ABSTRACT

There is something paradoxical about the place of addictions in psychoanalysis today. In the Freudian moment of psychoanalysis, a person would approach the analyst because he was suffering in some way or another, a suffering that was senseless to the person—people see that in the cases that Freud has left them. In the psychiatric field, they are not called addictions, but rather substance use disorders. Here, in the psychiatric world, the emphasis is placed on the concept of the substance, which substantializes the drug as an object. Psychoanalysis, in contrast, in its approach to the issue of addictions, can only proceed with the establishment of certain suppositions, related to the unconscious and to the subject of the unconscious, an unconscious subject that is elaborated in a kind of fragmentary or incomplete way over the course of the treatment. These beliefs in the unconscious and the corollary unconscious subject are one of the foundations of psychoanalysis.