INTRODUCTION
To have a place in human society, a person must establish and continually rework a set of supportive relationships with a family, community, religion and so forth. This process has been called "psychosocial integration" (Erikson, 1963; 1968; 1982)1. The cumbersome term, "psychosocial integration," refers simultaneously to an individual's experience of engagement with a group, and to the group's understanding and acceptance of the individual. Psychosocial integration is essential - it makes life bearable, and even joyful at its peaks.
Inadequate psychosocial integration can be called "dislocation". Dislocation, in this broad sense of the term, is difficult to endure. Different forms of enforced dislocation, e.g., ostracism, excommunication, and solitary confinement, are so onerous that they have been used as extreme punishments from ancient times until the present. Severe and prolonged dislocation regularly leads to suicide.
Dislocation can have diverse sources. It can arise from accidents, e.g., a natural disaster that destroys a person's family or a handicap that renders a person unwelcome in society. It can be voluntarily chosen, e.g., in the single-minded pursuit of wealth in a "gold rush". It can be inflicted on others by violence, e.g., parental abuse that makes a child forever shrink from human contact. It can be inflicted without violence, e.g., by instilling an unrealistic sense of superiority that makes a child insufferable to others. Finally, dislocation can be universal if society systematically curtails the opportunities for psychosocial integration in its members.
Universal dislocation is the focus of this article. Although a person in any society can become dislocated, "free market" societies2 inevitably dislocate their members, rich as well as poor, from traditional family, community, and religious ties. This is done in order to create and maintain a free-market in labour, land, currency and consumer goods which allows an unencumbered pursuit of individual and corporate wealth (Weber, 1920/1958; Polanyi, 1944; Gray, 1998). The founding principle of free-market society is that unencumbered pursuit of wealth benefits everybody in the long run by multiplying the "wealth of nations" (Smith, 1776/1991).
Whether or not it is universal, severe dislocation provokes a desperate response. Dislocated people struggle to find or restore psychosocial integration - to somehow "get a life". People who are persistently unable to achieve and maintain genuine psychosocial integration eventually construct lifestyles that substitute for it. At best, these "substitute lifestyles" can be outlandishly creative, as in the case of an eccentric artist or high-tech wizard, but more usually they are banal and repellent, as in the case of a youth gang member or a street addict. Substitute lifestyles frequently centre on incessant and/or dangerously excessive use of drugs (Alexander, 1990, chap. 8; Erikson, 1968, p. 88).
Even the most repellent substitute lifestyles are adaptive as substitutes for psychosocial integration. For example, membership in a violent youth gang, offensive as it may be to society and to the gang member's own values, is far more endurable than no identity at all. Even the barren pleasures of being a street "junkie" - transient relief from pain, the nervous thrill of crime, pariah status - are less painful than the unrelenting depression and aimlessness of dislocation. Whenever substitute lifestyles are the best adaptation that people are able to achieve, they cling to them with a tenacity that is properly called "addiction" in the traditional sense of that term in the English language - whether drugs are involved or not.
The English word "addiction", from its ancient beginnings to the present, has denoted a state in which a person's life is given over to a single pursuit, or a narrow range of pursuits, to the detriment of a broader, more balanced lifestyle (see Alexander and Schweighofer, 1988; Oxford English Dictionary, 1989, vol. 1, p. 143, definition 2a). "Addiction" in this traditional sense is a strong word. It denotes com-pulsivity and an absence of a fuller psychosocial integration, rather than merely an annoying habit contained within an otherwise normal life. Jerome Jaffe's phrase "overwhelming involvement" sums up this traditional meaning of addiction concisely. Extremes of addiction as defined in this manner have always been recognised as disastrous. See, for example, Socrates' description of the "tyrannical personality" (Plato, circa 375 B.C./1955, Book 9: lines 571-576).
The word "addiction" was never closely linked to drugs or to disease until the late nineteenth century when the word was redefined under the influence of a popular "temperance movement" and a burgeoning medical interest in treating excessive consumption of alcohol or drugs (Alexander and Schweighofer, 1988; Berridge and Edwards, 1981, p. 250). Definition 2b in the 1989 Oxford English Dictionary identifies addiction with a "need to continue taking a drug as a result of taking it in the past". However, this definition is not mentioned in the first edition of the OED, published in 1933, and is supported in the 1989 edition almost entirely by quotations from 20th century sources. The more inclusive, older sense of the word "addiction" fits reality better, since there are no important differences in behaviour or experience between people who are addicted to drug use and those who are addicted to other pursuits and since there is no convincing evidence that using any drug causes people to use it addictively in the future.3
Because western society is now based on free-market principles which mass-produce dislocation, and because dislocation is the precursor to addiction, addiction to drug use and to other substitute life styles within western society is not the pathological state of a few, but, to a greater or lesser degree, the general condition. Because free-market society increasingly provides the model for globalization, addiction is becoming more and more prevalent everywhere on earth, along with the English language, the Internet, and Mickey Mouse.
Of course, addiction can occur in any society, including pre-modern and non-western ones. For example, alcohol addiction was widely prevalent in the USSR, which did not have a free-market economy. This may be because soviet society shared with free-market society the willingness to destroy traditional relationships within families, communities and religions in the interest of economic development. Further attempts at comparison between different types of society cannot be undertaken here. This short article focuses on endemic addiction in free-market society, without suggesting that other kinds of society do not engender problems of their own.
There has been little analysis along these lines among addiction researchers because the field of addiction has been fenced in on four sides by professional conventions. First, only experimental and medical research has been considered really valid, other approaches seeming too philosophical, political, literary, anecdotal, or unscientific. This remains the case, despite the well-documented pitfalls of "medicalization", "scientism", "methodolatry", "methodological individualism", and so forth that have been identified by critical scholars (e.g., Danziger, 1990). Second, attention has been lavished upon alcohol and drug addictions, although non-drug addictions are often as dangerous and certainly more widespread. Third, American examples, data, and ideology provide most of the important guideposts in this field, although the United States is obviously only one case among many. Fourth, although a few individual scholars do speak out, professional associations within the field rarely contradict the mainstream media wisdom concerning drugs and addiction - even when it is patently false. This tightly fenced field swarms with mutually contradictory theories of addiction and competing formulas for intervention.
Thus, the current addiction field is both too restricted and too cluttered to afford clear perspective on as large and menacing a beast as addiction. It is time for addiction scholars to broaden their purview, even if this requires some fence jumping. This article jumps all four fences, by emphasising historical research and addiction to activities other than drug use, using primarily Canadian examples, and disregarding mainstream popular wisdom. The final section discusses the implications of this analysis for addiction professionals in the future.
1. These premises are based directly on Erik Erickson's work. Although this article draws from him throughout, there is only space to gesture toward his intricate analysis, rather than re-stating it. ↩
2. The term "free market" is used here in its conventional sense, meaning a system in which people have the maximum freedom of choice in shopping, hiring, firing, and investing. The term is often contested by critics who argue that although "free market" economics maximize certain important freedoms, they curtail the freedom of citizens to safeguard social cohesion and the physical environment by regulating markets and corporations. ↩
3. One important complexity in accepting the traditional definition is omitted here to save space. Neither definition 2a, nor the historical usage surveyed in the OED, requires that addiction is necessarily a misfortune, since the term can also be applied to beneficial involvements. However, this article limits consideration of addiction to its negative sense. The term "devotion," will be reserved for being given over to a pursuit which dominates a person's life in a positive way, which will not be considered an addiction. I have discussed the relationship between addiction and devotion elsewhere (Alexander and Schweighofer, 1988). ↩