ABSTRACT
This chapter shows that there are core features of repetition-compulsion in addiction and obsessive compulsive disorders that we need to consider if we are to meaningfully get to grips with the reasons why people become addicted. Drug use in the UK has reached such a level that it has become nothing short of a public health disaster, and an exceedingly expensive one at that. The idea that social-pathogens can flank faulty mentalizations provides us with a robust developmental frame for unmasking drug misuse, and this was Sigmund Freud's starting point in Civilization and its Discontents. The proliferation of the appetite for drugs which can control emotion, pain, and mood: a pill to pep patient up, a pill to bring patient down, a pill to stop patient eating, a pill to take away the voices, the headache, and the pill to end all pills, the birth control pill.
