How to overcome self-illness ambiguity in addiction: making sense of one’s addiction rather than just rejecting it. A reply to McConnell and Golova

Abstract

ABSTRACT McConnell and Golova [2022. “Narrative, Addiction, and Three Aspects of Self-Ambiguity.” Philosophical Explorations. doi:10.1080/13869795.2022.2115532] argue that people with addiction often struggle to recover because there is a conflict between their self-narrative of ‘hopeless addict’ and their evaluative judgment that they value recovery. They add ‘narrative ambiguity’ as a third source of self-ambiguity, next to essential characteristics/embodiment and values/judgments. I argue that McConnell and Golova [2022. “Narrative, Addiction, and Three Aspects of Self-Ambiguity.” Philosophical Explorations. doi:10.1080/13869795.2022.2115532] pay insufficient attention to how a self-narrative of ‘hopeless addict’ is formed. This hopeless script is not a given narrative, but emerges due to conflicts in the other two sources of self-ambiguity: long-term addiction changes embodiment, and results in the experience that people fail to let their behaviour be guided by their values. Hence, they label themselves hopeless and not able to recover. In that sense, narrative ambiguity is not simply a third source of self-ambiguity, but is both a standalone source, as an organizing principle that tries to make sense of conflicts in the other sources of self-ambiguity. To overcome this narrative ambiguity, it is important to make sense of one’s addiction, rather than experiencing it as simply alienating. I give some examples of how people manage to do this: to incorporate their years of addiction into their life story without identifying with it in a hopeless manner.