Black holes
Some notes on time, symbolization, and perversion in the psychodynamics of addiction
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 20480262 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Alistair D Sweet (Yahoo (United Kingdom), corresponding author) |
| Year | 2012 |
| Volume | 21 |
| Issue | 2 |
| Pages | 94-105 |
| Publication date | 2012-06-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | International Forum of Psychoanalysis (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0803-706X • E-ISSN: 1651-2324 |
| Publisher | Informa UK Limited (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.1080/0803706x.2012.659284 |
| OpenAlex | W2090229209 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 2 |
| References cited | 11 |
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 intrapsychically 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, 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
Addiction · Mirroring · Perversion · Physics · Psychiatry · Psychoanalysis · Psychodynamics · Psychotherapist · Psychoanalysis and Psychopathology Research · Psychology · Psychology and Mental Health · Psychotherapy Techniques and Applications · Social Psychology
| Unique citing works | 2 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 0,14 |
| Citation span | 2012 - 2017 (6) |
| Citation velocity | historical |
| Highly cited | No |
| Citation types | Neutral: 2 |