Thinking About Thinking About Addiction: Integrating Top-Down and Bottom-Up

Much of Western thinking is abstract and disembodied, a result of the mind-body separation first made popular by Descartes. Gendlin advocated strongly for including subjective, embodied ways of knowing in his major works, A Process Model and Experiencing and the Creation of Meaning. The author shows how top-down thinking led to the disease model of addiction and offers a critique of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM) and its vast expansion of what constitutes mental illness. The history of Alcoholics Anonymous and the advent of cognitive behavioural therapy are reviewed in the context of top-down approaches. The work of Gendlin and of McGilchrist (on the difference between right and left-hemisphere brain processes) are offered as approaches to integrate mind and body-based ways of knowing and to de-pathologize addiction.