ABSTRACT
Positivist science, which depends on the observation, naming and classification of empirical reality, nevertheless assumes that in properly constituting itself as a science, it make a similar transition as that which characterizes the emergence of modern clinical medicine. J. Lacan calls the laws and the "order of things" in nature, which supposedly exist independently of the human subject, "knowledge in the real". This Lacanian conception of modern science is crucial. Despite the uniform social, legal and medical manifestation of addiction, the relationship between addiction and the subject is neither uniform nor predictable in any way. Listening to the discourse of addiction is perhaps a way out of the impasse. Important aspect of addiction, which S. Freud makes quite explicit in Civilization and its Discontents, is his insistence on the fact that addiction is a social symptom. Addiction can be related to the three clinical structures of psychosis, neurosis and perversion.
