also be seen as a compulsive drive to act, a repeated behavior seeking immediate relief, often with delayed consequences. Pleasure, if present, is secondary. What matters is urgency. The addict does not pause or deliberate; they act. This acting out becomes a form of expression that words have been unable to contain.
Freud observed that addicts are often less motivated by pleasure than by the desire to escape pain. He described this as a return to the “Nirvana principle”—a drive to eliminate all tension, a kind of gentle death instinct. The object of addiction—whether alcohol, drugs, sex, screens, food, work, or other pursuits—serves as an escape. The goal is the dissolution of the self in a self-contained satisfaction. The addict is not trying to live more intensely but to silence the voice of lack.
In 1915, in Instincts and Their Vicissitudes, Freud distinguished between need, tied to biological or tangible satisfaction, and desire, structured around lack and shaped by language. Addiction, however, belongs to neither category. It takes root in a drive that spins in emptiness, without a stable object or mental representation. Freud saw it as a regression to the oral stage, a search for immediate gratification, but also a refusal of lack and of symbolic castration. The addictive object becomes a substitute for the maternal breast, both nourishing and intrusive.
Freud described a drive as a somatic force that seeks satisfaction. It is directed toward a goal, but its object can be interchangeable. Within addictive behavior, the goal is fixed—to dissolve, to extinguish, to find relief—while the object varies, whether alcohol, sugar, sex, substances, cigarettes, or others. This constant substitution reflects a difficulty in connecting the drive to a stable, symbolically grounded object.
The compulsion to consume reveals a breakdown in symbolization. The person cannot reflect on their own loss. They cannot dream. They cannot delay gratification. They simply act. The manic state, often linked to addictive behaviors, functions as a defense against depression, a forward rush to avoid plunging into the abyss of lack. Addiction occupies an intermediate space between the hysterical symptom, which speaks, and the organic symptom, which cannot. It does not tell a story; it performs a ritual. It eludes psychic processing.
The underlying drama is often an unsymbolized trauma: the early loss of a cherished parental figure, abandonment, emotional neglect, intrusion or abuse of the child’s psychological or bodily space. Addiction is a pathological compromise, a survival strategy that helps the psyche avoid collapse.
This shows that addiction is not a matter of choice or a passing phase, but a primitive cry, often rooted in the earliest experiences of connection with the mother. We can now turn to exploring its origins.
No one is born an addict. Addiction emerges at the crossroads of early vulnerabilities, unspoken traumas, and harmful environmental influences.
The first context in which the capacity to tolerate frustration develops is the mother–child relationship. In the primary bond with a “good enough” mother—or her substitute—often before language has fully emerged, the infant learns that lack can be endured, and that frustration is followed by satisfaction. The child discovers delay, waiting, and rhythm. But if the mother is absent, inconsistent, intrusive, or failing, the infant cannot internalize this regularity. Lack becomes a raw wound, a black hole. Later, the adult will seek to escape this void, to numb it, or to compensate for it through repeated acts. This absence returns as a frightening emptiness that addiction strives to fill.
In adolescence, this void awakens. The body changes, the relationship to sexuality shifts, and thought begins to gain autonomy. For many, these upheavals trigger archaic anxieties, reactivating early vulnerabilities. The young person seeks to define themselves in opposition, to take risks, or to soothe an identity-related anxiety. Drugs, alcohol, self-harm, and extreme behaviors become outlets for this inner struggle.
It is hardly surprising that most addictions begin in adolescence. Contemporary consumer society, with its paradoxical demands— “be free, yet perform,” “be unique, yet conform”—makes this transition even more risky. The adolescent, still shaping their identity, is drawn to seductive objects that promise everything but symbolize nothing.
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