The potential of mind wandering in the recovery from addiction.

Abstract

The paper develops a critical reflection on the fabulative filmic collaboration with a participant suffering from heroin addiction and creates a line of flight from the dominant biomedical, sociocultural and psychological research. The artistic research articulates a cinema practice that seeks to address the issue of addictive behaviours in a way that has rarely been investigated, with a focus on the recovery process in the long-term. The paper asks how a creative practice with mind wandering as core component allows for recovery practices to challenge recurrent, preconceived and limited representation strategies that have been widely used for people recovering from addiction as medical patients, research participants and filmic figures. Exploring addiction in the context of artistic research unveils the potential of mind wandering in the recovery from addiction. The paper advocates for mind wandering to be a starting point to reconsider therapy concepts from the hypothesis that mind wandering is a helpful tool rather than a risk factor. Artistic research enables one to see the recovery from addiction as a becoming life force, in its affirmative as well as diminishing tendencies, and asks what addiction can do and how its recovery process can become a mode of existence in its own right.