ABSTRACT

The founder of psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud, famously acknowledged that all psychoanalytic treatment can accomplish is to transform “hysterical misery into common unhappiness”. The implication of this admission was that no human being could escape a certain minimum baseline of unhappiness. The story of man’s search for active euphoria or mindless oblivion involves means other than using psychoactive substances as well. Ordinary life activities such as eating, shopping, reading, surfing on the internet, having sex, and working can all get libidinized and pulled into the psychic centrifuge of addiction. These “addictions without substances” can serve as psychic retreats from emotional suffering, though, regrettably, causing further pain themselves. Freud was hardly alone in concluding that a certain amount of emotional suffering invariable accompanies human existence.