Addiction

The suffering that addiction brings to the addict and to all who know and love the addict is deep and all encompassing. Attempts to stop addictive behaviors are met with failure over and over again. Many people suffering from addictions find their lives in complete upheaval despite their best efforts. Self-respect and hope seem irretrievably lost.

Addiction has been a central area of investigation for me because, early in my career, I found that I was not identifying addictions until late in therapy. Many times these addictions were hidden and I did not have enough information to recognize the symptoms.

I also became aware that many therapists, not understanding addiction, became codependent in the treatment setting. I wrote a paper in which I described how co-alcoholism—as we have learned from Al-Anon — is also a disease and can unwittingly be practiced by psychotherapists who believe they can help a person “control” their addiction.

After a professional-in-residency program at the Betty Ford treatment center and attendance at Al-Anon and Alcoholics Anonymous conferences throughout California, as well as many 12-step program meetings, I became committed to understanding and writing about addiction. My commitment was to bring together the invaluable information from 12-step programs with psychoanalytic theory on addiction.

I began experimenting with a psychoanalytic approach and I found that it was effective in treating addiction. In this country, however, psychoanalysis has generally not been used to treat addiction. The treatment of addiction has been largely confined to the self-help community, notably 12- step programs. This has created an alarming and regrettable division in the treatment field. Those who deal primarily with addiction -- as well as addicts who have found help from these programs -- experience antipathy toward psychological treatment, and vice versa.

My treatment approach, therefore, is based on a co-partnering of psychotherapy or psychoanalysis with 12-step programs. My belief is that this partnering creates a way of life that can help addicts recover one day at a time and also develop an understanding of the roots and personality manifestations of addiction.