Une phénoménologie de la dépendance à l'alcool. Une expérience primordiale de la « nostrité »

Abstract

The phenomenological approach to alcoholism interestingly focuses on specific dynamics of interpersonal relationships displaying the founding of the Self from a primary “us” and its original basis in the human feast. Priorities for treatment intervention recommend to involve social setting and relationships of the patients, reaching their active participation to a motivational and long term group treatment, underlying the specific therapeutic effect of world exchanges. Biopsychosocial determination of alcoholism could be primarily based on components of interpersonal relationships. Regarding social background, drinking is one of the most famous supports for the achievement of the feast, a founding marker of present time. Taking an existential point of view, the feast appears as the heart of mankind because it presents a primary “us”, a plural state which indicates the beginning and founding of the Self from the others. During the feast, we regularly have to reach our Self from the “us” while avoiding two main dangers, drunkenness, an increase in the dizziness of upright verticality, and addiction, an opposite vertical surrender to alcohol and falling into in the alcoholic relapse, both situations imply a spatial domination and the disappearance of others. Treatment programs of alcohol addicts need to integrate the necessity of reaching the existential basic trust from the support of a group to the appropriation of the community which can be defined as an original “usness”.