Modernité et enjeux psychiques d’une clinique addictive. Illustration d’une forme de mal ordinaire

Abstract

Urges and impulses are at the heart of existence and essential for human beings, both on the physical and the psychic level, thus allowing for the satisfying of basic needs during the early stages of life. As Freud theorized in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, those urges also apply to death. They form a couple, associating in varying degrees, but always linked, life to death, Eros to Thanatos. In looking closer at this duality, we can question what addiction is. In this study, we propose the clinical illustration of a chronic and disabling conduct disorder of a patient who was referred for an addiction to pornography. The patient's addictive behavior patterns raise questions, as they are so alien to the question of pleasure, both in his sexuality as well as in his eating habits, where suffering and constraints dominate. What could be the function of these behaviors which seem to defy any psychic elaboration? The patient's background enlightens us in particular about what is involved in his relationship to his parents, where the maternal figure becomes clear. The maternal figure has imposed on her relationship with her son a fantasy that we could qualify as unitary, which rules out any possibility of a third party as an otherness to what will be finalized according to the dynamics of a dyad without any “other”. What could possibly bring about a separation? And this is the result of a primitive alienation, one that the addiction seems to reiterate, according to a modality of evil that, without being spectacular, reveals itself to be just as ordinary as it is devastating.