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Psychoanalysis and Addiction
R. Loose, The Subject of Addiction: Psychoanalysis and the Administration of Enjoyment, London-New York NY: Karnac Books, 2002. ISBN: 1-855-75299-9. £22.50. (Reviewed by Gabriela van den Hoven)
Rik Loose's book The Subject of Addiction is an event. It is a thorough examination of texts, from Freud's pre-analytical period to the latest developments of Lacan and the Lacanians. In this book Loose proposes a logical development about the place of addiction in the modern world.
Giving new status to Freud's “Cocaine Papers”, Loose explains clearly that drugs were for Freud a cause of desire which opened different pathways leading to the discovery of the unconscious. If, at the beginning, Freud thought that cocaine was a magic drug that would retrieve lost jouissance, it later became an unpredictable object. The difficulty in standardizing and mastering the effects of cocaine for a particular subject subverted Freud's position in the master-discourse and led to his encounter with the desire of the hysteric.
`From this point on, it is clear that Freud's passionate interest in cocaine had ceased to write itself . . .only to find a substitute for it, another object of interest which would open different pathways and eventually lead him to the discovery of the unconscious. This object was the desire of the hysteric (p. 21).
Rik Loose's thesis is that both psychoanalysis and addiction are counterparts of the world of science and techniques. Consequently, whereas the analytic discourse focuses on the subject and his/her relationship to his/her cause of desire and jouissance, the master-medical discourse of sciences and techniques touches on the foreclosure of the subject while it focuses its interest on the object of enjoyment. In a sharp way, Rik Loose exposes the logic of globalisation that commands our times and opposes to it a structure governed by desire and ideals.
Thus, the world of science and techniques demands and offers, through gadgets, jouissance to everybody. Jouissance is available everywhere in the market place creating the illusion that it is allowed rather than forbidden by the ideal. We are constantly bombarded with offers of objects that will open the doors to happiness and pleasure and we are pushed to buy and enjoy. Subsequently, what characterises this form of jouissance is the lack of interdiction: as Rik Loose underlines, `jouissance is no longer regulated by the law of desire (p. 176). These days, it is possible to access jouissance in a direct way, which means that we come up against a jouissance that is not framed by the ideal.
In Civilisation and its Discontents, Freud talks of a cultural superego that will, in the form of an internal prohibition, regulate the economy of desire and the access to jouissance. The cultural superego demands from the subject a sacrifice, a payment, a loss of pleasure, a loss of jouissance, which in itself becomes an object of desire for the subject. However, nowadays, to understand the logic of addiction, the logic of enjoyment, it is imperative to relate the phenomenon to the context in which it inserts itself. That is why Rik Loose's thesis is so valuable: because the emphasis is on the side of the subject and her/his time, rather than on the side of the object and its effects in the organism.
The logic of the book is supported by the desire to know which implies a forcing of the fantasy in which we are immersed, where what prevails is the homogeneous, in order to gain access to truth. Homogeneity in its different versions: gadgets, know-how, therapeutic manuals, etc., fascinate everyone. The Other of the market in its homogeneity appears to be the guarantee of complete happiness, no longer impossible to reach but obtainable.
(read the rest of this review in JLS Vol.1 No.1
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