ABSTRACT
Liberation psychotherapy is a difficult symbolic system to institutionalize. The mechanism by which co-dependency transforms liberation psychotherapy into a genuinely social doctrine is a new conceptualization of addiction, a new way of thinking about the psychological problems that are putatively caused by repression. Co-dependency, then, fuses liberation psychotherapy's causal model and cultural critique with the disease model of addiction's emphasis upon powerlessness. Accordingly, addiction is caused by cultural repression. The repressed co-dependent more or less corresponds with the original meaning of the term co-dependency, as it was derived from the idea of co-alcoholism. The process addicts are either those who are inadequately individuated or those whose actions defy the unquestioned assumption that humans are by nature innately positive and constructive beings. Drawing upon the overlap in the logic between conventional addiction discourse and liberation psychotherapy but still faithful to the ethic of self-actualization, co-dependency conceptualizes the psychological condition that is caused by cultural repression of the self as an addiction.
