Too Much Feeling: Affect and Addiction
Pain and Repetition
There is a level of affect, or emotion, which is tolerable; and there is a level of affect which is intolerable. Intolerable affect may feel like panic, or a shaking of the body, or a sense of going crazy. It’s intolerable because the person experiencing it feels compelled to do something with it, or to do away with it completely. Trying to stabilize oneself with soft verbal reassurances like “It’s going to be okay” or “This will end soon” do nothing to quell the anxiety which inevitably accompanies such affective avalanches. In fact, at some point it is difficult to tell whether the original emotion was anxiety or something else, like anger or fear.
How and why do our minds and bodies produce something which those very same minds and bodies find toxic? This is a troubling issue for philosophers and psychologists and a deeply disturbing conundrum for the individual who experiences this. It would not surprise me that, if interviewed, everyone can be said to have experienced this disturbed state at some point or other. At the peak of a roller coaster, during a break-up or loss of a loved one, on a bad psychedelic trip, and so on. But there are many people who unfortunately experience this kind of thing regularly.
Freud wrote that trauma is something which exceeds the organism’s capacity to make sense of it in the surreal 1920 text Beyond the Pleasure Principle. This ‘overcoming’ of the organism is felt as anxiety which cannot be bound to the pleasure principle. Up until that point in the person’s history, he reasoned, every experience or idea was bound to some kind of pleasure, whether it was simply unpleasurable and should be ejected, or pleasurable and should be taken in. This is a primary process of thinking, one that originates in early childhood: good stays in, bad goes out. This is the meaning-making process of the archaic psyche.
But later in his work, Freud saw patients who returned from World War I with an entirely different kind of neurotic presentation, a different clinical picture. Those soldiers had seen and experienced things which fit neither into ‘pleasurable’ or ‘unpleasurable’. They had experienced the intolerable. And something painful would happen to these soldiers. They would have dreams about their harrowing memories. And though only a brief paragraph mentions ‘war neuroses’ or ‘traumatic neuroses’, the publications of Freud surrounding Beyond are indicative that something was deeply concerning his liberal worldview (e.g., “On Transience” in 1915 and “Thoughts for the Times on War and in Death” in the same year). In his previous theory of dreams in which a dream is a fulfillment of a wish, Freud was forced to argue that people wish for suffering, otherwise it must be admitted that dreams can do things other than wish. Another domain in which his new patients seemed somehow attached to their mental suffering was in transference, the affect the patient feels for the therapist. As Peter Gay, in his biography of Freud, writes: “In a perverse way, the act of repressing and the analysand’s resistance to undoing that repression obey the pleasure principle. Now, it is true that their analysts had enjoined them to speak freely of everything in order to make the unconscious conscious; but something more tormenting seemed to be in play here, a compulsion to repeat a painful experience.”
In this little text, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, we have the idea that people repeat things they desperately do not want to repeat. Why and how this happens is the subject of much psychoanalytic writing and debate, and they are strikingly similar to conversations of addiction, both the sufferers and the clinicians. These debates link the earlier idea that trauma is the overwhelming of the individual’s ability to assimilate stimuli with the compulsion to repeat.
Representation and Assimilation
When something happens to us, we try to make some kind of sense of it. Humans have been coming up with stories to explain the things we see out there in the world or inside of each other for as long as we have had possession of language. Gods of lightning, reincarnation, science and philosophy—these are all ways to make sense of our world. These practices put boundaries on what we see and hear, giving them intelligible contours. But there is a kind of experience which escapes the grasp of making sense.
In Theaters of the Body, Joyce McDougall writes that the origin of ‘psychosomatic’ complaints (bodily symptoms which have their origin in psychological experience) is a kind of primitive experience in a person’s life which gets stuck at the preverbal level. The relationship between the mother and child, McDougall tells us, is responsible for handling the affects that come and go for both parties. Other psychoanalysts have referred to this as ‘holding’: the mother must be able to hold her child and soothe them in the midst of even the greatest psychological turmoil. If this is not done, the child will leave their nascency with a certain attitude towards its own internal experiencing—namely, an attitude of fright and distrust. Alexithymia, a state of being in which a person cannot identify or name discrete emotions within themselves, is an example of one of the effects this might have later in life.
But whether or not we accept McDougall’s argument—and I think there is some worth in it—we have to make sense of those people who can’t make sense of their internal experiences. Whether the individual is alexithymic or suffers from gastro-intestinal complaints, they have learned to deal with the affect without language, without making sense of it. This is something McDougall calls ‘affect dispersal’ or ‘disaffectation’. In an individual who can sense and experience their affect without experiencing it as threatening or confusing, there are all kinds of things that can be done: talking about it, directing it elsewhere (e.g., sublimation), or simply ignoring it. But for the person who cannot sense the inner workings of their emotional life, these options are not available to them.
They need a solution which targets the body directly, because that’s where the pain is. If they go to a doctor, they might even see data come up on a graph or in a scan indicating an illness of organic origin. But medications don’t seem to help much, or if they do it is only temporary relief.
The idea of affect dispersal allows us to think of ways in which a person who cannot make sense of their emotions might do something with them. For, if they do nothing with them, their existence is threatened with unraveling at the seams. The emotion is too toxic, too immense, to go on existing. This is also partly why, during psychotherapy, a particular patient might be on the verge of a panic attack, or they may start shaking, when language gets too close to the feared experience.
Addiction, Affect Dispersal, and Administration
An excellent way to target the body directly, by ‘avoiding the Other’ as Rik Loose puts it in his The Subject of Addiction, is substances. The use of a substance has the amazing ability to bypass the need to put things into language, or to make sense of them, and therefore to understand them. To return to Freud’s point about trauma: the compulsion to repeat in this circumstance is the compulsion to use to keep the trauma and its associated affects at bay.
Addiction is therefore a kind of a psychic survival technique adopted by an individual for whom mental processing is not a viable option. For this person, emotion is dangerous, toxic, and disintegrative. It is not uncommon, during sessions with a certain kind of patient in recovery from a substance, for them to experience an unnamable affect—the closest representative affect is perhaps ‘anxiety’—in early recovery without the supportive dispersal of the substance. The eruption of an affective state such as this is transitory, and how it is dealt with during the session depends on a number of factors, from the relationship of the therapist and the patient to the psychotherapeutic work has been done up until this point. An individual early in recovery should perhaps not be encouraged to experience or ‘work through’ the disturbing state. Some preliminary work can be helpful before this stage is encountered. Up until maintenance or sobriety, the substance has done this kind of work on their behalf, making a raw confrontation with affect unlikely and unstable.
Loose claims that this kind of mediation—from pure affect to dispersal via substance—is managed well during the throes of an addiction due to the almost direct impact the substance makes at the level of the body. This strategy, Loose claims, is an administration of soothing effects. ‘Administration’ because it surpasses the verbal processing which usually takes place in a psychological symptom.
The precise position that addiction takes in someone’s life is, certainly, singular in the sense that it can only make sense within the context of that life. The role of diagnosis in addiction is something I tried to cover in a previous essay, but something I will continue to explore.
For now, it is worth a brief summary of the role of affect in addiction that I traced here so far. There is a level of emotion that is felt as intolerable. There are a number of ways to phrase this metaphorically, from toxic to disintegrative experiences. This level of affect is registered at the level of the body (or, at least, it cannot and is not registered psychologically via language and psychic processing) and is therefore dealt with somatically with substances. Part of the work of psychotherapy with addiction, particularly with individuals in early recovery, is building a scaffolding of emotional stability to begin to confront these unnamable affects.
