ABSTRACT
Angela Foster’s training was in social work and psychoanalytic psychotherapy. Over her professional career she has worked with drug addiction as an individual and group therapist and Assistant Director of a residential treatment service, as a supervisor to other workers in the field, and as a consultant to substance misuse services. In this chapter she describes how each of these roles must be based on a profound understanding of the fundamental psychopathology of the addict, focusing particularly on the female addict. Central to her thinking is the concept of the female addict’s perverse relationship to her own body, and pivotal to this understanding is the work of Estela Welldon. The account that Foster provides is of the female addict’s use of drugs to simultaneously alleviate psychic pain and to destroy the body (and relationships). Splitting and projection of negative affect are everywhere, with the result that the addict alienates the sources of support that she most needs. The chapter describes how this is based on experiencing a fundamental failure of being mothered, which she attempts to repair in her successive attempts at mothering herself, yet which she is compelled to destroy. This dynamic is enacted with the 88 maternal functioning of the therapist and with the institution: for either to survive, the thinking space of supervision is essential.
