ABSTRACT
Freud makes a few comments on addictions in his work, most of them a gloss in one form or another of his comments to Wilhelm Fliess in a letter of December 22, 1897, in which he states that “masturbation is the one major habit, the ‘primary addiction,’ and it is only as a substitute and replacement for it that the other addictions—to alcohol, morphine and tobacco, and the like—come into existence”. With regard to history, however, it’s easy enough to note that Freud and Lacan had relatively little to say about addictions, and they were hardly alone within the greater psy field. While addiction may be a new phenomenon, a new social construct, people might say, it is certainly clear that drugs and alcohol have been around a long, long time. Not the master Signifier as a master in the Hegelian sense, but in an unconscious, superegoic dimension.
