Love and Addiction
Love and Addiction
Love and Addiction
“Stanton Peele is a true pioneer of addiction research and theory. His ideas
must be reckoned with by anyone who is serious about understanding
addiction—and they offer hope to the many millions for whom current
approaches are not effective or who simply prefer evidence-based
alternatives.” —Maia Szalavitz, neuroscience journalist for Time
magazine’s Healthland
“Stanton Peele is a bold and original thinker with a wide-angle view of the
human psyche and spot-on vision. He is a champion of the power people
have to change, and has long been a pioneer in rejecting the deterministic
belief that addiction is a disease that one has forever and that addicts are
powerless in the face of their cravings. He has shown instead that cognitive
and life skills are keys to kicking addictions.” —Hara Estroff Marano,
Editor at Large, Psychology Today
“This is one of those rare books that demonstrates that true insight
transcends politics, intellectual fashion, and even time itself. When you're
right, you’re right—and Stanton Peele and Archie Brodsky are clearly right
that most of us are wrong about addiction. They show that addiction is not a
disease or a quality of one substance or another. Instead, addiction is a
relationship people form with the world, as represented by various
activities, substances, and involvements—even including some
relationships American society calls ‘love.’ And, perhaps most importantly,
they show us how to emerge from addiction to live and to love fully.” —
Christopher Ryan, Ph.D. & Cacilda Jethá, M.D., Authors of the New York
Times best seller, Sex at Dawn
First Edition
Copyright © 1975 by Stanton Peele and Archie Brodsky All rights reserved.
Printed in the U.S.A.
Writing in 2014, we are grateful to Vicki Rowland for her expert design and production of the
Kindle edition and its new virtual book cover, and even more for being out ahead of us in her
conviction that Love and Addiction deserves a new life as an e-book.
Archie and I would especially like to thank two people whose involvement
with this book has been almost as deep and longstanding as our own. Mary
Arnold has contributed sensitive editorial suggestions, participated in our
inner and outer lives, and helped create an atmosphere in which we could
try to realize in life the ideals of the book. Donna Gertler has worked with
us on many, many versions of the manuscript, researched and traveled with
us, and shared the ups and downs of our effort.
We appreciate, too, the sympathetic and useful comments made by
several other readers of the manuscript: Barbara DuBois, Ruth Karei,
Stanley Sagov, and Julia Vellacott, as well as readers of individual chapters
who are too numerous to list here. There are also two friends who have
supported our work through their hospitality, practical help, and advice:
Michael Gross and Stanley Morse. Time, space, and structure have been
provided us by our consulting company, Fred's Firm, Inc.
Finally, we owe much to our publisher, Terry Taplinger, and our editor,
Bobs Pinkerton. Their faith and their investment in this book have helped
give it a form and enabled it to reach those we want to speak to. Here it is.
—S.P.
Contents
2014 Authors’ Preface
Introduction
An Égoisme à Deux
An Anxious Parent
Adulthood Denied
Cultural Drift
Other Addictions
Ideals
Pitfalls in Growing
A Case of Change
References
Correcting Relationships
Bibliography
Love and Addiction was a book remarkably before its time when it was
published in 1975. It still is.
We don’t mean by this that the addiction field and the public have
rejected the ideas we presented in a book now recognized as a classic. On
the contrary, every single major idea in Love and Addiction now plays a
central role in labeling, diagnosing, and treating addiction, even though
these ideas were beyond the pale in 1975, and indeed many took decades
longer to be incorporated.
Love and Addiction still has the ability to shock and to impress. Here is
addiction researcher Rowdy Yates’ reaction to rereading the book 35 years
after it came out:
This book I read as soon as it was published. A friend had recommended it and she wasn’t
wrong. Peele and Brodsky view addiction as a normal behavior that has veered out of
control and they compare it with dysfunctional human relationships. I think it was probably
the first book I ever read which analyzed addiction in a way that made sense to me and
echoed what I knew from my work. Years later, I undertook a study looking at recovered
addicts who had been sexually abused as children. One of the researchers we used was a
psychotherapist and remarked to me that the relationship they described with their drug(s)
of choice sounded exactly like their relationship with their perpetrator. I remembered Peele
and Brodsky and pulled it off the shelf. It still reads absolutely true as an understanding of
addictive behavior all these years later.
***
You will learn more about your world—including that of present-day self-help book
writers with the same problems he delineates—than you may ever have wanted to know.
Because he says what you think you already know in a way that makes it all but impossible
to ignore.
This book needs to be reprinted, and made available to the general public, now.
Twenty-five years later, its prophetic visions and common sense approach have yet to be
surpassed.
***
We have written new introductions to the chapters of the originally
published version of Love and Addiction. In addition, we have highlighted
some passages in the original book to reflect their special relevance to
currently debated topics in the addiction field. Otherwise, nothing has been
changed in the original manuscript.
We wrote a preface for Love and Addiction (included here) when
Penguin published a repackaged paperback edition of our book in 1991,
already 16 years after its original publication. A reissue was required as
Love and Addiction continued to sell due to an explosion of interest in the
subject. The idea of addiction extending beyond drugs had become popular
due to Melody Beattie’s 1987 best-selling book, Codependent No More,
which introduced the term “codependent” to the public to stand for
interpersonal addiction. Patrick Carnes picked up on our idea of sexual
addiction in his 1983 book of that name (which was retitled Out of the
Shadows in 1985).
We were happy for the sales and the interest in the subject. However, we
believed then and believe now that these books missed the mark in a way
prophetic of the continued current misunderstanding of addiction. These
and similar works failed to realize that addiction’s occurring in love and sex
relationships as well as with heroin and alcohol opened up an entirely new
vision of addiction. Instead, they simply absorbed love and sex addiction
into the 12-step disease and recovery culture. They thereby prolonged our
failure to grasp what addiction is, nor did they help us deal effectively with
these (or any) kinds of addictions by conceiving them as “diseases.”
Oh, and “real” addiction experts—like those responsible for writing
psychiatry’s diagnostic manual, DSM-IV, published in 1994—simply
ignored these developments as some pop fad. As we indicated above, these
experts’ obtuseness continued into the publication of DSM-5 in 2013, where
they recognized compulsive gambling as an addiction, albeit a “behavioral
addiction,” but not compulsive involvements with drugs, sex, and love as
addictions, further muddying the waters while failing to grasp the nature of
addiction in ways that continue to this very moment.
Stanton Peele and Archie Brodsky
March 2014
Authors’ Preface, 1991 Reissue
Love and Addiction was a mass-marketed paperback—the kind that used to be sold at
supermarket checkout counters. For that reason, this brief introduction to Love and Addiction
was written to cover many bases. It first establishes that close personal relationships can be
addictive, and that this kind of attachment is exactly the opposite of a love relationship. This
allowed us to define addiction to love as one of many potential addictions, while defining
genuine love as the opposite of the constrictive experience of love addiction. The introduction
moves on to analyze the meaning of addiction—how broadening the view of addiction to see that
it includes more than narcotics can’t simply stop at identifying more addictive drugs, but must
include a wider range of involvements. To be able to do this, Love and Addiction created a new
definition of addiction, one not biochemically driven, as it always, incorrectly, has been.
This is Love and Addiction’s greatest contribution, one still to be fully understood and
appreciated, as we continue to go up one blind alley after another trying to make sense of
addiction. Finally, the introduction makes clear that addiction is not some special pathology, an
alien chemical reaction, but is rather a central experience that may take hold in any area of life,
one with which we are all familiar. This is not to say that we are all addicts, or that it is useful to
think of ourselves that way. It is to say that we don’t have to go too far to comprehend the core
meaning of addiction—we all know what it is.
—AL HAMILTON, HERMON WEEMS, WILLIAM GARRETT, I’ve Got to Have You
©1968, Jobete Music Company, Inc., Hollywood, California, U.S.A. International
copyright secured. All rights reserved. Reprinted by permission.
This chapter lays out the essential similarities in addictive love relationships and drug
addiction, including the appearance of withdrawal as a “real” consequence of breakups
—an idea that seemed to people at the time (and to many still) the utmost in
implausibility. Beyond noting this essential truth, it might seem that the tight-knit
couplings described here are a thing of the past—that, what with the hook-up culture
and metrosexuality, we no longer witness the kinds of complete mutual immersions
depicted. But they exist and are as strong as ever, albeit in a well-defined social class
—the educated upper-middle class—and include, more than ever before, the children of
the family as the core of the insular network, as detailed in Chapter 6.
But we should note that, in Chapter 8, where we address sexual (as opposed to love)
addictions, we recognize that a variant kind of interpersonal addiction—a sort of
“speed” (like cocaine or meth) version of this, the “downer” (as in narcotic,
tranquilizer, or Quaalude) kind of relationship—has gained more notice in recent
decades. So be it. The dynamics of both types of relationships remain the same as
depicted in Love and Addiction.
Several years ago I began to think that what people call love can sometimes
be an addiction. It was my way of making sense of some observations about
drugs and about people. This was in the late 1960s, at the height of the drug
explosion, when reports on acid-tripping and speed-freaking (along with the
use of marijuana and heroin) were widely broadcast. At that time,
newspapers and magazines began to print tables of drugs to enlighten the
public about what effects these drugs had. Two things struck me in reading
these tables—first, how many misconceptions I and the people I knew had
about drugs, and second, how much inexact information the tables
themselves contained. The assumptions I and others were making about the
power of psychoactive drugs did not seem justified by any existing
evidence. To me this signaled a large undefined area where the motivations
and attitudes of people who took drugs could come into play. It also
indicated basic fears and irrationalities in our society about drugs and what
they could do.
At about the same time, though for unrelated reasons, I was beginning
to look more critically at the concept of romantic love with which I had
grown up. In today’s open society, many varieties of male-female
relationships can readily be observed in life, in motion pictures, in novels,
in song lyrics. What I saw in these contexts was often disconcerting.
Relationships which supposedly entailed some notion of growing together
were really based mostly on security and the comfort of spending as much
time as possible with someone totally sensitized to one’s needs. In those
cases, loving another person actually seemed to bring about a contraction in
the scope of one’s life. What made such relationships stand out for me was
the feeling that there was something fundamental in their nature that made
them this way. I could think of only one word to describe it: addiction. The
individuals involved were hooked on someone whom they regarded as an
object; their need for the object, their “love,” was really a dependency.
At first this idea was only a metaphor to me. I didn’t try to apply it
seriously until I read an account of the daily lives of three married couples.
In its lighthearted way, the account indicates that the writer was thinking
along much the same lines as I was:
It’s amazing how marriage affects people’s use of the telephone. First off, there’s Mike and
Betty. Whenever I call Mike, even on what amounts to a business matter, I have to endure
long silences, stretching the conversation to twice the length that would otherwise be
necessary while he fills Betty in on what I have just said. Still, hers is a benign form of
interference. Betty thinks of herself as a friend of mine too, and she might reasonably be
said to be expressing an interest in my welfare when she jumps up and down in front of the
phone screaming, “What’s he saying?” The kind of thing I’m talking about becomes
malignant when you try to talk to Herman. We all know that Herman’s wife hardly ever lets
him go to a basketball game, and that when she does let him go she goes with him and
makes him reserve seats far away from his friends. But lately he can’t even carry on a
phone conversation without muffling the receiver each time you say something and
repeating the message verbatim to his wife, so that she can tell him what to say.
Janet, too, has her own style of relating over the phone. On the rare occasions when
Arnold is absent for more than an hour or two in the evening, she will call me and keep a
long, aimless conversation going so as to avoid having to find something to do on her own.
(Often, in her desperation to find a substitute, she will get stoned—a bad move, since it
makes three hours without Arnold seem like six.) But should Arnold return, even if we’ve
been talking only a short time, or we’re in the middle of an important topic, Janet will
scream out his name as soon as she hears the key in the door and hang up before I can even
say goodbye.
An Égoisme à Deux
Vicky and Bruce are individual human beings in body only; they are
constantly struggling to overcome the separation of skin that is the one
barrier to their total union. Their backgrounds explain some of the story.
Both of them grew up, comfortable and protected, in a suburb of Los
Angeles. From an early age they thought in terms of professional careers
and a domestic existence. Bruce, who graduated from high school a year
ahead of Vicky, turned down a scholarship to an Ivy League university he
had always dreamed of attending. Instead, unwilling to leave Vicky, he went
to a university in the Los Angeles area. Vicky followed him there a year
later. She hadn’t wanted to go too far from her parents, and in fact she lived
at home rather than on campus, just as Bruce had done the year before so
that he could be near her. The couple made the hour-long trip to and from
school every day together, and they continued to see each other in the
comfortable settings of their old neighborhood and their parents’ homes. It
was as if they were biding time, waiting simply to reach an age when they
could marry without arousing comment. Their lack of experience with other
people at college naturally did not give them a chance to gain a very
accurate impression of themselves as others saw them. The result was that
they didn’t develop adult qualities that might have made them attractive to
people who didn’t already know and love them.
And there you have it. Two people reluctant to leave the security of their
high school relationship, probably as much from a fear of disappointing
each other, and of never finding anything better for themselves, as from
inherent desire, had joined themselves together “’til death do us part.” In the
meantime, they had missed the opportunity to live away from home, an
experience their upper-middle-class parents would willingly have
subsidized. The price they extracted from each other for the sacrifices
involved in maintaining the relationship was the constant reassurance of
each other’s company. Having spent so much of themselves simply to stay
together, they both felt the relationship owed them a great deal. And, to
justify this commitment, they steadily inflated each other’s worth to the
point where nothing else seemed of any consequence to them.
They soon gave up whatever independent interests they had. Vicky
discarded the idea of joining the college drama club because it would have
taken too much of her time from Bruce. They did not see much of their old
friends, most of whom had gone away to college. Nor did they make new
friends at the university, except a few classroom friends. They talked about
courses and teachers with these people, and together went to occasional
parties with them, but because so little of their free time was spent on
campus, these outside relationships didn’t amount to anything. The couple
grew more and more clinging, turned to each other for more and more of
what they wanted, and gradually severed all connections with the rest of the
world except for school and their parents.
Vicky and Bruce got married upon Bruce’s graduation. Together, they
decided to move to San Francisco for their graduate training. Bruce was to
go to law school, while Vicky planned to take her Ph.D. in history after
completing her senior year at a college in the area. Not that she had any
intention of being a historian. She found her history courses boring and,
worse, tremendously stressful. Constrained but not inspired by the
curriculum during her undergraduate years, she had made her way through
with the help of stimulants and tranquilizers. One may wonder why she
didn’t rise up against this agony and get off the academic treadmill, but it is
not surprising that a person so little disposed to question the security of her
family home and her marriage would not seek something more purposeful
than continued, meaningless academic activity. In fact, she saw no
alternative for herself while her husband was in law school.
Vicky and Bruce were concerned about moving so far away from their
families. However, they enjoyed regular weekend visits from their parents.
They frequently returned these visits, carefully dividing their time between
the two families, as well as bringing them together for joint gatherings. And
they had hardly arrived in San Francisco before they began making detailed
plans for their eventual return to Los Angeles, where they would buy a
house near both families once Bruce was earning a lawyer’s income and
their San Francisco “bohemian” period had come to an end.
At this point they settled into the kind of married life described in the
account at the beginning of this chapter. Marriage gave their relationship,
blessed with parental indulgence from the beginning, the added comforts of
a home life. Occasionally they roused themselves to attend an evening
lecture or other university cultural event. However, their penetration into
San Francisco never went much deeper than that. With few friends, their
social life was as limited and superficial as it had been in college, and
although they espoused topical viewpoints, they were certainly not part of
the new West Coast scene.
Thus two underdeveloped egos merged into what D. H. Lawrence called
an égoisme à deux: two people banded together, not because of love or an
increasing understanding of each other, but rather because of their over-
entanglement and mutual self-deprivation. With each step in their growing
interdependence, Bruce and Vicky broke a few more of the ties they had
had with other people, things, and activities. And as these disappeared, they
hung on to each other that much more frantically to bolster themselves
against an increasingly alien environment.
We can partially trace the genesis of these addictive personalities in
Vicky’s and Bruce’s upbringing. Neither of them had broken from a
childhood dependence on their parents. They approached all experience
outside the family as somehow external to themselves. Although they were
both successful students, and both accepted the yoke of school’s demands,
their schoolwork had little meaning for them, and they spoke of it cynically.
Nor were they capable of forming relationships outside the family, but for
one—with each other. It was as though this isolated excursion drained them
of all the energy they might have applied toward knowing other people.
Their parents had been so generous, so quick to bend the environment to
Bruce and Vicky’s needs, that they could not realize how they were limiting
their children’s experience. When Vicky became involved with Bruce, her
parents, with his parents’ blessing, turned over their beach house to the
young lovers, and rented a smaller place at Lake Arrowhead. The couple
could go to the beach house and be together without interference. Except, of
course, it was total interference, for the young people were never allowed to
develop distinct wills of their own. Vicky had no reason to go out into the
world when her mother and father were so attentive to her needs, so
appreciative of her charm and intelligence, that she could not have hoped to
find better treatment anywhere else. Moving straight from her parents’
home to her husband’s, this woman never had the experience of living
alone, on her own emotional resources, and probably never will. In this
way, Vicky’s and Bruce’s parents incorporated every stage of their
children’s growth except for the last stage, independence—not only a
healthy separation from the home, but a true psychological independence;
something a person carries with him or her for all time. And it is this kind
of self-completion which instills the integrity that every real coming
together of two or more individuals presupposes.
In order to persuade readers that “love” can really be addictive, we first had to show that drug
addiction—heroin addiction—isn’t what they think it is; that most users don’t become addicted,
that withdrawal is a variable and often mild consequence of quitting, and that addiction to
cigarettes (!) is as severe as narcotic addiction. All of this information concerning narcotics was
known when we wrote Love and Addiction—indeed, the Vietnam experience, which we cite, is
repeated in nearly every book debunking conventional notions of addiction (including Stanton’s
own books) to the present day.
Stanton expanded the list of evidence that narcotic addiction is part of a broad spectrum in The
Meaning of Addiction—a more technical work where that information remained relevant and still
met fierce resistance. But the idea that heroin is, well, heroin won’t disappear even now, when
most so-called “overdose” deaths[*] occur with prescription painkillers, like OxyContin. Stanton
attended a lecture by Carl Hart, author of High Price: A Neuroscientist's Journey of Self-
Discovery That Challenges Everything You Know About Drugs and Society, which combines the
story of his inner-city upbringing with his research findings that drug effects are not nearly as
severe as they are supposed to be and cannot account for the social problems witnessed in
connection with drug use. The sympathetic audience responded warmly and repeatedly said, “We
wish that government officials would all get your message, and not just us.” Yet when Hart said,
“Heroin withdrawal is generally mild, like a case of the flu” (as stated herein), the sympathetic
audience recoiled as though he were waving a cobra in front of their eyes and immediately began
questioning and doubting his statement.
Hart doesn’t deal with addiction per se. By contrast, in this chapter we review the history of
addiction, the history and social landscape of drugs, and the ways in which these have created
expectations and behaviors that form the basis of the prevailing concept of addiction. In its place,
we propose a framework that incorporates types of drug effects, user expectations, and cultural
meanings associated with various drugs into one framework of addiction—it is this multi-layered
experience to which people become addicted.
When we talk about addictive love relationships, we are not using the
term in any metaphorical sense. Vicky’s relationship with Bruce was not
like an addiction; it was an addiction. If we have trouble grasping this, it is
because we have learned to believe that addiction takes place only with
drugs. In order to see why this is not the case—to see how “love” can also
be an addiction—we have to take a new look at what addiction is, and what
it has to do with drugs.
To say that people like Vicky and Bruce are genuinely addicted to
each other is to say that addiction to drugs is something other than
what most people take it to be. Thus, we must reinterpret the process
by which a person becomes dependent on a drug, so that we can trace
the inner, psychological experience of drug addiction, or any addiction.
That subjective experience is the key to the true meaning of addiction.
It is conventionally believed that addiction happens automatically
whenever someone takes sufficiently large and frequent doses of certain
drugs, particularly the opiates. Recent research that we will cite in this
chapter has shown that this assumption is false. People respond to
powerful drugs, even regular doses of them, in different ways. At the
same time, people respond to a variety of different drugs, as well as
experiences that have nothing to do with drugs, with similar patterns of
behavior. The response people have to a given drug is determined by
their personalities, their cultural backgrounds, and their expectations
and feelings about the drug. In other words, the sources of addiction lie
within the person, not the drug.
While addiction is only tangentially related to any particular drug, it is
still useful to examine people’s reactions to the drugs which are commonly
believed to produce addiction. Because these drugs are psychoactive—that
is, they can alter people’s consciousness and feelings—they have a strong
appeal for individuals who are desperately looking for escape and
reassurance. Drugs are not the only objects which serve this function for
people who are predisposed to addiction. By seeing what it is about some
drugs, such as heroin, that draws the addict into a repetitive and eventually
total involvement with them, we can identify other experiences, such as
love relationships, that potentially have the same effect. The dynamics of
drug addiction can then be used as a model for understanding these other
addictions.
We will see that more than anywhere else in the world, addiction is a
major issue in America. It grows out of special features of the culture and
history of this country, and to a lesser extent, of Western society generally.
In asking why Americans have found it necessary to believe in a false
relationship between addiction and the opiates, we discover a major
vulnerability in American culture that mirrors the vulnerability of the
individual addict. This vulnerability is close to the heart of the very real and
very large significance of addiction—drug and otherwise—in our time.
Consider our image of the drug addict. The Federal Bureau of Narcotics and
fiction like The Man with the Golden Arm have taught us to visualize the
“dope fiend” as a criminal psychopath, violently destructive to himself and
others, as his habit leads him inexorably toward death. In reality, most
addicts are not at all like this. When we look at the addict in human terms,
when we try to figure out what is going on inside him, we see more clearly
why he acts as he does—with or without drugs. We see something like this
portrait of Ric, an on-again off-again addict, from an account given by a
friend of his:
I helped Ric, now off his probation period, move out of his parents’ house yesterday. I
didn’t mind the work, since Ric is such a nice guy and has offered to help put new linoleum
down in my kitchen. So I set in to do the wall-washing, vacuuming, floor-sweeping, etc., in
his room with good spirits. But these were quickly turned into feelings of depression and
paralysis by Ric’s inability to do anything in a reasonably complete and efficient manner,
and by my seeing him, at the age of 32, moving in and out of his parents’ house. It was the
reductio ad absurdum of all the inadequacies and problems we see around us, and it was
goddamned depressing.
I realized that the struggle for life is never done, and that Ric has blown it badly. And
he knows it. How could he fail to realize it with his father telling him that he wasn’t a man
yet and with his mother not wanting to let us take their vacuum cleaner to clean his new
apartment? Ric argued, “What do you think I’m going to do—pawn it or something?”
which has probably been a real possibility on many occasions, if not this time. Ric was
sweating in the morning chill, complaining about that fucking methadone, when it was
probably his needing a fix sooner or later and his father noticing and knowing and saying
that he couldn’t take a little work—that he wasn’t a man yet.
I started right in cleaning—Ric said it would be about half an hour’s work—because he
had been an hour late picking me up and because I wanted to get it over with so as to get
away from him and that place. But then he got a phone call and went out, saying he’d be
back in a little while. When he returned he went into the john—presumably to fix. I kept on
cleaning; he came out, discovered that he didn’t have the garbage bags he needed for
packing, and went out again. By the time he got back, I had done everything I could, and he
finally set into packing and throwing things out to the point where I could help him.
We started to load up Ric’s father’s truck, but it was bad timing, since his father had
just come back. The whole time we carried things down and placed them in the truck, he
complained about how he needed it himself. Once, as he and Ric carried down a
horrendously heavy bureau, he started in on how it and the rest of the things we were
carrying should have stayed where they belonged in the first place, and not been moved in
and out. Like Ric stepping out into the world, to love, to work, only to retreat; to be pushed
or pulled back inside, to go back in again behind drugs, or jail, or momma or papa—all the
things that have safely limited Ric’s world for him.
It is not likely that Ric will die of his habit, or kill for it. It is not likely
that his body will rot and that he will be reduced to a disease-ridden
degenerate. We can see, however, that he is severely debilitated, though not
primarily, or initially, by drugs. What makes a heroin addict? The answer
lies in those aspects of a person’s history and social setting which leave him
in need of outside help in order to cope with the world. Ric’s addiction
stems from his weakness and incompetence, his lack of personal wholeness.
Heroin reflects and reinforces all his other dependencies, even as he uses it
to forget them. Ric is an addict, and he would be one whether he were
dependent on drugs or love or any of the other objects that people turn to
repeatedly under the stress of an incomplete existence. The choice of one
drug over another—or of drugs at all—has to do primarily with ethnic and
social background and circles of acquaintance. The addict, heroin or
otherwise, is addicted not to a chemical, but to a sensation, a prop, an
experience which structures his life. What causes that experience to become
an addiction is that it makes it more and more difficult for the person to deal
with his real needs, thereby making his sense of well-being depend
increasingly on a single, external source of support.
No one has ever been able to show how and why “physical dependence”
occurs when people take narcotics (i.e., the opiates: opium, heroin, and
morphine) regularly. Lately it has become clear that there is no way to
measure physical dependence. In fact, nothing like it occurs with a
surprising number of narcotic users. We know now that there is no
universal or exclusive connection between addiction and the opiates
(universal, in the sense that addiction is an inevitable consequence of
opiate use; exclusive, in the sense that addiction occurs only with the
opiates as opposed to other drugs). Supporting this conclusion is a wide
range of evidence which we will review briefly here. An Appendix has been
provided for those who want to explore further the scientific basis of the
findings about drugs which are reported in this chapter. The reader may also
want to consult some excellent recent books such as Erich Goode’s Drugs
in American Society, Norman Zinberg and John Robertson’s Drugs and the
Public, and Henry Lennard’s Mystification and Drug Misuse. These books
reflect the consensus among well-informed observers that the effects of
drugs are relative to the people who take them and the settings in which
they are taken. As Norman Zinberg and David Lewis concluded a decade
ago after an in-depth study of 200 narcotic users, “most of the problems of
narcotic use do not fall into the classic definition of addiction … [i.e.,
craving, tolerance, and withdrawal]. Indeed, the range of cases that do not
fit the stereotype of the narcotic addict is very wide….”
In the first place, exactly what are the withdrawal symptoms we hear so
much about? The most commonly observed symptoms of severe withdrawal
distress call to mind a case of the flu—rapid respiration, loss of appetite,
fever, sweating, chills, rhinitis, nausea, vomiting, diarrhea, abdominal
cramps, and restlessness together with lethargy. That is to say, withdrawal
isn’t a unique, definite syndrome that can be precisely distinguished from
many other cases of bodily discomfort or disorientation. Whenever the
body’s internal balance is upset, whether through withdrawal from a drug or
an attack of illness, it can manifest these signs of physical and
psychological distress. Indeed, the most intensely felt symptom of
withdrawal, one that we know about only from the statements of addicts
themselves, is not chemical at all. It is an agonizing sense of the absence of
well-being, a sense of some terrible deficiency inside oneself. This is the
major, personal upheaval that results from the loss of a comfortable buffer
against reality, which is where the real wallop of narcotic addiction comes
from.
Tolerance, the other major identifying mark of addiction, is the tendency
for a person to adapt to a drug, so that a larger dose is required to produce
the same effect that resulted initially from a smaller dose. There are limits
to this process, however; both monkeys in the laboratory and human addicts
soon reach a ceiling point where their usage level is stabilized. Like
withdrawal, tolerance is something we know about from observing people’s
behavior and listening to what they tell us. People show tolerance for all
drugs, and individuals vary greatly in the tolerance they show for a given
drug. Just how much variation there can be in withdrawal and tolerance
effects stemming from the use of opiates and other drugs is revealed by the
following studies and observations of different groups of users:
1. Vietnam veterans, hospital patients. After it became known that perhaps
one-fourth of all American soldiers in Vietnam were using heroin, there was
widespread concern that returning veterans would trigger an epidemic of
addiction in the United States. Nothing of the sort happened. Jerome Jaffe,
the physician who headed the Government’s rehabilitation program for
drug-dependent veterans, explained why in an article in Psychology Today
entitled “As Far as Heroin Is Concerned, the Worst Is Over.” Dr. Jaffe found
that most of the G.I.s used heroin in response to the unbearable conditions
they faced in Vietnam. As they prepared to return to America, where they
would be able to resume their normal lives, they withdrew from the drug
with little difficulty and apparently showed no further interest in it. Dr.
Richard S. Wilbur, then Assistant Secretary of Defense for Health and
Environment, said that this conclusion to the heroin experience in Vietnam
amazed him, and caused him to revise the notions about addiction that he
had learned in medical school, where he “was taught that anyone who ever
tried heroin was instantly, totally, and perpetually hooked.”
(quoted by Aubrey Lewis in Hannah Steinberg, ed., Scientific Basis of Drug Dependence)
Doctors are the best-known single group of controlled drug users.
Historically, we can cite Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s cocaine habit and the
distinguished surgeon William Halsted’s daily use of morphine. Today,
estimates of the number of physicians taking opiates run to about one in
every hundred. The very circumstance that prompts many doctors to use
narcotics—their ready access to such drugs as morphine or the synthetic
narcotic Demerol—makes such users difficult to uncover, especially when
they remain in control of their habit and of themselves. Charles Winick, a
New York physician and public health official who has investigated many
aspects of opiate use, studied physician users who had been publicly
exposed, but who were not obviously incapacitated, either in their own eyes
or in the eyes of others. Only two out of the ninety-eight doctors Winick
questioned turned themselves in because they found they needed increasing
dosages of the narcotic. On the whole, the doctors Winick studied were
more successful than average. “Most were useful and effective members of
their community,” Winick notes, and continued to be while they were
involved with drugs.
3. Ritualistic drug use. In The Road to H, Isidor Chein and his coworkers
investigated the variety of heroin usage patterns in the ghettos of New York.
Along with regular, controlled users, they found some adolescents who
were taking the drug irregularly and without withdrawal, and others who
were drug-dependent even when they were getting the drug in doses too
weak to have any physical effect. Addicts in the latter circumstances have
even been observed to go through withdrawal. Chein believes that people
like these are dependent not on the drug itself, but on the ritual of obtaining
and administering it. Thus a large majority of the addicts interviewed by
John Ball and his colleagues rejected the idea of legalized heroin, because
that would eliminate the secretive and illicit rituals of their drug use.
In the Consumers Union report, Licit and Illicit Drugs, Edward Brecher
states that no essential difference exists between the heroin and nicotine
habits. He cites cigarette-deprived, post-World War II Germany, where
proper citizens begged, stole, prostituted themselves, and traded off
precious commodities—all in order to obtain tobacco. Closer to home,
Joseph Alsop devoted a series of newspaper columns to the problem many
ex-smokers have in concentrating on their work after giving up their habit
—a difficulty heroin treatment programs traditionally have had to deal with
in addicts. Alsop wrote that the first of these articles “brought in scores of
readers’ letters saying in effect, ‘Thank God you wrote about not being able
to work. We’ve told the doctors again and again, and they won’t believe it.’
”
Social and Cultural Variations in Drug Effects
If many drugs can addict, and if not everyone gets addicted to any
particular drug, then there can be no single physiological mechanism
which explains addiction. Something else has to account for the variety
of reactions people have when different chemicals are introduced into
their bodies. The signs which are taken as indicators of addiction,
withdrawal and tolerance, are affected by a host of situational and
personal variables. The way people respond to a drug depends on how
they view the drug—that is, what they expect from it—which is called
their “set,” and on the influences they feel from their surroundings,
which comprise the setting. Set and setting are in turn shaped by the
underlying dimensions of culture and social structure.
Lasagna’s placebo experiment demonstrated that people’s reactions to a
drug are determined as much by what they think the drug is as by what it
actually is. An important study that showed people’s expectations working
in combination with pressures from the social environment was conducted
by Stanley Schachter and Jerome Singer. In it, individuals who were given a
shot of adrenalin responded to the drug in entirely different ways,
depending on whether they knew ahead of time to anticipate the effects of
the stimulant, and on what mood they observed being acted out by someone
else in the same situation. When they weren’t sure what they were getting in
the injection, they looked to see how the other person was acting in order to
know how they should feel (see Appendix C). On a larger scale, this is how
drugs are defined as being addictive or nonaddictive. People model their
response to a given drug on the way they see other people responding,
either in their social group or in the society as a whole.
A striking example of this social learning is provided by Howard
Becker’s study (in his book Outsiders) of the initiation of novice marijuana
smokers into groups of experienced smokers. The novice has to be taught
first that feeling certain sensations means that he is high, and then that these
sensations are pleasurable. Similarly, groups of people who took LSD
together in the 1960s were often known as tribes. These groups had widely
differing experiences with the drug, and people who joined a tribe quickly
learned to experience whatever it was that the rest of the group encountered
in a trip. In the case of heroin, Norman Zinberg reports in his December,
1971, New York Times Magazine article, “G.I.’s and O.J.’s in Vietnam,” that
army units each developed their own specific withdrawal symptoms. The
symptoms tended to be uniform within a unit, but varied greatly among
units. In Drugs and the Public, Zinberg and John Robertson also note that
withdrawal was consistently milder at the Daytop Village addiction
treatment center than it was, for the same addicts, in jail. The difference was
that the social atmosphere at Daytop did not allow severe withdrawal
symptoms to appear because they could not be used as an excuse for not
doing one’s work.
Whole societies, too, teach specific lessons about drugs in line with
their attitudes toward them. Historically, the drugs which other cultures
have considered dangerous often have not been the same ones that we, in
our culture, think of in such a light. In The Soul of the Ape, for example,
Eugene Marais describes the devastating effects of our ordinary smoking
tobacco on the Bushmen and Hottentots of nineteenth-century South Africa,
who were familiar and moderate users of dagga (marijuana). Opium, which
has been taken as a pain-killer since antiquity, was not regarded as a special
drug menace before the late nineteenth century, and it was only then,
according to Glenn Sonnedecker, that the term “addiction” began to be
applied to this drug alone with its present meaning. Previously, the negative
side effects of opium were lumped together with those of coffee, tobacco,
and alcohol, which, according to the data compiled by Richard Blum in
Society and Drugs, were often objects of greater concern. China banned
tobacco-smoking a century before it prohibited opium in 1729. Persia,
Russia, parts of Germany, and Turkey all at some time made the production
or use of tobacco a capital offense. Coffee was outlawed in the Arab world
around 1300 and in Germany in the 1500s.
Consider the following description of drug dependence: “The sufferer is
tremulous and loses his self-command; he is subject to fits of agitation and
depression. He has a haggard appearance…. As with other such agents, a
renewed dose of the poison gives temporary relief, but at the cost of future
misery.” The drug in question is coffee (caffeine), as seen by the turn-of-
the-century British pharmacologists Allbutt and Dixon. Here is their view
of tea: “An hour or two after breakfast at which tea has been taken … a
grievous sinking … may seize upon a sufferer, so that to speak is an effort.
… The speech may become weak and vague…. By miseries such as these,
the best years of life may be spoilt.”
What seems dangerous and uncontrollable at one time or in one place
becomes natural and comfortable to deal with in another setting. Although
tobacco has been proved to be injurious to health in any number of ways,
and recent investigations suggest that coffee may be equally harmful,
Americans do not, by and large, strongly mistrust either substance (see
Appendix D). The ease we feel in handling the two drugs has led us to
underestimate or disregard their chemical potency. Our sense of being
psychologically secure with tobacco and coffee stems, in turn, from the fact
that energizing, stimulant drugs closely fit the ethos of American and other
Western cultures.
A culture’s reaction to a drug is conditioned by its image of that
drug. If the drug is seen as mysterious and uncontrollable, or if it
stands for escape and oblivion, then it will be widely misused. This
usually happens when a drug is newly introduced to a culture on a
large scale. Where people can readily accept a drug, then dramatic personal
deterioration and social disruption will not result from its use. This is
usually the case when a drug is well-integrated into life in a culture. For
instance, studies by Giorgio Lolli and Richard Jessor have shown that
Italians, who have a long and settled experience with liquor, do not think of
alcohol as possessing the same potent ability to console that Americans
ascribe to it. As a result, Italians manifest less alcoholism, and the
personality traits which are associated with alcoholism among Americans
are not related to drinking patterns among Italians.
Based on Richard Blum’s analysis of alcohol, we can develop a set of
criteria for whether a drug will be used addictively or nonaddictively
by a particular culture. If the drug is consumed in connection with
prescribed patterns of behavior and traditional social customs and
regulations, it is not likely to cause major problems. If, on the other
hand, either the use or control of the drug is introduced without respect
to existing institutions and cultural practices, and is associated either
with political repression or with rebellion, excessive or asocial usage
patterns will be present. Blum contrasts the American Indians, in whom
chronic alcoholism developed in the wake of the white man’s disruption of
their cultures, with three rural Greek villages where drinking is so fully
integrated into a traditional way of life that alcoholism as a social problem
is not even conceived of.
The same relationships hold true for the opiates. In India, where opium
has long been grown and is used in folk medicine, there has never been an
opium problem. In China, however, where the drug was imported by Arab
and British traders and was associated with colonial exploitation, its use got
out of hand. But not even in China has opium been as disruptive a force as
in America. Brought to America by Chinese laborers in the 1850s, opium
caught on quickly here, first in the form of morphine injections for
wounded soldiers in the Civil War, and later in patent medicines.
Nonetheless, according to accounts by Isbell and Sonnedecker, doctors and
pharmacists did not regard opiate addiction as a problem different from
other drug dependencies until the two decades between 1890 and 1909,
when opium importation increased dramatically. It was during this period
that the most concentrated opiate, heroin, was first produced from
morphine. Since then, narcotic addiction in America has grown to
unprecedented proportions, despite—or perhaps in part due to—our
determined attempts to ban the opiates.
This chapter lays out a general model for addiction—one that works as well today as when it was
written, and that could be debated tomorrow in every leading addiction agency and research
institution. To create it, we had to steer a careful course. When it’s clear that addiction is not a
characteristic of drugs, there is a very natural tendency to focus on the personalities of addicts as
the source of addiction—as the leading addiction theory dissidents, such as Lawrence Kolb and
Isidor Chein, did. But as others—such as Norman Zinberg and Charles Winick—recognized,
addiction is usually self-limiting. Therefore, it is not a permanent trait of the individual (nothing
makes clear the futility, uselessness, and counterproductivity of biological models of addiction as
this indisputable fact). Addiction is often restricted to traumatic circumstances, like the Vietnam
War—so the individual’s cultural setting and personal situation play a crucial role as well. The
idea of the addictive experience is the best way to incorporate the various threads that go into an
addiction, not least because this way of thinking elevates addiction to the proper level of
analysis, and away from biological, genetic, and neuroscientific determinism, which have led us
down every blind alley that we have always pursued in understanding addiction, and still do.
(Stanton makes this experiential model clear in The Meaning of Addiction.)
We then flesh out the ways in which these strands intertwine to create an addiction for a person,
and how and why this experience grows and maintains itself—keeping in mind that this nexus
exists in a time and place and stage in a person’s life, which many (most) eventually outgrow.
Addictions provide specific experiential rewards for the individual, but not the kind of brain
rewards neuro-addiction theorists maintain that they do. The addict responds excessively to these
rewards because of who he or she is and where he or she is placed in the universe. And the key
reason that addictive rewards are so dominant is because of the paucity of choices the addict sees
for himself, a paucity that the addiction reinforces and imposes on him. One sad commentary on
the addiction field is that its most vocal and visible subjects and forceful advocates are those who
don’t follow the normal “maturing out” path. It is their abnormal experience—created in good
part, as this chapter shows, by their belief that their addiction is an inbred, biological disease—
from which neuro-addiction theorists generalize to their portrait of hopeless victims of hijacked
brains. If you believe that, we have an addiction to sell you.
One last note. The magnificent Mary MacLane, quoted at the top of this chapter, and an early
seer of the modern mental state, has been brought back into print, after oh these many decades.
With our new model of addiction in mind, we need no longer think of
addiction exclusively in terms of drugs. We are concerned with the larger
question of why some people seek to close off their experience through a
comforting, but artificial and self-consuming relationship with something
external to themselves. In itself, the choice of object is irrelevant to this
universal process of becoming dependent. Anything that people use to
release their consciousness can be addictively misused.
As a starting point for our analysis, however, addictive drug use
serves as a convenient illustration of the psychological whys and hows
of addiction. Since people usually think of drug dependencies in terms
of addiction, who becomes addicted and why is best understood in that
area, and psychologists have come up with some fairly good answers to
these questions. But once we take account of their work and its
implications for a general theory of addiction, we must move beyond
drugs. It is necessary to transcend the culture-bound, class-bound
definition that has enabled us to dismiss addiction as somebody else’s
problem. With a new definition, we can look directly at our own
addictions.
Although Chein doesn’t say so in quite these terms, the substitute way
of life is what the street user is addicted to.
Exploring why the addict needs such a substitute life, the authors of
The Road to H describe the addict’s constricted outlook and his
defensive stance toward the world. Addicts are pessimistic about life
and preoccupied with its negative and dangerous aspects. In the ghetto
setting studied by Chein, they are emotionally detached from people,
and are capable of seeing others only as objects to be exploited. They
lack confidence in themselves and are not motivated toward positive
activities except when pushed by someone in a position of authority.
They are passive even as they are manipulative, and the need they feel
most strongly is a need for predictable gratification. Chein’s findings
are consistent with Lasagna’s and Winick’s. Together, they show that
the person predisposed to drug addiction has not resolved childhood
conflicts about autonomy and dependence so as to develop a mature
personality.
To understand what makes a person an addict, consider the controlled
users, the people who do not become addicts even though they take the
same powerful drugs. The doctors Winick studied are aided in keeping their
use of narcotics under control by the relative ease with which they can
obtain the drugs. A more important factor, however, is the purposefulness of
their lives—the activities and goals to which drug use is subordinated. What
enables most physicians who use narcotics to withstand dominance by a
drug is simply the fact that they must regulate their drug-taking in line with
its effect on the performance of their duties.
Even among people who do not have the social standing of doctors, the
principle behind controlled use is the same. Norman Zinberg and Richard
Jacobson unearthed many controlled users of heroin and other drugs among
young people in a variety of settings. Zinberg and Jacobson suggest that the
extent and diversity of a person’s social relationships are crucial in
determining whether the person will become a controlled or compulsive
drug user. If a person is acquainted with others who do not use the drug in
question, he is not likely to become totally immersed in that drug. These
investigators also report that controlled use depends on whether the user has
a specific routine which dictates when he will take the drug, so that there
are only some situations where he will consider it appropriate and others—
such as work or school—where he will rule it out. Again, the controlled
user is distinguished from the addict by the way drugs fit into the overall
context of his life.
Considering the research on controlled users in conjunction with
that on addicts, we can infer that addiction is a pattern of drug use that
occurs in people who have little to anchor them to life. Lacking an
underlying direction, finding few things that can entertain or motivate
them, they have nothing to compete with the effects of a narcotic for
possession of their lives. But for other people the impact of a drug,
while it may be considerable, is not overwhelming. They have
involvements and satisfactions which forestall total submission to
something whose action is to limit and deaden. The occasional user may
have need for relief or may only use a drug for specific positive effects.
But he values his activities, his friendships, his possibilities too much to
sacrifice them to the exclusion and repetition which is addiction.
The absence of drug dependencies in people who have been exposed
to narcotics under special conditions, such as hospital patients and the
G.I.’s in Vietnam, has already been noted. These people use an opiate
for solace or relief from some sort of temporary misery. In normal
circumstances, they do not find life sufficiently unpleasant to want to
obliterate their consciousness. As people with a normal range of
motivations, they have other options—once they have been removed
from the painful situation—which are more attractive than
unconsciousness. Almost never do they experience the full symptoms of
withdrawal or a craving for drugs.
In Addiction and Opiates, Alfred Lindesmith has noted that even when
medical patients do experience some degree of withdrawal pain from
morphine, they are able to protect themselves against prolonged craving by
thinking of themselves as normal people with a temporary problem, rather
than as addicts. Just as a culture can be influenced by a widespread
belief in the existence of addiction, an individual who thinks of himself
as an addict will more readily feel the addictive effects of a drug. Unlike
the street addict, whose lifestyle they probably despise, medical patients
and G.I.’s naturally assume that they are stronger than the drug. This
belief enables them, in fact, to resist addiction. Reverse this, and we
have the orientation of someone who is susceptible to addiction: he
believes the drug is stronger than he is. In both cases, people’s estimate
of a drug’s power over them reflects their estimate of their own
essential strengths and weaknesses. Thus an addict believes that he can
be overwhelmed by an experience at the same time he is driven to seek
it out.
Who, then, is the addict? We can say that he or she is someone who
lacks the desire—or confidence in his or her capacity—to come to grips
with life independently. His view of life is not a positive one which
anticipates chances for pleasure and fulfillment, but a negative one
which fears the world and people as threats to himself. When this
person is confronted with demands or problems, he seeks support from
an external source which, since he feels it is stronger than he is, he
believes can protect him. The addict is not a genuinely rebellious
person. Rather, he is a fearful one. He is eager to rely on drugs (or
medicines), on people, on institutions (like prisons and hospitals). In
giving himself up to these larger forces, he is a perpetual invalid.
Richard Blum has found that drug users have been trained at home, as
children, to accept and exploit the sick role. This readiness for
submission is the keynote of addiction. Disbelieving his own adequacy,
recoiling from challenge, the addict welcomes control from outside
himself as the ideal state of affairs.
Yardsticks like this can be applied to any thing or any act; that is why
many involvements besides those with drugs meet the criteria for addiction.
Drugs, on the other hand, are not addictive when they serve to fulfill a
larger purpose in life, even if the purpose is to increase self-awareness, to
expand consciousness, or simply to enjoy oneself.
The ability to derive a positive pleasure from something, to do
something because it brings joy to oneself, is, in fact, a principal
criterion of nonaddiction. It might seem a foregone conclusion that
people take drugs for enjoyment, yet this is not true of addicts. An
addict does not find heroin pleasurable in itself. Rather, he uses it to
obliterate other aspects of his environment which he dreads. A cigarette
addict or an alcoholic may once have enjoyed a smoke or a drink, but
by the time he has become addicted, he is driven to use the substance
merely to maintain himself at a bearable level of existence. This is the
tolerance process, through which the addict comes to rely on the
addictive object as something necessary to his psychological survival.
What might have been a positive motivation turns out to be a negative
one. It is a matter of need rather than of desire.
A further, and related, sign of addiction is that an exclusive craving for
something is accompanied by a loss of discrimination toward the object
which satisfies the craving. In the early stages of an addict’s relationship to
a substance, he may desire a specific quality in the experience it gives him.
He hopes for a certain reaction and, if it is not forthcoming, he is
dissatisfied. But after a certain point, the addict cannot distinguish between
a good or a bad version of that experience. All he cares about is that he
wants it and that he gets it. The alcoholic is not interested in the taste of the
liquor that is available; likewise, the compulsive eater is not particular
about what he eats when there is food around. The difference between the
heroin addict and the controlled user is the ability to discriminate among
conditions for taking the drug. Zinberg and Jacobson found that the
controlled drug user weighs a number of pragmatic considerations—how
much the drug costs, how good the supply is, whether the assembled
company is appealing, what else he might do with his time—before
indulging on any given occasion. Such choices are not open to an addict.
Since it is only the repetition of the basic experience for which the
addict yearns, he is unaware of variations in his environment—even in the
addictive sensation itself—as long as certain key stimuli are always present.
This phenomenon is observable in those who use heroin, LSD, marijuana,
speed, or cocaine. While light, irregular, or novice users are very dependent
on situational cues to set the mood for the enjoyment of their trips, the
heavy user or the addict disregards these variables almost entirely. This, and
all our criteria, are applicable to addicts in other areas of life, including love
addicts.
“Love” as an Addiction
“I never saw a more promising inclination. He was growing quite inattentive to other people, and
wholly engrossed by her. Every time they met, it was more decided and remarkable. At his own ball
he offended two or three young ladies, by not asking them to dance, and I spoke to him twice myself,
without receiving an answer. Could there be finer symptoms? Is not general incivility the very
essence of love?”
Having laid out the definition and meaning of addiction and addictive experiences, we see how
“love” relationships can fit that definition. Clear signs of this are people who jump from drugs or
alcohol to lovers and vice versa, as well as the experience of withdrawal from love. Love
withdrawal, as described in this chapter, still strikes a remarkable chord in people—as seen in
Stanton’s viral Psychology Today blog post: “The 7 hardest addictions to quit—love is the
worst!” We also lay out the criteria that differentiate love addiction from love. This fundamental
distinction centers on the question, “Do I want my love to be happy more than I want him to be
with me?”—a criterion singled out for discussion by Aaron Ben-Zeév, professor of philosophy
and former president of the University of Haifa, in a 2012 Psychology Today blog post.
We are assisted in making this journey into love and addiction by “philosophers” from Germaine
Greer to Erich Fromm, as well as stories of love and hate like F. Scott Fitzgerald and Sheilah
Graham’s famous love affair, and great literary representations such as D.H. Lawrence’s Women
in Love. Finally, as we cite a well-known Scottish addiction researcher, Rowdy Yates, in the
Authors’ Preface, the core nature of addiction is evident in the worst, most abusive relationships.
Writing in 2012, Yates noted, “Years later [after first reading Love and Addiction], I undertook a
study looking at recovered addicts who had been sexually abused as children. One of the
researchers … remarked to me that the relationship they described with their drug(s) of choice
sounded exactly like their relationship with their perpetrator.”
Since the person who addicts himself to a lover has essentially the same
feelings of inadequacy as the drug addict, why should such an individual
choose another person, rather than a drug, for the object of his addiction?
One characteristic which distinguishes the two groups of addicts is their
social class. Opiate use is found primarily in people in lower social and
economic positions, especially racial minorities. Lower-class whites more
normally take to alcohol as their escape. Middle-class Americans, on the
other hand, while not quite as prone to alcoholism and while certainly not
interested in heroin, are no less subject to addictive tendencies; they just
express them differently.
As a rule, other human beings play a role in the middle-class person’s
lifestyle that they do not for the lower-class person. Lee Rainwater, who
reports such social class differences in Family Design, found that sexual
relationships in the lower class tend not to involve as great a degree of life-
sharing. To take an extreme case, Chein’s analysis of New York City heroin
addicts shows that they are distrustful of people; drugs are the only things in
their lives they feel they can rely on. Even the middle-class English opiate
addicts whom Edwin Schur studied in Narcotic Addiction in Britain and
America are generally alienated from other people. And perhaps an
explanation for widespread drug abuse among young dropouts from the
middle class is that the disruptive nature of their living habits leaves them
with only fragmental and temporary relationships. But though this
inability to form strong interpersonal ties characterizes drug and
alcohol addicts no matter what their social class, weakened and
unstable social networks are more common among economically and
otherwise deprived groups. Hence individuals in these settings more
frequently succumb to heroin addiction and debilitating alcoholism while
people (mainly lovers) serve the same purpose for those who are better off.
In either case, the combination of dependency and manipulativeness that
Chein observed in heroin addicts lies behind the addict’s exploitativeness.
Unsure of his own identity, the addict sees other people as objects to serve
his needs. But for the drug addict, using people is only a means to other
ends; for the middle-class addict, possessing people is the end.
Rainwater makes these differences clear in an article entitled, “A Study
of Personality Differences Between Middle and Lower Class Adolescents.”
There he states that “The lower class person … is less dependent on people,
and more oriented toward those gratifications which can be achieved
without complicated cooperation of other human beings.” Among the
middle-class children in the study, a distinct pattern emerged which
explains how people can be the drugs of middle-class addiction. Two-thirds
of the middle-class children (as compared to only one-fifth of the children
from lower-class families) showed evidence of a “social dependency
constellation.” The latter can be defined as the need to cling to one human
object for love and support. That object may not even be a true person, but
only a conception of a person.
When people are economically comfortable but still sense a large
deficiency in their lives, their yearnings are bound to be more existential
than material. That is, these yearnings are tied into their basic conception of
and feelings about themselves. D. H. Lawrence describes such a case in his
novel Women in Love. The character is Gerald Crich, the well-to-do son of
an industrial magnate. When his father dies, Gerald’s world begins to fall
around him, and he experiences the spiritual catastrophe which leads him to
a relationship of desperation with Gudrun Brangwen.
But as the fight went on, and all that he had been and was continued to be destroyed, so that
life was a hollow shell all around him, roaring and clattering like the sound of the sea, a
noise in which he participated externally, and inside this hollow shell was all the darkness
and fearful space of death, he knew he would have to find reinforcements, otherwise he
would collapse inwards upon the great dark void which circled at the centre of his soul. His
will held his outer life, his outer mind, his outer being, unbroken and unchanged. But the
pressure was too great…. For day by day he felt more and more like a bubble filled with
darkness….
Moreover, when her best friend was coming to Hollywood from New
York, Fitzgerald insisted that they go away the weekend she was to arrive,
and that the friend move into her own apartment immediately. He even went
to the point of picking an apartment out for her and putting down the
deposit. When the friend arrived at Sheilah’s residence, she found an
apologetic note and a key. Graham comments: “This Scott made me do to
my best friend. He was jealous of her. He was so obviously unhappy, I
could not refuse him.” Perhaps even more extreme was the way Fitzgerald
and his lover reacted to a prospective visit by her boss, John Wheeler:
As the day of Wheeler’s arrival approached, Scott grew more and more glum. He would not
be reassured. And as had happened many times before when I found myself in difficulty,
inspiration came. The night before Wheeler arrived, I went into the Good Samaritan
Hospital for a minor operation, something my doctor had said could be done “any time—no
hurry about it.” I chose this time so that I would be too ill to see John Wheeler. Scott took
me to the hospital, reassured at last.
Naturally, she had good cause to act this way, and perhaps her attitude
was momentary, a fit of pique. Yet it still represents complete alienation
from that with which she formerly felt as one.
Above all else, these extreme emotional reactions conclusively establish
that the relationship was an addiction. All along, the lovers’ actions toward
each other were dictated by their own needs. Therefore, when their
connection was severed—even temporarily—they had no basis on which to
relate. Each was incapable of respecting, or even conceiving of, the other in
his or her own terms, as continuing to live his or her own life. It was
impossible for either to be concerned about the other’s well-being; if the
one lover wasn’t there to satisfy the other’s needs, then he or she ceased to
exist. In addition to this, when viewed in isolation from the ongoing
relationship, the weird behavior which the two of them had participated in
together now appeared grotesque. These love addicts were like the person
who cannot use moderately a drug to which he was addicted. An addict,
when he stops, must stop altogether. Because an addiction is sought only for
the total experience it provides, it can only be accepted emotionally in that
form. The ex-addict cannot conceive of relating to what was formerly the
addictive object in anything less than a total way.
These comments, and much else that Fromm writes, reveal a sharp
awareness of the potential for addiction inherent in the “powerful striving”
man feels for “interpersonal fusion.”[†] Fromm notes that two passionately
attracted people “take the intensity of the infatuation, this being ‘crazy’
about each other, for proof of the intensity of their love, while it may only
prove the degree of their preceding loneliness.”
Fromm is a social critic who wants to alert his readers to the harmful
effect which society, particularly modern capitalist society, can have on the
individual and on personal relationships. Thus he emphasizes the
materialism in self-seeking behavior toward others, especially lovers—that
is, the tendency to regard social partners as commodities. People who show
this orientation “fall in love when they feel they have found the best object
available on the market, considering the limitations of their own exchange
values.” Fromm feels that any such person is seriously disabled in going
about the business of making love, for “the marketing character is willing to
give, but only in exchange for receiving; giving without receiving for him is
being cheated.” Seeking lovers in this way is like “buying real estate,
[where] the hidden potentialities which can be developed play a
considerable role in this bargain.” Fromm therefore stresses that the respect
inherent in all love requires a lover to think, “I want the loved person to
grow and unfold for his own sake, and in his own ways, and not for the
purpose of serving me.”
As Fromm rightly insists, this altruism encourages the loved one’s
growth. But we have to ask also whether it allows for an uncritical attitude
toward the lover that is reminiscent of the mindless romanticism Fromm
criticizes. Fromm sees any evaluation of what another can contribute to
one’s own successful dealing with life as an illegitimate consideration in
love. What misleads him, and many others, is the habit of conceiving of
love exclusively in terms of the lovers’ relation to each other—as if this
could be separated from the contexts of the lovers’ individual lives. This is
actually a romantic perspective, and within it judgments of another’s worth
can only be viewed as self-serving. Yet a different order of judgment is
implied by Fromm’s rejection of sterile, solely self-gratifying
interdependency. For if you aren’t just going to use someone else as a
dehumanized substitute for—or extension of—yourself (just like any other
addictive object), then you will want to ask whether that person is himself
mature and strong. Mature people, concerned with the quality of their lives,
engage naturally in a continuing evaluation of their relationships, testing
alternatives and questioning their commitments. An independent, open
person exploring life seriously will instinctively (if not consciously)
consider whether someone has anything of substance to add to his or her
existence.
Germaine Greer makes a similar point in her book The Female Eunuch.
While sharing Fromm’s dislike of superficial, commercial standards for
assessing potential mates, she accepts the need for some external means of
validation in a relationship: “A woman shows her own value to her sisters
by choosing a successful and personable man. It is probably a part of the
process of natural selection, operating at the very outset of the courting
game, and a healthy egotism at that, if only the criteria involved in such
judgments were not so ersatz and commercial, and so trivial.”
1. Does each lover have a secure belief in his or her own value?
2. Are the lovers improved by the relationship? By some measure outside
of the relationship are they better, stronger, more attractive, more
accomplished, or more sensitive individuals? Do they value the
relationship for this very reason?
3. Do the lovers maintain serious interests outside the relationship,
including other meaningful personal relationships?
4. Is the relationship integrated into, rather than being set off from, the
totality of the lovers’ lives?
5. Are the lovers beyond being possessive or jealous of each other’s
growth and expansion of interests?
6. Are the lovers also friends? Would they seek each other out if they
should cease to be primary partners?
Paradoxically, at the stage where they have rejected the rest of the world
—when they need each other most—the lovers have become least critical
and aware of each other as unique individuals. The partner is just there, a
completely necessary point of certainty in a bewildering and dangerous
world. Under these conditions, acceptance of another is not a recognition of
that person’s integrity. Where need is so intense, there is no room in the
lovers’ minds for such a concept of dignity, either the other person’s or
one’s own. Their lack of feeling for themselves makes them want to be
absorbed by each other, and their lack of self-development and ability to
express themselves individually makes it possible for them to be so
engulfed.
Then, too, the lovers’ ultimate lack of interest in each other gives the lie
to the romantic notion of addicted love as a kind of intense passion. The
intensity that we see is that of desperation, not of a desire to know each
other better. In healthy relationships the growing attachment to another
person goes with a growing appreciation of that person; among these
relationships are those inspiring love affairs where two people continually
find new facets of each other to admire and delight in. In addiction what is
apparent is not the intensity of passion, but its shallowness. There is no
emotional risk in this sort of relationship, or, at least, the addict tries to
eliminate that risk as much as possible. Because he is so vulnerable, what
the addict is ideally striving for is perfect invulnerability. He only gives of
himself in exchange for the promise of safety.
From this perspective, love at first sight becomes understandable in the
sense that addiction to heroin on the first injection is understandable. A
description by an addict in The Road to H of his first shot of heroin can
apply equally well to the addicted lover’s experience: “I felt I always
wanted to feel the same way as I felt then.” Both addicts have discovered
something reassuring that they hope will never change. From the turmoil of
their inner worlds, they recognize and latch onto the one sensation they
have encountered which they feel can bring them peace.
Addicted lovers see each other more and more in order to maintain this
secure state. They settle into each other, requiring ever more frequent
interactions, until they find themselves consistently together, unable to
endure significant separations. When they are apart, they long for each
other. The two people have grown together to such an extent that, as in our
example of Vicky and Bruce in Chapter 1, neither feels like a whole person
when alone. This is the development of tolerance in a relationship. The
excitement that originally brought the lovers together has dissipated, yet the
lovers are less able than before to be critical of their arrangement. Even if
their contact degenerates into constant conflict, they cannot part.
As with heroin and its irrecoverable euphoria, or cigarettes smoked in
routine excess, something initially sought for pleasure is held more tightly
after it ceases to provide enjoyment. Now it is being maintained for
negative rather than positive reasons. The love partner must be there in
order to satisfy a deep, aching need, or else the addict begins to feel
withdrawal pain. His emotional security is so dependent on this other
individual around whom he has organized his life, that to be deprived of the
lover would be an utter shock to the system of his existence. If the world he
has built with the lover is destroyed, he desperately tries to find some other
partner so as to reestablish his artificial equilibrium. For as with heroin and
other addictions, it is traumatic for addict lovers to reenter the broader
world with which they have lost touch. “It was as though I was lost in a
dream world,” they say, “I thought everything we did was so cool, and now
I see it was all so sick.”
The addictive foundations of such a relationship are revealed when it
ends in an abrupt, total, and vindictive breakup. Since the relationship has
been the person’s one essential contact point with life, its removal
necessarily leaves him in a disoriented agony. Because the involvement has
been so total, its ending must be violent. Thus it is possible for two people
who have been the most intimate of friends suddenly to turn around and
hate each other, because they have been thinking more of themselves than
each other all along. The exploitation that has been going on throughout the
relationship simply becomes more overt when the breakup occurs; then the
two ex-lovers withdraw emotionally, perhaps to the point of trying to hurt
each other. Such betrayals are most striking when a lover breaks off from an
established relationship in favor of a new partner who better satisfies his or
her needs. Only where “love” is a self-serving device can an external
accident destroy the feelings that two people supposedly have for each
other. The addict’s haphazard, seemingly innocent couplings are more
volatile and more destructive than those formed by people who maintain a
questioning attitude toward their lives and relationships.
When there is a willingness to examine one’s motivations and behavior
toward others, the idea of addiction can be treated not as a threatening
diagnosis, but as a means for heightening the awareness of some dangers
which are very common in relationships. By establishing the antithesis of
addiction, we can delineate an ideal with which to oppose the tendencies
toward self-suppression and suppression of others that can appear in love.
Just as it is important to keep the addictive elements that are somewhere
present in all human contact from becoming full-blown addictions, it is at
least equally valuable to expand the positive, life-seeking potential that also
exists within any relationship.
A loving relationship, as Erich Fromm makes clear, is predicated on the
psychological wholeness and security of the individuals who come to it.
Out of their own integrity, the lovers seek a constant, nondisruptive growth
for each other and for the relationship. Respecting the people they are and
have been, and the lives they have formed, they try to maintain the prior
interests and affections they have known. Where possible, they want to
incorporate these things into the relationship, in order to broaden the world
they share. They also reserve the time—and the feeling—to keep up those
activities or friendships which it would be impossible or inappropriate to
offer each other.
Because they are well-composed individuals before the relationship is
conceived, their approach to that relationship is not frantic. They may be
passionately attracted and want very much to become better friends, but
they also recognize there are points at which pressure and intensity are
hurtful to what they desire. They accept the need for privacy and for
different viewpoints and tastes, they realize that forcing certain
commitments or declarations is unwise and ultimately self-defeating, and
they appreciate that it takes time for two people to know each other and to
discover the extent and depth of their compatibility. They can now carry
over to their relationship together the same good feelings that they have
about themselves as whole, secure, and reasonable people.
What makes this relationship fulfilling to them, what convinces them
that it is love, is their seeing that what they have together is particularly
rewarding among the alternatives that each of them has. Rather than making
the relationship dry or emotionless, this perspective enables them to give
without reserve as mature people who know why they love and sacrifice,
and why they can inspire these feelings in someone else. The fact that they
are discriminating makes clear that their choice of each other has been
made on both sides out of something other than desperation, and thus
cannot be blown away by a chance wind. There is no reason for them to
doubt that their feeling for each other is genuine, substantial, and long-
lived, and hence there is no reluctance to explore life both within the
relationship and outside it.
The impetus for this exploration is the life instinct of the individuals
involved: they were growing beings before they met, and they entered upon
their union as a positive choice for continued growth, only this time to be
carried out in conjunction with—though not exclusively with—another
person. The lovers approach the relationship itself as an opportunity for
growth. They want to understand more about it, about themselves, and
about each other. For this reason, a love relationship necessarily becomes
deeper, out of the experience the lovers share, and out of their constant
desire to uncover new facets of their connection and to better understand its
old facets. Each of the lovers wants to become a better person and wants the
other to become a better person, both out of a love for that person and a
desire to see the best things happen to him or her, and out of the knowledge
that this will make him or her—and oneself—a more stimulating,
accomplished, happy person to love and be with.
For these things to come about, a loving relationship must be a helping
relationship. The lovers have to support each other in their areas of
weakness and their areas of strength, though with a different attitude toward
each. The first is understood as something undesirable which it may be hard
to change. The second is welcomed, admired, utilized, and expanded. In
both cases, there is a loving attention, an appreciation of each other’s
individuality, and a striving to bring out what is best in each other. To do
this may require gentle but persistent reminders, on the one hand, or
encouragement and congratulations on the other. But the aim of both is the
same: support for one’s partner to become the best human being he or she is
reasonably capable of being.
While it is impossible to overstate the role of nurturance and
reassurance in love, it is also true that love itself is demanding and
sometimes exhausting. The issue between addiction and love is whether the
demands will be preordained and immediately self-serving, or whether they
will be in the service of some larger sense of individual and mutual
progress. The exhaustion that sometimes results from intense contact
between two people can be due either to the self-disgust and despair of
addiction, or to an impatience and dismay at seeing challenges go unmet.
Human emotion necessarily involves risk. The risk may stem from the
possibility that a rigid coupling will be cataclysmically disrupted by some
new, unanticipated experience, or from the chance that two people who do
not allow their lives to be totally defined will evolve in different directions.
There is always this danger in love; to deny it is to deny love. But where the
people involved are genuine and self-sustaining, and where they have been
in love, the parting—made with whatever pain and regret—will not be the
end of them as individuals or as loving friends.
This feeling of existential confidence in oneself and one’s relationships
is hard to achieve, and may only very rarely be encountered. A host of
social forces work against it, and, as a result, it is unfortunately easier to
find examples of addiction than of self-fulfillment in love.
Chapter 5
© 1962, Jobete Music Company, Inc. Hollywood, California, U.S.A. International copyright secured.
All rights reserved. Reprinted by permission.
This chapter shows the way addicted lovers meet, grow into each other (or leap into one another)
for a variety of reasons, and either do or do not stay together. It is a clinical depiction of the
bonds of close relationships—relationships that might be called love, but that are really very
mechanical couplings. It explores what drives people to addictions. Some of these factors are
peculiar to the person; some are general, cultural habits. That is, true addictive relationships are
“rooted in an existential pain that is deeper than any calculations about sex or money” or a need
to attain social status. One way we see this is when such relationships become abusive or deeply
painful, and yet people stay in them. Indeed, as we saw in Chapter 2, addiction is built on
involvements (think of drugs, alcohol, and gambling) that are hurtful, sometimes brutally
harmful, and yet people still cling to them.
At the same time, the tendency toward addictive relationships is learned by the social rules of the
road—that is, the way society in America is organized. Before we turn to how such addictive
drives are learned, we first need to question whether this picture remains true nearly half a
century—and two generations (Generation Xers and Millennials)—beyond the baby boomers.
The short answer is “largely yes.” People today are just about as likely to feel the need to commit
themselves to a relationship that may not suit them, even though there is undoubtedly greater
sexual freedom now. When the New York Times featured a story on the college hook-up culture,
Maia Szalavitz authored an article in Time Healthland on the research of sociologists who
studied college students’ sexual behavior in the years 1988-1996 and 2002-2010 (corresponding
to Gen Xers and Millennials). The two groups didn’t differ in the number of sexual partners they
had. So whatever pressures toward sexual intimacy are felt by young people, they are more
constant than changeable. We believe the same interpersonal and sexual patterns characterized
the parents of Gen Xers and Millennials, the baby boomers growing up in pre-1988 America
who appear in this book.
In the study Szalavitz cited, there was a slight decline in the number of college students saying
they had a “spouse or regular sex partner.” But this number in the 2000s was still 77 percent of
students! (It was 85% in the earlier generation.) So we should not expect too great a change in
the trend among Americans—that is, Americans who go to college—to enact the pressure to
couple up, whatever that entails for them. In other words, the stories in this chapter remain true.
On the other hand, the description of social-class differences in Chapter 4 of Love and Addiction,
in which it is middle-class people who seek reassurance in stable relationships, while working-
class and other Americans can’t rely on such stable couplings, has become even more true. This
picture, as described by Lee Rainwater, and by us, was this:
“The lower class person … is less dependent on people, and more oriented
toward those gratifications which can be achieved without complicated
cooperation of other human beings.” Among the middle-class children in the
study, a distinct pattern emerged which explains how people can be the drugs of
middle-class addiction. Two-thirds of the middle-class children (as compared to
only one-fifth of the children from lower-class families) showed evidence of a
“social dependency constellation.” The latter can be defined as the need to cling
to one human object for love and support. That object may not even be a true
person, but only a conception of a person.
The picture of two different Americas today is presented most forcefully in Charles Murray’s
Coming Apart—which the New York Times columnist David Brooks has detailed. It is not just
income and education that divide Americans, differences that weren’t nearly so great in the
1960s-1970s as they are today. What drives the two Americas apart even more today is how they
live and love. The middle- to upper-class, college-educated elite form stable families with low
divorce rates, families organized to stay together and move their children ahead the same way the
parents were brought up. Those in disadvantaged (or less advantaged) circles don’t have this
stability, but rather form quicker “hitting,” less stable couplings. The advantaged group,
according to Brooks, has “returned to 1950s traditionalist values and practices. They have low
divorce rates, arduous work ethics and strict codes to regulate their kids. Members of the lower
tribe work hard and dream big, but are more removed from traditional bourgeois norms. They
live in disorganized, postmodern neighborhoods in which it is much harder to be self-disciplined
and productive.” Almost half of their children, for instance, are born out of wedlock.
And so, Love and Addiction continues this story of the nuclear American family and the people,
types of love, and families it produces:
In today’s uncertain world, there are many people who can identify with the
experience of unwise or desperate love. And there are many people who can
identify with the experiences of aimlessness and self-doubt, fear and escapism.
Some of these readers may find that this broadened concept of addiction gives
them a concrete way to interpret their experiences. In this sense, too, Love and
Addiction is a personal book, one whose relevance can only be accurately
interpreted by each individual.
This is as true today—truer—as it was when Love and Addiction was written.
The vignettes that follow, like that of Vicky and Bruce in Chapter 1, are in a
way unusual for a book of this kind. We think of a psychological study as
depicting some obvious abnormality. This is not true of the psychological
studies presented here. People like the ones portrayed in these narratives do
not think of themselves, and are not generally thought of, as pathological
cases. On the contrary, they are reckoned as healthy, contributing members
of society. Some of our characters, in fact, are cast as highly accomplished
professionals. Their attitudes toward their own lives range from
complacency to bearable dissatisfaction, from total unawareness to fatalistic
self-knowledge. Such individuals lead lives that most would deem
acceptable, but they could fulfill themselves at a wholly different level were
it not for the fact that they are addicted.
Addiction is not always an all-or-none proposition. Although there are
differences in personality that tip an individual’s balance toward an
addictive or a nonaddictive orientation, we all are susceptible to addiction
in greater or lesser degree. Habit and repetition are necessary parts of any
life, and none of us is altogether free from the impulse to retreat to secure
ground. When that impulse gets out of hand, and dominates our existence, it
is addiction—and each of us individually has to decide when that point has
been reached. The characters in this book have been created to illustrate a
pattern found commonly all around us. In this respect, the use of relatively
“normal” individuals as hypothetical case studies can help us grasp the
subtlety and the universal dimensions of addiction. If severe personal
discontent and paralysis can exist in people who fit society’s definition of
normality, then society is accepting, and even sanctioning, a kind of
spiritual disability.
The placid union of our prototype couple, Vicky and Bruce, illustrates
what an addictive relationship ideally aims to be, that is, untouched by time
and place. What happens to such a couple ten, twenty, thirty years later?
Can an unsound relationship survive indefinitely? With Vicky and Bruce, it
is likely they can persist in their feeling that their marriage is a success, as
long as they continue to isolate themselves from the world. This isolation is
not physical so much as it comes from a way of looking at interactions with
all other people as external and perfunctory. By dealing seriously only with
each other and their families, such couples don’t face the tensions that
would arise from exposure to a more fluid environment.
The stories that follow are both more complex and more typical. In
them, addictive needs are in conflict with other personal motivations and
with cultural forces which endanger the stability of fragile relationships.
These cases show that the character of an addictive relationship is most
clearly revealed when the relationship is under stress. They also show why
there is probably no such thing as a one-sided addiction, and how different
but complementary needs, in combination with certain social pressures, can
temporarily bring ill-matched couples together.
Like Vicky and Bruce, Gail and Allen were originally motivated to create
an égoisme à deux. But because they chose to maintain contact with the rest
of the world, they failed to seal themselves off so effectively as did Vicky
and Bruce. Their story provides an example of what happens to an addictive
marriage when its weaknesses are played upon by a changing cultural
climate.
Allen and Gail were students together at Ohio State University. At the
time they met, he was a junior and she a freshman. The two young people
had traveled quite different routes on their way to meeting at college. Gail’s
parents had been killed in a car accident when she was five. Fortunately,
however, an aunt and uncle who were close to her family had immediately
taken Gail (and her eight-year-old brother) into their home in Akron. Gail’s
new parents were kind and attentive to her, as they were to their own
children—two boys and a girl a year and a half younger than Gail. But the
new household also had its unsettling aspects. Gail’s uncle had been a
chemical engineer with a promising future in a large rubber manufacturing
company until, claiming that an invention of his had been taken over
without acknowledgment, he ran afoul of his employers. He eventually left
this position and went into business on his own while he pursued litigation
to gain redress. He subsequently had some good years financially and some
bad ones. Perhaps because he never secured his place in the community, his
wife was especially concerned that all her children act properly, and that
they be accepted socially.
Allen had come from a much more staid and conventional home, one
managed tightly by a father who had attended medical school, but who had
been forced to drop out and become a science teacher instead. Now a school
superintendent, he made sure that his two sons were outstanding students.
While still in high school Allen had to contend with the image of an older
brother who was popular, brilliant, and already an acknowledged personal
and professional success. But Allen, too, had a great deal of natural ability,
and at Ohio State he gravitated to the science courses which showed his
technical aptitude in its best light. There was another side to his mind,
though, one which poked fun at things and led him to associate with people
who questioned façades and hypocrisies. He became one of a group of male
friends who criticized the rules and unspoken social forms that governed
life for most students at Ohio State. He and his friends wore their hair a
little longer than average, prided themselves on reading more widely, and in
other ways set themselves off from their classmates.
But when Allen found Gail, he showed little interest in continuing his
association with these men. At one time his closest friends, they became
superfluous to him. As he put it, he no longer “needed” to be with them
now that he was in love with Gail. In fact, the role of mentor to this young
woman appealed greatly to a man who felt he had never been granted his
due by other men. Allen’s old pals in some ways accepted his separation
from them, because they, too, believed in the ideal of a close, sharing
relationship with a woman—one that meant leaving many other things
behind. In other ways, however, they resented the change in Allen. His
roommates, for example, regarded his bringing Gail into the dormitory at
times when they were trying to study as selfish and inconsiderate. Once a
classmate came to Allen’s room to get some help for a test the next day.
Instead, he was forced to wait an hour (after which he left) while Allen
talked on the phone to Gail in an effort to calm her down about a traumatic
mishap in one of her classes.
Many upsetting things happened to Gail at college. With warmth and
affection from her stepparents, she had come through adolescence an
outwardly happy and well-adjusted girl, with insecurities that seemed not to
be outside the normal range for a person of her age. Yet although attractive
and energetic, she was also skittish and temperamental, and still relied on
regular calls from her aunt for a sense of security. At the same time, she
wanted deeper answers to life than her aunt and Akron society could offer.
Having met with tragedy early on and later having identified with her
uncle’s maverick stance, she felt as though she had been singled out by fate
for a depth of experience that passed most of her acquaintances by. While
not a particularly good student in high school, she wrote poems and wanted
better to understand herself and life. But she had no intellectual forms in
which to cast her thoughts and observations. These Allen provided in the
long talks they had while they walked around the campus in the evenings.
As Gail grew closer to Allen that first year away from home, her aunt’s
phone calls took on a new air. She seemed to be checking up on Gail. In
particular, she got in the habit of calling early on both Saturday and Sunday
mornings, as if to make sure that Gail had not slept away from her room. In
addition, the aunt began to take up Gail’s time on the phone with paeans
about her cousin, who was a cheerleader and social luminary in high school,
dating a different boy each Friday and Saturday night. The cousin had
always been better able to live out the role her mother had in mind for the
girls. Now, with Gail having an intimate relationship with a man, it seemed
that a rift was developing within the family. The person to whom Gail had
most consistently looked for love and emotional support was disapproving
of her.
In the place of her aunt’s devotion, Gail looked more and more toward
Allen for guidance. Allen gave her advice on how to think and how to live.
He encouraged her and gave her confidence in herself, but the implication
was that what he gave he could take away. In return, Allen called upon Gail
to side with him in the various conflicts of egos that were a normal part of
college life among men, even those who criticized collegiate society and
stayed on its fringes. While Allen himself was not aggressive, challenges
from others elicited in him a privatism that led him to retreat to home
ground. He generally preferred a retiring life, contentedly working late into
the night on his studies, and Gail was all he felt he needed to fulfill himself
personally. As long as he had Gail’s respect and loyalty, and her
unquestioning acceptance of his versions of the daily events he was
involved in, he sought no more.
Allen’s excessive reliance on Gail was a complex matter. Although his
tendency toward isolation could be called defensive, it did not completely
obscure his considerable personal appeal and intellectual capacities. The
use of his mind was not limited to schoolwork, and when he was with
people he had a lot to offer. Both witty and insightful, he was an engaging
person to be around. For his own part, he enjoyed the company of serious
and rounded people more than that of his narrow, technically oriented
scientist colleagues. Yet the constricted lifestyle and personal inertia that
made him so willing to shut himself off with one person reflected a deep
fatalism. He was pessimistic about his ability to give direction to his life or
to have any impact on his world. This inertia characteristically overcame
his energetic side and resulted in the care he took to build into his life a
number of devices for ensuring his comfort. A doting girlfriend was one
more of these devices.
Altogether, this relationship was not much different from other
involvements formed by college students newly awakened to the
possibilities for life-sharing that being away from home afforded. A man
who can protect his woman and a woman who sides with her man in any
dispute are ever-present ideals in our culture. But Allen and Gail forged a
permanent connection out of what was a very immature tie, as they created
a relationship almost solely for the sake of alleviating their respective
insecurities.
One day, after a weekend at home, Gail returned to school terrifically
depressed. She had been forced to endure one critical lecture after another,
culminating in a hushed conversation in which her cousin told her how
unhappy her behavior was making her aunt. As she sat with Allen,
discussing how they could circumvent the dormitory regulations which
prevented them from spending as much time together as they wanted, Gail
began to wonder if it was all worth it. Then Allen made a startling
proposition: “Why don’t we just get married, and stop all this sneaking
around?” For Gail, it suddenly seemed the obvious solution. She could
leave behind her untidy family situation and join up with the boy she loved.
Besides being knowledgeable in the areas that mattered to her, Allen was
kind, and she saw in him a chance to realize all the things she wanted but
could not get for herself. She especially admired Allen’s intellectual
attainments and his association with a group of offbeat, critically minded
students. Although she felt intimidated by this group, she envied their clear
and certain vision of things. This is not to say that she anticipated specific
advantages from marrying Allen. She actually went into the marriage with a
genuine enthusiasm and hopefulness, rather than a calculated opportunism.
But never having dealt with her lack of personal definition, she also went
into the marriage as a child, looking for a way of maintaining her childlike
role. For his part, Allen was delighted to have an attractive wife who would
keep him company and share his perspective in life. Never before having
held so securely the affection of another person, he would do whatever was
necessary to guarantee the continuation of this relationship.
By the time they got married, in the summer after Gail’s freshman year,
the two had had a smoothly functioning relationship for almost a year.
Thus, their friends and acquaintances readily accepted the move as a
reasonable step. Since even the more iconoclastic students at this time and
place favored permanent, monogamous attachments, there was no reason to
question this one, even if it seemed somewhat premature. With the families,
it was a different story. Allen’s parents were suspicious of this young
woman who wanted to avail herself of their son’s background and
promising future, while Gail’s aunt protested vehemently that a coed should
get around more and should only marry when she was in a position to
choose from among many men. The aunt was not impressed with Allen’s
academic record when she knew that he had years of schooling to go
through before he could support a wife. But as Allen and Gail persisted in
their intentions, their parents gradually accepted the fact that they were
serious about each other. Finally, the two families met and agreed that as
long as the young people were going to be so deeply involved with each
other anyway, their intimacy might as well be acknowledged and brought
into the family. So Allen and Gail married with Allen not yet out of college,
and Gail barely into it. Neither had had any serious boyfriends or
girlfriends, and Gail had not dated, not kissed, another boy since before her
eighteenth birthday.
As a married couple ensconced in an apartment away from the main
campus, they occasionally saw their old friends, but mainly they spent their
time alone together. They no longer had to relate so intensely as when they
had desperately sought reassurance from each other in the face of outside
threats. Instead, they settled into a quiet domestic existence—one very
much in keeping with the staid atmosphere that prevailed on this Ohio
campus. But it all came to an end when Allen went on to graduate school
the next year. Sensing that the limited purview of the science courses he had
taken didn’t reflect his own broader interests and concerns, Allen decided to
study environmental sciences. He hoped in this way to turn his abilities to
applied research that was both more useful and more stimulating.
As he turned away from abstract scientific work, Allen also rejected the
option of staying at Ohio State. Instead, he chose to go to the West Coast, to
the University of Oregon, where there was a well-developed awareness of
environmental issues and a clear mandate for doing something about them.
Gail, too, welcomed this chance to enter a fresh, exciting world. She felt
that unlike Ohio State, Eugene would be a real intellectual community. Gail
was a vibrant person—after all, choosing to side with Allen against her
family was not something a completely timid and yielding person would
have been able to do—and it was her and Allen’s vital, inquisitive side that
moved them toward a more fluid environment. In taking this chance to
grow as individuals, however, they unwittingly placed themselves in a
setting that would be fatal to their life together.
When Gail arrived in Eugene, she found a world even more invigorating
than she had imagined it would be. Just entering her junior year in college,
she embarked on a program that the university had recently created. It was
called “Human Development,” and it drew on the range of social,
psychological, and biological sciences for an understanding of human
behavior. Many of her fellow students in the program were seeking, as she
was, to make themselves into more contented human beings by overcoming
past hangups, and thus the courses showed an emphasis on contemporary
psychological movements such as primal, gestalt, and Reichian therapies.
Gail was attracted by a group of Reichian devotees, and in their teachings
and practices she found a way to release what she felt was her real self.
As she was drawn into these explorations, Gail tried to bring Allen with
her. But he was reluctant to follow. Perhaps he was just not used to seeing
Gail take the lead. In any case, his life in Oregon was very different from
hers. As a serious graduate student, he busied himself with secluded
research, conducted alone or in conjunction with a few colleagues. Allen
was content to transplant the privacy and self-containment of his life in the
Midwest to this new milieu, seeking from his surroundings only some faint
diversion in the form of observing the various West Coast movements
taking place around him. Gail was not satisfied with indirect involvement.
Initially looking toward Allen to continue to provide the stability and
competence that she relied on to obtain the things she wanted, she now
began to see him as irrelevant to her needs. She had always thought of him
as a more experienced person than herself, but now she saw him as living in
a limited world. After a while, as she came home from the campus each
evening to find Allen engrossed in his research, her resentment flared. She
felt that she was living on the margins of life.
As for Allen, his increasing indifference to Gail’s constant demands
may have signaled his disenchantment. He certainly was dubious about
Gail’s new enthusiasms, although he didn’t reveal to anyone the way he
actually felt. He seemed to carry on in the old groove more out of reflex
than present desire, more because he dreaded the consequences of a split
than because he was still getting the satisfactions from the relationship that
he once had. Just as Gail needed him less now that she had her own set of
intellectual peers, maybe he needed her less, too, now that he was safely
away from the undergraduate friends with whom he had been emotionally
involved in such an uncomfortable way. With personal relationships in
graduate school so much less complicated, he felt less need for the constant
support of a woman who still demanded quite a bit of him.
Allen, however, would have done nothing on his own. He just tried to
keep things as they were, as when he rebuffed Gail’s proposal that they
move into a commune of Reichian therapy adherents that she had been
invited to join. Whenever he turned his back on her like that, she felt on the
verge of doing something final. Then, with a noisy announcement, her
young cousin showed up in Los Angeles. In a radical turnabout, the cousin
came to live the West Coast life with a vengeance, becoming one of the
followers of a powerful guru who reportedly used his spiritual teachings as
a cover for his sexual gratifications. When Gail heard of this, she had a
perplexed reaction of envy and frustration, of having been upstaged in some
odd way by a person whom she had left behind. It was the last straw.
One morning, while Allen was at the lab, Gail took their tape recorder
and spoke about her feelings of being stifled, her desire to branch out more,
and her intention to start a new life on her own. A few minutes of taped
conversation, after which she left their apartment for good, and their life
together was ended. Allen came home, read a note directing him to turn on
the recorder, and there found his life broken asunder. Their love had turned
to resentment—Gail’s resentment as the child whose potential for an
independent life was being suppressed, Allen’s resulting feelings of having
been betrayed by an ungrateful child. She rejected what he was, and he
resented what she was becoming. Ideally, they could have tried to approach
each other in an entirely new way, with an appreciation of each other as
independent beings. In reality, they didn’t have enough in common to make
the effort worthwhile. As often happens in addiction, the choice of partners
had been almost accidental.
These things are very clear in retrospect. But at the time, Allen and
Gail’s old college acquaintances were shocked by the suddenness and
totality of the breakup. Until then, everyone had been compelled to
conceive of the relationship in its own stated terms. How else was it
possible to make sense of both partners’ enormous sacrifices of other
friendships and interests—past, present, and future—except by assuming
that a great love existed between them? Yet when Gail withdrew from the
union, it was done precipitously and unilaterally—in response, we might
say, to a series of smaller unilateral disengagements on Allen’s part. Neither
tried very hard to work things out with the other. Could this have been love?
The unexpected denouement should cause us, as it did them, to reevaluate
the whole relationship from its beginnings, and to see that what all had
called love was more like addiction. The couple’s closeness was an artificial
creation, based on their having been available to each other at a time when
they shared a special need. Once their needs changed, or they found better
ways to satisfy their needs, they knew they had no further use for each
other. Their relationship could not allow for growth in either of the two
lovers. And they were both ready to grow.
After the initial disruption stemming from their separation, Gail and
Allen threw themselves into the West Coast culture that lay in wait for them
outside their marriage. Today they can hardly imagine themselves to be the
same people who were once married to each other. They have put
themselves through a lot of experience, and they both date their growth into
“real” life from their splitting off to go into the world independently. They
have now gone off, for the most part, in different directions. Gail feels that
her emulation of Allen and his college friends’ intellectuality was
misguided, especially since she now sees their “rational” approach as
wrongheaded, and itself a product of middle-class hangups. But relatively
soon after she became immersed in Reichian therapy, she decided that the
particular commune she had joined was not for her. What’s more, she
suspected that her whole frenetic involvement in West Coast life was
superficial and did not really allow her to deal with her psychological
conflicts. As a result, she has returned to Akron and to a way of life which
does not subject her high-strung nature to such strains. She has continued
her Reichian analysis in an effort to sort out her motives and desires, and to
free more of what she still regards as her blocked energy. She has chosen to
do this by living close to her aunt and uncle and by sorting out her family
situation through the use of her new psychological tools.
It is Allen, surprisingly, who has made the West Coast his home. At the
time of the sudden dissolution of the marriage, he faced a situation which
appeared bleaker than Gail’s. Moving immediately into her commune, Gail
had ready-made emotional resources to draw upon, while Allen, with no
one he felt close to in Eugene, had nothing comparable to rely on. That he
found himself so desperate was probably fortunate in the long run. After a
miserable six months in which he did little but go to the lab every day, he
began to get into campus and community activities. Among other things, he
joined a commune dedicated to action on ecological issues, where he could
bring to bear his academic training in concrete ways. His participation in
this group has placed him in close contact with a number of people and has
brought him many good friendships and working relationships. It has also
led to his putting less of himself into his academic work, and he has now
begun to doubt whether an academic career holds much meaning for him
anymore. On the other hand, he was unwilling to apply for a position he
might easily have obtained in a state office created to preserve Oregon’s
natural resources and beauty. He seems not to be sure of what he wants to
do professionally.
Both Allen and Gail have now been allowed to follow out the courses
their lives almost seemed destined to travel. Gail’s inward movement and
Allen’s outward movement have made them more complete individuals,
correcting somewhat their past imbalances. In this sense, they have broken
out of the barriers their relationship built around them. Neither is very self-
critical about their marriage, however, which they seem to regard as just
another experience that contributed to making them what they are today.
They feel that given what they were when they met, it was something they
had to get into; given what they later became, it was something they had to
get out of. While it is probably healthy for them to adopt this attitude—it
would certainly be foolish for them to weigh themselves down with guilt at
this time—it may still be that Allen and Gail are not ready to confront what
it is in themselves which threw them off by so much when they felt they
were forming a lasting love relationship.
Neither of them has yet found a single, stable relationship with another
person, which they both say they want, even though they now know a great
deal more about who they are when they enter into an involvement. Gail
has shied away from serious, long-term entanglements altogether. Allen has
striven to achieve more honest, mature relationships with women, but he,
too, has not been able to find what he wants in these, and his affairs have
drifted into disinterest or disillusionment on either his or the woman’s part.
With both Allen and Gail, the realization of where their marriage failed has
not been such as to enable them to understand where they go wrong when
they enter into a new relationship. Perhaps they have not identified their
insecurities sufficiently well. Perhaps they misconceive their goals, and
while they think they want another permanent lover, they should really be
thinking of personal satisfaction in other, less grand terms. Finally, since
neither has found a basic career interest—they have subordinated this
consideration to more personal concerns—their lives show an overall lack
of direction that may make secure personal resolutions almost impossible
for them.
Allen and Gail seem not to have overcome the childhood training which
left them passive when it came to giving their lives a larger momentum. It is
not an accident that Allen is still a student as he nears thirty, and that Gail’s
deepest emotional ties are still within her family. Apparently, the culture
into which they were born produced individuals who could not act
effectively outside the structures of family and school. This is why they
turned to an addictive panacea in the first place. As Allen and Gail conceive
of it, what they have been going through both in their marriage and in the
years since is a kind of retooling that is required of many people because
they were inadequately prepared for the new demands society has placed on
them.
After Gail and Allen got married, Gail’s aunt came to accept and even
to endorse the relationship. How stricken she was, then, when Gail
confessed her desertion several weeks after the fact. The aunt now
disapproved of Gail’s having given up so quickly. “I don’t see why two
adults can’t sit down and work these things out,” she insisted. “Things have
not always been easy between me and Dad.” To Gail and Allen this made
no sense, since they wanted more from life than the security of a makeshift
partnership. If anything can be learned from this story, it is that to “fall in
love” and take on the pseudo-adult roles of a married pair is, as a substitute
for personal growth, becoming easier to do, but harder to get away with.
Carl and Shelley, a couple in their late twenties, also were involved in an
addictive relationship that broke down under stress. But their story has a
different flavor from that of Allen and Gail. There was no idealized
marriage, no parental guidance; the relationship ran its course inside the
complex and sometimes brutal world of young, single professionals. This
case also has an extra wrinkle, for in it one partner appeared to be addicted
while the other did not. It is actually a case where two contrasting and
conflicting personal styles interacted so as to produce a surprisingly
tenacious mutual dependency.
We get a glimpse of this relationship in a story told by another couple
about a trip they took with Carl and Shelley and a fifth person. “It had been
snowing between here and Montreal, so we took our jeep, which has two
seats in front and a bench seat in back. You can squeeze three people into
that rear seat, but it’s very uncomfortable. We were the only two who could
drive the jeep, so we worked the seating like this: Whichever one of the two
of us wasn’t driving sat in back. The other three passengers took turns
sitting beside the driver where they could spread out a bit. Except for
Shelley, that is. She always gave up her turn in front so she could stay with
Carl in back. She did this throughout the 800-mile round trip, even though
Carl took every chance he could get to sit up front, and she never said
anything to him about it.”
Who were this couple, and why did they act that way? Carl was a young
doctor who came to New York to do his internship. When he arrived he
called all the women he knew around New York, as was his custom upon
reaching any new locale. Among these women was Shelley, whom Carl had
met briefly on a previous visit to the city. He didn’t feel a special attraction
to her, but when some of his other contacts didn’t turn out, he arranged to
see Shelley again. She was living outside the city in a semirural house with
several other women. Carl had a pleasant time there and so he continued to
get together with Shelley, either by driving up to her house or having her
take the train down to the city.
Carl welcomed these relaxing interludes very much. As an intern, he
was immersed in hospital work for days—and even weeks—at a time. After
such a stretch, he found it irresistible to drive up to Shelley’s place and
unwind. He enjoyed the countryside, Shelley’s home, the meals she made
for him, and the pleasures of sex and company that she provided. Although
Carl considered himself something of a swinger, in the period since he had
come to New York he had had difficulty meeting other women, given the
demands of his schedule. So he naturally fell more deeply into this
relationship. Shelley, meanwhile, could see Carl whenever and for however
long he was free, because her job as a commercial artist allowed her to
make her own hours. Carl could count on her always being glad to see him,
and he could make plans with her at a moment’s notice. She didn’t seem to
have much else on tap. She certainly didn’t seem to be very interested in the
other women with whom she lived; in fact, she usually complained about
them to Carl during his visits, and kept her distance from them while he was
there.
If Carl had thought about it, he might have been surprised that he could
have such complete access to an established professional of Shelley’s age.
But Shelley’s background was unusual for a woman in her position. Starting
as a young bride, she quickly became a mother and then a widow—all
before she was twenty-five. At that age she suffered a breakdown. After her
parents took her child in, Shelley began to build a career. Socially, though,
she repeatedly sought out men she could cling to. One such attachment had
just ended when she met Carl.
After a while, Carl became uneasy about the amount of time he was
spending with Shelley, what with his grand designs on the female
population of New York. He prepared Shelley for the lessened contact he
foresaw by telling her that he didn’t feel he could take as much time off to
come up to see her, and that, anyway, he was a little uncomfortable in the
strained atmosphere created by her housemates. On his next visit, Carl
noticed that Shelley had packed all her belongings into boxes. When he
asked her about this, he discovered that she had interpreted his comments as
a request that she move into his apartment with him. Carl was shocked, but
he didn’t see any easy way out of his predicament. What’s more, he
reflected that it might be fun to have a companion in the city, and someone
to provide him with the domestic comforts. So he dutifully took Shelley and
her things back with him.
As Carl told everyone he knew—but mostly himself—this was not
meant to be a permanent arrangement. He attempted to justify that claim by
treating Shelley in an increasingly detached way. But he never made a move
to end things. When his internship was completed and he entered his
residency, his working hours became more nearly normal, so that he no
longer had external constraints to blame for his plight. Whatever his long-
range goals, he could not bring himself to take an action whose immediate
impact would be to deprive him of something comfortable. Instead, he
began to have secret affairs, principally with women he had known
elsewhere who were stopping by in New York. These were compromised,
though, by Carl’s tendency to take up the women’s time with complaints
about Shelley. Given the trouble a woman had to go through to contact Carl
—either calling when Shelley was away, or else pretending she was a
cousin of his—the affairs amounted to little more than silly escapades.
Shelley was suspicious of Carl’s shenanigans over the phone and his late
nights at the hospital, and at times she would become extremely angry. She
couldn’t muster a serious threat to walk out of this demeaning situation,
however, because her discontent was so totally and patently that she wanted
more of Carl, not less.
Each time Carl tried to make his position clear to Shelley, she insisted
that he could not possibly feel as he said he did, and that his uninvolved
stance was merely a pose. He, by not taking any action, and by (in effect)
acknowledging the status of the relationship when he lied about his affairs,
made her retorts sound reasonable. The relationship that existed in Carl’s
mind was entirely different from the one in Shelley’s mind. Both partners
stated their wishes in no uncertain terms, and both allowed themselves to
believe that the other’s acquiescence implied an acceptance of those terms,
or at least a hope of eventual acceptance. Neither had much concern for
how the other actually felt; they existed for each other mainly as objects to
be manipulated (or imagined) into playing a desired role.
The frequent arguments between the two served no purpose, for no
changes in behavior were ever made on either side. A remark of Shelley’s
during one of these confrontations nakedly revealed her addiction. “If you
leave me now,” she said, “then what was it all for?” She valued their time
together not for the pleasures it had brought her, not for whatever intangible
contribution it had made to her experience, but only insofar as it guaranteed
her lover’s continuing presence. In this respect, she was just like a heroin
addict obsessed with making sure her next fix will be available when she
wants it. The question we have to ask is whether—or how—Carl was really
any different.
After two years, realizing that he would never be able to leave Shelley
except by leaving New York (but not realizing what this implied about
himself), Carl decided to finish his residency elsewhere, namely in Newport
News, Virginia. He told friends that by going to the South he would be able
to get away from Shelley. But Shelley—asserting herself in a way Carl had
never seen before—pestered one of her business clients who had offices in
Washington, D.C. until she finally got a job there. The couple drove south
together. Shelley had made arrangements to move in with a friend in
Washington, but as long as Carl remained there before continuing on to
Virginia, she stayed with him in his hotel room.
When Carl finally left, Shelley’s first reaction was to fall apart. Then
she began to come across as sane and reasonable in her letters and phone
calls to him, disarming any apprehensions he might have about her. She
spoke about a new lover she was seeing in Washington—not to make Carl
jealous, but to reassure him that she would no longer be an unpleasantness
to him. Eventually he invited her to Virginia for a visit, an act he regretted
from the moment of her arrival—a day early. The visit was full of tensions
and willful misunderstandings about the nature of the relationship. Shelley
was still asking a lot more of Carl than he was prepared to give. As for
Shelley’s new lover, he evidently did not yet figure prominently in her
plans.
How can we make sense of this situation? Shelley was an addict in the
classical sense. Though she was a sensitive, capable woman, she did not
seem to derive any real satisfactions from her work. She did not make
friends easily and did not enjoy very many people’s company. Whatever
new opportunities came to her as a mature person, her early marriage
continued to set the pattern for her life. Like her husband and previous
lovers, Carl functioned as a symbol of certainty, tying everything together
for her. By being willing to sacrifice all other possible connections and
commitments in order to preserve—or invent—this sure focus for her
existence, she became that much more needful of a crutch in order to live.
Carl had become Shelley’s only world, one which at least had an
immediate, superficial reality while they were living together, but which
was becoming increasingly flimsy.
Carl’s addiction was more puzzling, for he was outwardly adventurous
and good-natured and seemingly a self-assured person. He had a strong
feeling for the prerogatives enjoyed by a young professional, and for the
independent life that was open to him. But he couldn’t come to grips with
himself or organize his life in any larger sense. When any complicated
personal emotions were introduced into his scheme of things, requiring him
to establish his basic preferences, he had no idea of how to react. He
became passive and showed an almost pathological tendency to vacillate.
Unsure just what intimate relationships were all about, he took a detached
approach to his life and to other people. Since he could not give his
involvements a solid grounding, only a woman who was prepared, however
perversely, to cling to him no matter what could form a lasting tie with him.
Carl’s actions, in fact, made no more sense than did Shelley’s. Very few
men, feeling as he said he did, would have kept playing her game for so
long. He could present himself as a calculating male who was using Shelley
as a convenience, at the same time that he maintained the relationship long
after it supposedly became burdensome to him. Or he could take the
opposite line and say that he couldn’t bring himself to hurt Shelley by
cutting things off, while he was hurting her far more by permitting her to
evade reality and thus not discover whether she could sink or swim on her
own.
For all his savoir faire, Carl was adrift. A woman who saw to his
superficial wants could make him feel as if he were being looked after in
deeper ways—something he desired but was incapable of bringing about
genuinely. Because he was so out of touch with real emotions in himself or
others, he could only form a long-term relationship with a person like
Shelley who bestowed affection without regard to whether or not it was
mutual. Thus he needed her as much as she needed him. Whenever the
desire for emotional security becomes primary over all else, for whatever
reason, addiction sets in. And someone who consistently gratifies an
addict’s needs generally shows some matching weakness or uncertainty.
Carl, too, was an addict. A month after the visit from Shelley which so
annoyed him, he came up to Washington to spend the Christmas holidays
with her, rather than taking up a number of invitations to visit other parts of
the country. Whatever his opinion of this woman, he couldn’t do without
her.
It is fitting that Shelley, who was the prime mover in creating a
relationship out of Carl’s essential passivity, was also the one who, in a final
paroxysm of frustration, broke it off. Even as her visits to Carl continued,
her new lover began to assume real proportions. Shelley tentatively held off
his advances while implicitly asking Carl to make a decision to resolve the
situation, in the hope that he would affirm his commitment. Carl,
meanwhile, waited with increasingly ill-concealed relief for things to be
settled by this outside agent. Unable to move Carl by this one last effort,
Shelley stormed out on him one weekend, but not before discharging her
long-standing rage in a physical attack on him. Now she has transferred the
burden of her dependency to a new relationship, just as she did when she
first met Carl. As for Carl, being in Washington without looking up Shelley
is for him like being a newly reformed alcoholic who winces every time he
passes a bar.
Growing Up Addicted
The way they shut their doors, these married people, and shut themselves into their own exclusive
alliance with each other, even in love, disgusted him. It was a whole community of mistrustful couples
insulated in private houses or private rooms, always in couples, and no further life, no further
immediate, no disinterested relationship admitted: a kaleidoscope of couples, disjoined, separatist,
meaningless entities of married couples.
This chapter, building on the previous one, analyzes the addictogenic nature of modern society—
that is, what about our daily life feeds into our addictions. It begins with the analysis of the
nuclear family, an issue we discussed in Chapter 5 in assessing to what extent the cases of love
addiction we described are still commonplace. In this chapter, we note (writing presciently in the
1970s, given the 2013 article we cited in the new lead-in to the previous chapter showing that
Millennials and Gen Xers are similar to their predecessors in terms of their tendencies towards
sexual “hook-ups” versus committed relationships):
Even among young people whose new cultural style supposedly repudiates the old stilted
conception of dating, most appear to be carrying on in the same old way. It is true that young
couples engage in sex more readily than did their precursors. But we should not expect such
deeply ingrained cultural tenets as the significance attached to marriage—and sex—to be
forgotten in a decade … parents and children often differ little in their attitudes towards sex….
People who came of age after the sexual revolution supposedly transformed college life are no
less subject to the pressure to couple than those who came before.
But there is much more to the susceptibility to addiction—love addiction included—than the
tendency to couple up for social life. These are the trends analyzed in this and the next chapter
and how they present themselves in today’s world.
1. The dependent child. Chapter 6 is devoted primarily to the passivity- and dependence-
producing nature of modern childrearing and childhood. But, things have gotten worse,
much worse. While we could reference how little independent time kids had—compared
to forays alone or with friends biking into the woods or going downtown together that
children enjoyed in the immediate postwar period—the sixties and seventies now seem
like a halcyon idyll of a bygone era. In the 2010s, children can’t venture outside their door
alone—in the most prosperous, safest suburbs—until they are teenagers, for fear of being
run over or kidnapped! Gone is the idea of a child contributing to a household—even the
modest chores baby boomers were expected to perform. We have created a generation of
children whose entire place in society is secondary, hidden, self-absorbed, and often quite
lonely.
2. The electronic child. Although we discuss television viewing and addiction at length (in
Chapter 7), we simply couldn’t imagine—no one could—the degree to which today’s
children, teens, young adults—in fact, all of us—are yoked to electronic auxiliaries to
function, keep pace, entertain ourselves, and be connected to the world. A dystopia of
socially isolated individuals like A Clockwork Orange has long ago been surpassed. Even
fiction writers couldn’t have guessed at the extent to which electronic devices would be
interposed between ourselves and the people, experiences, and environments of the world
we live in. We are potentially evolving into a new species, with a kind of higher—but
detachable—intellect and sensory system supplied to us by Apple et al. These changes are
inescapable—we don’t want to escape them. After all, they make our lives easier and
more productive than ever before imaginable (just as we are producing this e-book). At
the same time, the further implications of this human—or inhuman—evolution are beyond
our current comprehension.
3. Cultural drift. Our susceptibility to addiction stems in part from “the loss of stable social
structures and religious beliefs that have traditionally provided a framework for individual
lives. Most people are not and probably never were equipped to live comfortably in an
existential void where they must create their own values and meanings…. If addiction is a
manifestation of a need for external structure, it is understandable that it is so much in
evidence at present.” Update: While we hear regular announcements of people returning
to traditional values, or religion, or tightly-knit social groups, this trend in the opposite
direction is apparently irreversible, at least until some future dystopia, when we will
perhaps return to a medieval allegiance to church, state, community, and family—but
nobody looks forward to what it will take to get us there.
4. Education for addiction. One constant from the time of Love and Addiction to the present
is a preoccupation with America’s failures at education—the inability of students to
actively process what they learn. Do you remember Sputnik, and the cries for educational
reform that it sparked? We face exactly the same issues as we did then. These are both the
decline in the excellence of even America’s elite secondary schools relative to the
mainstream in other countries and the always-widening gap in the U.S. between the haves
and the have-nots, the upper-middle class and the working class and people of color. We
described in the previous chapter the impact of this gap on the social and marital stability
of working-class individuals and families. As for education, although these problems spur
commercial products ad infinitum (from charter schools to Baby Einstein), all these
innovations fail because our educational failures are embedded in our culture, as this
chapter makes clear. A Common Core Initiative approved by most states as well as by
President Obama and business leaders required students to be able to think actively in
using basic math and reading concepts. When the first wave of negative test results
arrived, states and school districts bolted unceremoniously for the doors.
5. [Addiction] medicine and psychiatry. Chapter 6 describes our dependence on medicine—
and psychiatry: “The addictive implications of our dependence on medicine are most
strikingly present in the psychiatry-psychology boom….The prevalent form of
psychological vulnerability that we have been dealing with in this book is the absence of a
sure sense of personal control.” As with our electronification, we couldn’t have imagined
how much farther medicine—and especially the new specialty, addiction medicine—has
gone to reinforce our disconnection from ourselves in a way that encourages addiction.
Love and Addiction was written to show how commonplace, how unexceptional, the
experience of addiction is, how it is present to some extent in many activities in all of our
lives. Addiction medicine works the other way round, from the external inward. It tells us
that drug addictions are uncontrollable forces (they “hijack” our brains) and that, now that
addiction medicine is discovering that gambling and a growing number of involvements
are really addictions, these work the same ways addiction doctors claim drugs do to make
us passive victims of our own urges. In this way, the essence of addiction—the unsure,
starved self that turns itself over to a force outside of, greater than, itself—is more
apparent today than ever, and the self-appointed healers are spreading the “disease” they
claim to be treating.
And, so, we safely—and sadly—conclude that the forces that appeared in the 1970s and earlier
that thrust us towards addictive dystopias are in full array. It has become a struggle for society—
and for any individual within it—to avoid addiction. And, so, in this and in the following
chapter, we re-examine both the sources of addiction and its obvious antidotes.
Where it so natural to insulate ourselves from experience, we must seek it out actively if we want
to find it. Now, as always, the best antidotes to addiction are joy and competence—joy as the
capacity to take pleasure in the people, things, and activities that are available to us; competence
as the ability to master relevant parts of our environments and the confidence that our actions
make a difference for ourselves and others. Both joy and competence require a connectedness to
life in the concrete.
Let us take a closer look at Allen and Gail, who staked several years of their
lives on a relationship that joined only their external selves. We have seen
how this marriage shook beneath the surface, how it soon came apart. But
why did it come about in the first place? Gail and Allen were attractive,
physically and mentally able individuals. Why, then, did they feel pressed
to commit themselves so precipitously to such an imperfect union?
Gail and Allen in a sense formed a father-daughter relationship so that
they could play within their marriage the roles of assertive male and adored
female which were denied them within their own families. But such
standard psychoanalytic interpretations only go so far. Gail undoubtedly
would trace her insecurities to the trauma of her parents’ death and her
uneasy position within a family where—however warmly she was
welcomed—her cousin always knew the surest routes to her aunt’s
approval. Yet the cousin herself, with all the benefits of her real parents’
love and a continuity of upbringing, brought no internal direction to the
shifting social atmosphere which she entered when she left home. Her
extreme changeability betrayed a search for security that was even more
frantic than Gail’s.
It would seem that childhood traumas such as death and divorce are not
the sole or principal cause of addiction. Children from broken homes do not
necessarily become addicts, and, as Allen shows, children can just as easily
have severe difficulties when their homes are not disrupted by death or
divorce. Allen faced considerable emotional pressure from being expected
to meet his father’s standards and match his brother’s achievements. These
insecurities, too, were apparently not the root of his problems. For his
brother, like Gail’s cousin, ultimately gained little from his favored position
in the family. A standout performer in every way up to his graduation with
honors from law school, the brother lost his momentum and entered
adulthood feeling as uncertain and pessimistic as did Allen. He never
practiced law, but instead returned to school to study physics in a desultory
manner. In fact, it turned out that he envied Allen’s intellectual abilities.
After marrying a beautiful and gracious woman, he was divorced at the age
of thirty and started drinking heavily. He, too, has proved susceptible to
addiction.
If anything, the resemblances between Gail and her cousin and between
Allen and his brother are more striking than the differences, and these
consistencies express the styles of their respective households. The two
girls’ instability reflects that family’s uncertain social standing and the
aunt’s fearful propriety. The two brothers’ fatalism, combined with their
forced march toward academic and other achievements, is in keeping with
the stuffy, yet cynical decorum under which they were raised. These
instances and others like them strongly suggest that special circumstances
like sibling rivalries, differential treatment by parents, and broken homes
are not all that influential in shaping those aspects of children’s
personalities that are relevant to addiction. More important are the constants
—the attitudes, beliefs, and orientations that are transmitted to all the
children within a given family.
Furthermore, the attitudes which create addiction are not usually even
specific to individual families, but stem in large part from broader cultural
moods and predilections. In the home which produced stable children like
Allen and his brother and the home which produced unstable children like
Gail and her cousin, we can discern common elements of self-doubt,
anxiety, and smoldering discontent on the part of the parents. The
breadwinners’ careers in both cases were frustrated for their entire working
lives by circumstances beyond their control. The two mothers had no choice
but to be housewives, despite their considerable personal resources—in
Allen’s mother, the intelligence she transmitted to her two boys; and in
Gail’s aunt, the sense of responsibility and the strength that enabled her to
hold a large family together.
Perhaps owing to such forced narrowing of larger aspirations and
talents, these were nervous people who insisted on keeping strict control of
their homes, allowing little voice to their children. If Allen and his brother
procrastinated indefinitely over both large and small moves, they did so
under the remembered weight of their parents’ insistence that every little
thing in the house be in its place at all times. When Gail’s uncle taught her
to drive, he would lecture her condescendingly, and would take control of
the car at the sight of a pedestrian crossing the road anywhere on the block
ahead. His final instruction to her after she somehow got her license was
that she should never drive the car more than ten miles alone. Worst of all,
this protection cum harassment continued past the age when Allen and Gail
should have formed some independent judgment. In their parents’ eyes, it
seemed, they never ceased to be children.
As a result, they never developed into fully competent people—not even
as competent, say, as their parents were beneath their neuroses. This was
especially true of Gail, who seemed perpetually in a state of upset. Her
jitteriness and her appeals for verbal reassurance may well have been less
an expression of a need for love than of helplessness and a lack of
confidence in herself. Considering that she married at a time when she
hadn’t established a personal identity, it is significant that she was later
surprised when other people found her appealing and sought her out. She
had been systematically taught at home to underestimate her own
capacities. At Eugene Gail came to think differently about herself, but by
then her marriage, and perhaps her basic personality, had already been
formed.
Allen, too, was deeply affected by his parents’ forebodings. Although
he was mechanically adept, he always hesitated for weeks before tackling a
broken household appliance. Then, as he worked on it, he would oscillate
between claiming that the repair was as good as done and swearing that it
would be impossible. Under the confident air he displayed to Gail was a
deep strain of confusion and volatility. The same spirit characterized the
couple’s life together after their marriage. While Allen maintained order by
restricting the scope of their activities, an uncertainty which approached
hysteria was always threatening to erupt. During the two years they drove
Allen’s father’s old car, they swore one week that he had been a fool to give
such a good car away, the next week that it was about to fall apart. In their
personal lives they seemed equally eager to declare things settled, and
equally unsure that they were justified in doing so.
At their wedding, the minister repeatedly referred to the bride and
groom as “children.” He seemed to direct his remarks to their parents, who
had given him his instructions and made all the wedding arrangements. Had
the parents actually arranged the wedding in a larger sense as well? Initially,
both sides had opposed the marriage, precisely because Gail and Allen were
so young and inexperienced. But their opposition took the form of testing
the strength of the young people’s feeling for each other by seeing whether
they would persist in their plans in the face of obstacles. Gail’s aunt did not
want her niece to have an intimate relationship with a man unless he was to
be the man who took her out of the house forever. Friendships and varied
experiences with men were not goals that the aunt valued, and so they
weren’t tolerated in Gail’s life.
Nor were they encouraged by Gail and Allen’s social milieu generally.
The marriage was brought about by the couple’s acquiescence in a widely
held outlook about marriage, an outlook fostered by parents, peers, and
circumstances. For Gail and Allen, marriage was the only proper state of
being for an adult—the only alternative to intolerable conditions of personal
isolation and parental domination and the most decisive way to bolster
one’s ego and complete one’s identity. Allen was driven to marriage by the
alienation which warped his relationships with other men, made real
friendship impossible, and created a longing for some form of human
closeness. Gail, having no avenues of independent activity open to her, had
to attach herself to someone else to attain the intellectual standing she
sought. In her approach to Allen, she was able to draw upon traditional
models of feminine behavior—accentuating her helplessness, throwing
herself at his mercy, appealing to his better nature. In offering him this
commanding, masculine role in her life, she unknowingly appealed to his
insufficiencies.
Interpersonal addiction would not be so “normal” were it not reinforced
by the very nature of family life and life in society. Allen and Gail’s
upbringing left them, as it left many of their contemporaries, with a lack of
self-integration and a lack of ability to handle their environment. What’s
more, it did not give them a chance to strengthen themselves through
friendly and loving relationships with other human beings. When they
looked around for relief from their oppressive aloneness and uncertainty,
they saw that society offered them one escape, its rightness and propriety
affirmed in every way—an exclusive love affair leading to marriage. It took
years of self-deception and additional years of pain before they learned to
confront their situations in more essential ways.
As the case of Allen and Gail illustrates, the families and the social settings
in which we grow up have a lot to do with whether or not we become
interpersonal addicts. The process works in two ways. Growing up without
a sense of self-assurance and self-sufficiency, we become liable to addiction
in any form. And the overemphasis placed on close ties with a few
individuals, together with the unavailability of other avenues for making
contact with people and things, causes love, marriage, and family to be the
most likely objects of our addiction.
Consider the kind of family that produced Allen and Gail as well as
most of the other addicted lovers whose stories are told in this book—the
middle-class American family of the mid-twentieth century and the post-
World War II period. This family usually consists of two parents and from
one to three children, separated from other people including even close
relatives. The isolation of the nuclear family has grown wherever the
industrial age has left its mark, but it has never before been so extreme as in
mid-twentieth-century America. For whatever reasons (affluence, a
philosophy of personal independence, plenty of room to move around in),
individual families have had less sustained contact with each other in
America than elsewhere. In European countries there are well-established
social forms for bringing people together, such as the cafe and the pub, but
the average American family has looked out at the world increasingly from
the vantage points of its own house and car.
After World War II, the mobility traditional in America took on a new
form. Nationwide corporations began shifting personnel as efficiency
dictated. A child might make friends at school and in the neighborhood only
to lose them all at once when the father was transferred. The only people
the child didn’t leave behind were his or her parents, and brothers or sisters.
The child of this era grew up in a world very different from the one his
parents had known when they were young. The biggest difference for him
was that the extended family did not have a place in his life. It used to be
that a household was more than just parents and children. There might also
be grandparents, aunts and uncles, and cousins around.
The extended family and the community of which it was a part had been
a very handy thing in an earlier period. One did not have to face the same
few people all the time, so that if the emotional going got rough, a child, or
an adult, could turn to some peripheral figure in the family or neighborhood
for love, consolation, and the particular wisdom that came from that
person’s experience. Growing up amid the clash of a number of very
different personalities—some of them, perhaps, even unusual or bizarre—a
child got a more rounded picture of human nature, and thus had a chance to
learn that his parents’ idiosyncrasies were not all there was to human
conduct. The child was often out of his parents’ sight, either being
supervised by an aunt, say, or left to the free give-and-take with brothers,
sisters, cousins, and friends of all ages. But in the modern nuclear family
setup the child came under the continual surveillance of his parents. This
intrusive attention undoubtedly kept many children from learning to solve
problems and get things done on their own. In place of these abilities,
though, it gave them a feeling of being at the center of someone else’s
world—an experience they were likely to look for again.
In the mid-twentieth century, parents were almost the sole figures of
importance to a child. Who, then, were these people, and what past and
present conditions were they reacting to as they brought up their children?
To begin with, they were two people who interacted with each other very
intensely, though not always peacefully or constructively. Often, with the
social pressures they were under, they had not had the luxury of searching
out a suitable mate. Only now they did not have behind them the extended
family, which traditionally served to take the strain off a marriage,
especially at the outset. Yoked to each other in some cases practically by
accident, husband and wife found themselves alone together in the world,
and that could be scary. Whether the husband ran a small business with his
wife’s help, or whether he came home to her from a day of coldly
impersonal contacts at an outside job, they had to find in each other all the
warmth and support they were going to receive.
This man and woman were not likely to be tuned into the niceties of
personal relationships; they had more pressing things to worry about. Thus,
they carried many unresolved and unrecognized emotional problems with
them into marriage and childrearing. Still it was paramount that they be able
to count on a basic emotional, moral, and practical support from each other,
even if they started out with very different habits and preferences. So they
hammered themselves into the mold of a harmonious team. On the one
hand, they sacrificed much that they individually held dear for the sake of
the marriage or the children. On the other, they released their contained but
unrelinquished desires by sniping at each other when their daily lives
brought them too much strain.
Historical circumstances, too, had contributed to the discomfort of these
people (some of whom were especially vulnerable as immigrants or the
children of immigrants). All of them, as young adults or as children, had
felt the effects of the Depression, whether materially or psychologically.
The Depression taught them that whatever they did, they could not
determine their own economic future. Always they would be at the mercy
of an impersonal and seemingly malevolent marketplace. Even if they were
not directly threatened with being without food or shelter, they would never
again be able to feel secure about their economic standing. When one thinks
of the schoolteacher I once heard describe how he had qualified for his
position in the 1930s, one can appreciate the stress on people as their plans
for a career were thrown completely out of kilter. This man had been among
300 applicants competing for five jobs in a citywide examination. “I studied
my guts out for weeks,” he said, “and finished seventh. Afterward they
opened up two more jobs, and I got in.” That was how hard he had to fight
to get into public school teaching at that time, and his success in that one
examination put him in a place where he stayed for the rest of his working
life.
On the heels of the Depression came the dislocations of World War II,
and in the wake of the war came an accelerated growth in technology,
especially household technology. Already people had found their work
restricted by an institutional environment. Either they worked for a large
organization, or, if they owned a business, it was usually on the order of a
retail store, with a fixed place in the scheme of things and a limited
potential for growth. Beyond this, their home life was being transformed by
the mechanical age which had grown faster than any untrained individual
could keep pace with. As central as the car was in America, James Flink in
America Adopts the Automobile indicates that most people—especially in
the cities—were not able to fix their own. When the washing machine,
television, and all the home gadgetry of the postwar era appeared, people
were already accustomed to depending on machines whose workings they
did not understand. They had grown used to calling on expert technicians
for mechanical repairs.
This reliance on expert authority was present even in something as
personal as childrearing. Pediatricians and manuals were consulted in place
of the grandparents who were no longer around the house. A baby’s fever
could be frightening to a mother when her mother wasn’t there to say, “Oh,
that’s just a little upset. Let it take its course.” Lacking such a voice of
experience, the mother would naturally turn to a doctor, or a book. A sign of
both the breakdown of the extended family and the triumph of the
technological outlook was the extraordinary popularity of Dr. Spock’s Baby
and Child Care, which came out right after World War II. While Dr. Spock
was a sound and a fairly sensitive adviser (things could have been a lot
worse), the vacuum that was there for him to fill signified that the family’s
own resources were no longer adequate to the demands made on them. In a
slightly later era, regular visits to a pediatrician would be de rigueur for
obtaining the information and reassurance that used to be provided by
grandmothers.
This new generation of parents was expressing its uneasiness about a
world which seemed forever beyond its mastery. Out of this feeling came
the vast, intangible fear which has characterized our age—anxiety; or, in
Franklin Roosevelt’s phrase, “nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror.”
Since people didn’t know what they were afraid of, they couldn’t do
anything concrete to allay their fear. Once they had checked the gas to make
sure that it had been turned off, there was nothing functional left for them to
do. But they still worried, and to assuage this feeling they fussed endlessly
about matters over which they had no control, or where they had already
done everything possible. Is the gas leaking? Did we leave an electrical
appliance on? Will the car start this morning? And to their children: Did
you remember to bring everything you need? Don’t run around the block at
night!
Chein found that adolescent heroin addicts were taught by their parents
to feel an excessive concern with the dangers of life. Yet parents in the
mainstream of society often communicated this same sort of anxiety, both
through the way they handled everyday household problems, and through
their direct admonitions. What permitted the parents to transmit their
worries so freely? For one thing, in dealing with their children they reacted
reflexively, driven by their own emotional imperatives; they couldn’t help
themselves. At the same time, they really cared about their children and
wanted to prepare them for life’s pitfalls as they saw them. Finally, a child
gave them their only chance for exerting control in an otherwise chaotic
world. Here was the one person and one place where they thought they
should be in charge. Indeed, the frustrations they experienced elsewhere
only fueled their irrationality at home, where they could express fears and
demands with a lack of restraint that was not allowed them anywhere else.
The worldview children got from their families was one in which the
comfort and security to be found in the nuclear family was sharply
contrasted with the turmoil lurking outside it. The optimistic, confident
spirit of the early industrial age had been replaced with an almost primitive,
superstitious attitude toward technological and bureaucratic power. It was
necessary to propitiate such forces, so that they would not harm you. In this
swirl of suspicion and mistrust, the family was seen as a garrison, requiring
strict loyalty and giving in return a safe haven. With most other people out
to cheat you, it was vital to support family members in any potential
conflict. Family secrets were to be protected, for if any sign of weakness or
instability leaked out, the information could be used against you. Both
material and spiritual resources had to be hoarded.
For the children, at least in their early years, the sealing off of the home
strictly limited what sense they could make of things on their own. They
had to accept what their parents said and did as reasonable, because that
was all they saw, all they heard, all they knew. This resulted in part from the
parents’ reluctance to let them out of sight to explore the world on their
own, because then the children might not always be safe, or might grow and
change unpredictably. In other words, the uncertainty which was so
disconcerting to the parents might come at them from their children’s
direction, and that would be intolerable. To prevent this, parents often
minutely directed a child’s life, not realizing the danger of letting a young
child’s own judgment die stillborn.
An Anxious Parent
Adulthood Denied
The same parental and institutional regimes shaped life for Fred and his
contemporaries when they reached adolescence. Old enough now to
develop interests and initiate activities outside the home, they were
cautioned not to do anything that might bring shame on themselves or their
families. If they tried anything too offbeat, they faced chastisement from
their parents along with ridicule that came from friends and schoolmates
trained along the same lines as they were.
Even with adolescent children, many parents continued to have
difficulty letting go emotionally, to the point where they treated their
children as children long after such treatment became inappropriate. Here is
what Ginott, in Between Parent and Teenager, considers a reasonable way
of addressing a boy in his teens:
Our response must differentiate between tolerance and sanction,
between acceptance and approval. We tolerate much, but sanction little….
One father, irritated by his son’s long hair said: “I’m sorry, son. It’s your
hair, but it’s my guts. I can stand it after breakfast, but not before it. So,
please have breakfast in your own room.”
This response was helpful. Father demonstrated respect for his own
feelings. The son was left free to continue with his unpleasant but harmless
revolt….
It is questionable whether a man who speaks to someone else so
disrespectfully is really respectful of his own feelings. What is certain is
that his manner here is degrading to an emergent adult who is discovering
his own style and identity. What is the youth himself to do? At his age, he
may be able to reject his father’s judgments as prejudiced. In their place, he
can consult his own experience in order to evaluate himself and his actions.
One reason why it may be difficult for him to keep his bearings while
under parental attack, however, is that the thoroughgoing respect for all
authority which he has been taught does not disappear after childhood or
adolescence. As a college student he will find it impossible to talk to
professors naturally and on equal terms. Nearly all Americans today
similarly show an outsized deference toward high government and business
officials. This expansion of authority is symbolized by the evolution of the
police from the ludicrously impotent Keystone Cops of 1910 to today’s
frightening specter of high-powered cars, searchlights, and ammunition. As
for the disrespect attributed to student protestors of the 1960s, a number of
radical leaders at that time confided to me that they felt uncomfortable
standing up to college administrators. Indeed, the vaunted use of “pig” and
other derogatory appellations when speaking directly to government and
university officials was really very infrequent, especially when compared
with the heckling considered normal and “within the system” at nineteenth-
century political gatherings. It is odd that what was labeled as a growth of
disregard for sanctioned authority was really just a feeble reaction against a
relatively recent psychological bondage.
An awe of those in official positions goes with the doubting of one’s
own capacities. Young people who have been conditioned by their parents’
nervous uneasiness can develop in one of two ways. Some, unable to
separate the essential from the irrelevant, tune out their parents’ warnings
altogether and become unreliable and careless, unable to bear the thought of
straining to accomplish anything. Other adolescents accept the warnings
and rely on them in place of evaluating situations for themselves. When
they no longer hear their parents’ anxious remonstrances directly, they re-
create them in their own minds. Their coping is a matter of constant
vigilance: something can always go wrong without warning. The parents
are forever a part of them, living within them. When parents request that an
adolescent always call if he is going to be late getting in, they are tying him
down spiritually even after he is physically autonomous. With the nagging
thought of worried parents at the back of his mind, he can’t think of losing
himself for the evening, of having an affair, of taking a mad trip to New
York. As his lips meet a woman’s, he is overcome by the feeling that he
should be making a phone call. Life is approached with grim concentration,
and you don’t take any shortcuts or scenic detours.
The adult who is produced by this training is left with a distorted
approach to making decisions. Much of his behavior consists of ritualized
worries or acts directed toward warding off some dreaded outcome which
never materializes. Such neurotic behavior serves to reduce anxiety, at least
momentarily. And because whatever the person fears does not in fact
happen, he feels in some way that his compulsive reactions have helped
him. Thus, he persists in them, irrational as they are. Equally irrational is
his considering only the negative consequences that could come from a
proposed course of action, such as changing jobs or trying to know
someone. Ideally, one would take into account the likelihood of a positive
or negative result, and then ask oneself how much one desires the positive
result or wishes to avoid the negative. This would produce a balanced
decision. But where initiative and risk are involved, it is all too common for
a person to consider only the potential dangers, no matter how improbable
or inconsequential. “Why take a chance?” is the credo he has learned. So he
goes all his life missing experiences which he could easily obtain for
himself, and which he is often delighted with when they are thrust upon
him, as when he loses his job and is forced to look for a new and better one.
Take, for instance, the story of Nat, an ex-student who illustrates how
the irresponsible and the overly responsible reactions to parental nagging
and negativism merge. Nat thoroughly understood his father, an
oppressively orderly man who had taken care to set himself up as early as
possible with a job, a house, a wife, and even a car that he could keep for
life. When Nat dropped out of college, he said something very poignant
about his father’s reaction. “My father is tremendously worried about
what’s going to happen to me,” he said, “because he isn’t sure what I’m
going to do next. What my father really always wanted has been for me to
hurry up and go through school, get a job, get married—and die.” When I
heard this story, I was struck by the truth in what Nat said. Just as the father
had struggled to remove all uncertainty from his own existence, this man
valued his son’s experience only insofar as it served to nail the son down,
and thus to eliminate any possible doubt for the father.
It was a tragic assessment of the older man, but what did it point to for
Nat? Had his piercing insight into his father given him a better grip on his
own life? Although, as the comment I quoted suggests, Nat was extremely
gifted verbally, he never settled on a vocation. He always found his
opportunities not sufficient to his tastes, thinking them laughable for their
impurity and lack of meaning. Because all the careers he considered—and
the people who filled them—were flawed in some way, Nat rejected entirely
the possibility of fulfilling work. He made a few halfhearted attempts to
establish himself away from home, but his unwillingness to put himself on
the line, either with people or at some kind of work, always brought him
back to his home town and reliance on his parents. By the time he reached
his late twenties, he was left with nothing to fall back on but a disorderly
version of his father’s fearful, boxed-in existence.
Now that so many addicted young people are themselves married, what will
happen to the children they bring up? In the first place, we should observe
that the hypothetical “post-World War II” family described in this chapter
still exists, since no definite line marks off one generation from the next.
Indeed, the survival of authoritarian assumptions about childrearing in so
popular a modern counselor as Haim Ginott shows that many of the
practices of the past extend into the present. The mid-twentieth-century
family was the one that produced the addicts of our case histories. Now,
under more palatable labels and with a more easygoing manner, many of the
same attitudes toward living and relating are being transmitted.
It is true that since the forties and fifties there has been some evolution
in parenthood. Many young parents express fewer overt neuroses than were
the rule ten to thirty years ago, and place a greater emphasis on peaceful,
harmonious relations within the family. In a time of greater affluence and
higher educational levels, the young today pay more attention to their
relationships generally, and, as parents, to their children’s desires. However,
there is a continuing pattern of addiction in young people, one which should
make us cautious in attributing large significance to even the most
attractive, well-intentioned changes in style. In Allen and Gail, in the young
bride who shut herself off from experience much earlier than her mother
had, in the students rushing to establish themselves securely with lovers on
campus, we see evidence that people are still turning to each other out of
the addictive need for security. Vicky’s parents were understanding and
nurturant in a way that many young couples aspire to be, yet also in a way
that stifled their daughter’s motivation to become a complete person in
herself. Similarly, new parents today who are just as fearful as, though more
temperate than, their own parents still pass on their fear to their children, in
whom it will once again be a source of addiction. They do so because
addictive tendencies are woven so very deeply into the fiber of our society.
Even entirely new social forms which strive to remedy the extreme
insularity of conventional family life do not always serve to liberate the
individual spirit. With communes or with single people living together on a
semipermanent basis, self-protection can be the aim as easily as it can be
with the nuclear family or sexual coupling. Roommates of the same sex
may exclude others from their small society, and may lean on each other out
of insecurity and a need for mutual support. Larger units of people,
sometimes explicitly labeled families, can enable their members to lead
asexual lives by effectively ruling out intense relationships between any
member of the family and an outsider. A man who had dropped out of sight
socially for a time met an old friend and invited him to the house he now
lived in with a number of other very religious Christians. When asked how
long he planned to stay with this group, he replied quite frankly, “Until I
marry someone like us. For the present, this is the most secure setting I can
find.”
Chapter 7
I’ve nothin’ to do
Used by permission.
Love and Addiction has been remarkably accurate in predicting major trends in addiction in
American society—startlingly so. In this chapter, let’s note five of them:
1. Addiction to cigarettes and caffeine. It is little remembered today that the 1964 Surgeon
General’s Report on tobacco, Smoking and Health, had a chapter on nicotine and
addiction. It said that cigarettes were not addictive, but merely habit-forming. This was
because addicts were thought to be antisocial miscreants using illicit drugs to become
intoxicated or to deaden their sensations. But we clearly saw in Love and Addiction that
smoking (as well as coffee) was addictive, even as it was (is) used to provide stimulation
for the workday (addiction to caffeine is yet to be discovered/rediscovered). We noted that
addiction “in the form of nicotine and caffeine is accepted so casually that people have no
idea what they are caught up in.”
2. Electronic addictions. We identify and discuss the phenomenon of addiction to television.
The latest version of psychiatry’s diagnostic manual (DSM-5) includes only one
behavioral addiction, gambling, while it is considering for future inclusion “gaming.” But
reports of addiction to iPhones, iPads, electronic games, and so forth are so ubiquitous, it
seems that only the fear of recognizing something that is completely ingrained in our lives
impedes psychiatry from recognizing these addictions (the same, of course, was true of
television). Our definition of addiction here, however, makes this recognition inescapable:
“Addiction takes place with an experience sufficiently safe, predictable, and repetitive to
serve as a bulwark for a person’s consciousness, allowing him an ever-present opportunity
for escape and reassurance.”
3. The ADHD/Adderall epidemic. The fear of widespread, indiscriminate medication of
children and teens (including nearly one in five boys) for ADHD (“More Diagnoses of
Hyperactivity Causing Concern”) is another new American public health alarm. One
particular result of the massive infusion of amphetamine and other stimulant drugs to treat
ADHD has been a concern over addiction (“Drowned in a Stream of Prescriptions” is the
story of a young man who committed suicide after years of heavy Adderall use). This
scourge is one Love and Addiction clearly foresaw with what was then called
hyperactivity, where we highlighted “the use of Ritalin [like Adderall, a stimulant drug]
and other behavior modification drugs to treat hyperkinetic [hyperactive] children, in
some cases whole school systems full of them.”
4. The rise in depression. We noted that depression was rising in the early 1970s, while
popular magazines claimed we were on the verge of discovering its biological cause so as
to cure it. A 1973 Newsweek article announced: “there is no doubt that depression, long
the leading mental illness in the U.S., is now virtually epidemic.” Well, hold onto your
hats, it was beginning in the mid-1970s, and accelerating with the publication of the 1980
version of American psychiatry’s diagnostic manual, DSM-III, that depression, bipolar,
and ADD/ADHD diagnoses really took off. This has been the cause of speculation that
these may be overused, often incorrect diagnoses. Stanton, on the other hand, points out
that Americans really may be becoming less mentally healthy. In any case, our modern
medical era has been marked by an explosion in prescriptions of psychiatric medications
(notably anti-depressants and antipsychotics), especially for children and teens, with
seemingly no end of this expansion in sight. (See A Glut of Antidepressants: 1 in 4
American women in their 40s and 50s is now on an antidepressant.) This expansion is
inevitable because, as Love and Addiction argues, we are causing it.
5. Addiction to pharmaceuticals. As we now face an epidemic of addiction to prescription
painkillers (“More Women Dying From Prescription Drug Overdoses Than Cancer”),
Love and Addiction is again remarkably prescient: “Partly as a result of medicine’s
encouragement of drug use, people now see psychoactive drugs—and the altered states of
consciousness they bring—as a normal part of life…. However society claims to feel
about depressant drugs, there has been a significant expansion of their illicit and
recreational use.” An embarrassing chapter in the history of pharmaceuticals that we
generally prefer not to recall is the massive advertising of tranquilizers and sedatives
through “advertising spots which suggest that normal human events, such as weddings,
visits from relatives, and job interviews, can only be faced with the aid of some deadening
drug.” Our reliance on such medications has become so prevalent, so routine as no longer
to be considered worth noting—except for the resulting addictions and deaths.
The point of this re-exploration of Love and Addiction is to show how its analysis, its way of
seeing the interactions among society, experience, and mental dysfunction, has been proven
correct, even as medicine (now in the form of neuroscience and neurochemistry) continues to
hunt for biological remedies it claims will, finally, one day, once and for all cure our psychiatric
maladies, as well as our addictions. As a leading neurologist wrote in the 1970s about the
discovery of the first group of neurochemicals, the endorphins:
A man with two teen-age daughters was fascinated and horrified by the
Patricia Hearst story. He went around asking everyone he could, “What
went wrong with that girl?” The paradox of Patricia Hearst has troubled
many parents who worry that someday their children, too, may inexplicably
turn on them. But the mystery surrounding this young woman is not
impenetrable. Using the facts and impressions assembled by Andy Port and
John Pascal of Newsday (in a syndicated series published in May 1974), we
can look at the formative influences on her and at what she did when the
direction of her life fell into her own hands.
Brought up in an atmosphere of “smothering overprotection,” Patty
Hearst was sent to a succession of strict Catholic girls’ schools. The rules
she was taught there were entirely external to her, so that she possessed no
sure criteria of judgment. She was not experienced enough to know how she
really felt about things. At times she seemed to recognize this lack, as when
she took a clerical job “to do something different.” Such gestures didn’t
have much substance, though, and she continued to organize her life around
what were to her known quantities.
Chief among these was a young teacher, Steven Weed, whom she met at
her school when she was sixteen. Weed immediately became the one factor
Patty considered in every major decision she made. At the age of seventeen
she enrolled at a small college in the town where Weed lived, and a year
later she followed him to Berkeley. In her last year in high school, and still
accountable to parents and teachers for the way she spent her time, she had
been “an eager participant in several extracurricular activities.” But the
following year at Menlo College, where she was on her own, she “shunned
the school’s social life almost totally. With most of her time divided
between schoolwork and Weed, Patty made few friends at Menlo.”
Once at Berkeley, she and Weed single-mindedly drew a circle around
themselves. “Patty was an extension of Steve and Steve of Patty,” a friend
recalled, adding that he saw one without the other only once in two years.
Up to the time of Patty’s abduction by the Symbionese Liberation Army,
she and Steve were living a quietly hedonistic life, were still largely
dependent financially on the Hearst family, and were preoccupied with their
coming marriage. Patty herself was an unfocused undergraduate with no
political inclinations, no compelling interests or philosophy, and no clear
purpose for being in school. Her conversion, or “brainwashing,” by the
SLA was simply the substitution of one external structure for another, just
as her conversion from family and school to a romantic-intellectual
involvement with Weed had been.
Like other small, antisocial groups, the SLA was a world unto itself.
The very fact of being fugitives from the law protected the group’s
members against contact with anyone who might challenge their beliefs.
Interestingly, one of Patty’s tapes reveals that a love affair with a man in the
SLA was a catalyst for her acceptance of the group ideology. As always,
she was molded by her immediate surroundings, whether or not she initially
chose them for herself. This is the answer to that anxious father’s question.
Patricia Hearst had been prepared for the SLA by all the groups,
institutions, and allegiances that she had previously accepted. The
underlying similarity in the two kinds of membership is something the
perplexed father doesn’t understand and wouldn’t want to face.
Cultural Drift
Other Addictions
Always a man must be considered as the broken-off fragment of a woman, and the sex was the still
aching scar of the laceration. Man must be added on to a woman, before he had any real place or
wholeness.
Chapters 1 and 5 concentrate on the standard examples of love addiction—that is, lovers
committed to each other in extreme, smothering, mutually destructive ways. Chapter 8 deals with
a mirror-image form of interpersonal addiction: “People who have many lovers, simultaneously
or in succession, may be just as addicted as those who are inextricably tied to one person.” One
reason to expand the idea of love and sex addiction is because its most obvious version—
clinging dependence—was most evident in women (so that our “addiction model can give us
insight into women’s role in society”). Nonetheless, as we note, “Men and women exhibit
addictive tendencies in roughly the same degree.”
Sometimes men do so in a similar, steadfast way—there are plenty of men, we show, who
undergo love withdrawal and can’t be without the person they love (which today would focus on
lovers of both genders). But, it is generally agreed, males are more prone to the variation of
seeking out many lovers as a protection against aloneness, despair, and emptiness. And this
chapter is about addicted lovers—men and women—who are without an anchoring relationship.
Where love addiction is like a narcotic, multiple, casual “hook-ups” are like speed
(methamphetamines). Anne was one such person who found that multiple affairs were “furious
in their first rush, then faded to a dry, enervating down.”
Multiple sexual contacts (at least as an open and widespread phenomenon) have appeared
relatively recently within the middle class. They derive from patterns in the lower class and in
the most privileged classes, where transitory but passionate relationships more frequently occur.
This volatile style of coupling has entered mainstream society via the youth culture…. In a
chaotic world, it gives many individuals a series of temporary props, but the underlying middle-
class desire for a permanent connection remains strong.
This is still true, as we see many famous sex addicts eventually settle down. It seems that many
—even in the hook-up culture—are really searching “in a lover [for] a new meaning in life” only
to discover that these affairs “always turned out to be meaningless.”
For Guy, the other case study in this chapter, this meant a series of relationships that would last
“three months, six months, a year.” But, like Anne, he did settle down, form a successful family,
and live relatively happily ever after. Yet, despite a continuing urge to pair off permanently,
living alone has become commonplace, as have childless couples. Intimate relationships in our
society are in flux. People must seek their own answers—and sometimes they change their
minds.
Society twists men, too, into distorted images of themselves, only the
distortion is complementary to that which women experience. Forced to be
inhumanly tough and invulnerable in just the way women are forced to be
childlike and weak, men have no more of a chance than women to develop
themselves as full human beings. At the same time, men face precisely the
same assaults on their integrity and self-confidence that women do. In
addition to the social pressures on a man to marry, find a steady job, “settle
down”—and the inculcation of a sense of weakness and dependency
through encounters with parents, teachers, doctors, employers, experts, and
institutions generally—men face the special injunction that they always
show a strong face to the world. The effort to maintain this difficult
equilibrium creates the style of addiction found commonly in males.
It is a woman’s privilege to express her uncertainties and to
acknowledge her emotional attachments. In men, the same needs often
appear, but less openly. Many men live in a world which demands much
from them emotionally and gives them little in return. A man is expected to
develop a highly positive self-image—“the male ego”—and project his
belief in himself to the outside world. If he is unsure about the validity of
his self-image, he is certainly going to find other males disposed to
challenge it. At work, he receives little nurturance from men and women
who are trained into the same competitive aloofness he feels he must
display. So the conflicting burdens of his male need for reinforcement of his
self-image, and his human need to share his self-doubts, fall on his wife or
lover.
Guy typifies the kind of man who badly wants a total love experience to
resolve the contradictions in his psyche and cure his unease with himself.
Guy’s search was thwarted by the vastness and complexity of his emotional
needs, which no one woman could really satisfy. As a result, he was thrown
back on the blatantly self-gratifying use of women that made him seem to
many to be a Don Juan. The ideal he had in mind, though, was something
quite different from the transient, sex-centered affairs he often got into.
Guy grew up, outwardly comfortable and complacent, in a suburb of
Chicago. His father was a prominent corporate lawyer, his mother a passive,
helpless person. The inequality of stature between his parents was a source
of considerable instability in the family and within Guy himself. When Guy
was a child, his father did not spend enough time around the house to give
his son much positive direction. In addition, when he was present he tried to
make Guy measure up to unrealistic standards of successful performance.
He did this by belittling Guy’s successes and implying that whatever he did
was not quite enough. Yet Guy never learned to turn elsewhere, or inward,
for his rewards.
His mother, on the other hand, lavished on Guy the respect she herself
lacked. She met all of Guy’s needs for esteem as well as she could with the
few personal resources she had. Although she was indiscriminate in her
praise and admiration, her trivial position in the home made these
practically meaningless. She did teach Guy that, in the absence of what he
regarded as true accomplishment and acknowledgment, he could rely on the
sympathy of a woman.
With a father who wouldn’t respond to the most exceptional
performance, and a mother who effused about him no matter what he did,
Guy soon did not bother to extend himself in school. In fact, with no
models of purposeful activity before him (except for his father, whose goals
seemed so remote to Guy), nothing seemed worthy of sincere and diligent
pursuit. Rather, he cultivated an attractive personality, particularly a quick
verbal ability, as a means of impressing people and winning affection to
substitute for the love he most needed. Still, he was clever enough to do
well academically as long as school was at the center of his life.
Away at college, Guy relentlessly sought close relationships with
women. Even in his first year there, when most of his classmates limited
themselves to weekend dating, Guy was known for having a girlfriend. The
keynote to Guy’s relationships was devotion. Feeling that he deserved
loving attention, yet insecure about whether he could earn it, Guy did not
leave the matter to chance. He made explicit, detailed, and often abrasive
demands for the care and concern he wanted from his girlfriends. While he
was still seeing high school girls, he got away with it. But it would no
longer be as easy as it had been in his father’s time to find an educated
woman who would unthinkingly commit herself to a man who imposed
himself so much, even if he was as attractive as Guy.
Just as Guy was about to graduate, his father suddenly died. The family
seemed to fall apart, as if everyone had been held together solely by their
connection to the head of the house. Guy’s brother went to Europe; his
mother sold the family home and moved to Florida. Meanwhile, Guy
looked forward to returning to Chicago in the fall and rejoining a new
girlfriend whom he had met during his spring vacation and who would now
be entering the University of Chicago. It was to be near her, as well as to be
in a position to exploit his father’s connections in the legal world, that Guy
had applied to law school at the university. But by the time he arrived, the
girlfriend had dropped him. She made the curt announcement in the middle
of a phone call in which he had been berating her for her carelessness (an
act typifying a relationship which she could hardly have found enjoyable),
and Guy’s last emotional contact in Chicago was destroyed. He found
himself alone and unloved—and about to start an unappealing trek through
law school.
Why was he there? For one thing, because he preferred to go on living
the student’s life, which enabled him to devote much of his attention to
women. For another, because he expected to be able to go into a corporate
law career on his father’s coattails. While he lacked the specific interests
that might have directed him into some academic field, law school would
still give him the opportunity to exercise his considerable verbal and mental
abilities. To the intellectual friends with whom Guy shared his gifted
conversational style, law seemed both too bourgeois and too diffuse a
vocation, one which expressed no genuine heartfelt inclinations. Guy
himself revealed no such inclinations, however, and to the conventional,
careerist boyhood pals around whom much of his life still revolved, law
seemed as suitable as anything else. All told, Guy had not thought much
about it one way or the other. His ill-considered career choice reflected the
shallowness and lack of integration that had marked his life.
The main problem he faced on his arrival at the university was more
immediate. His spirit was broken in the aftermath of his rejection at the
hands of the girl he loved. Denied even a modicum of emotional support,
Guy had no energy for work. He made futile visits to his ex-girlfriend’s
apartment to win back her affection, and took up his classmates’ time with
tales of despair. He spoke of leaving school to join the army, or of
committing suicide. But he pulled through. Intelligent, personable, and
outgoing, he brought together a new group of friends who stood by him in
his misery. Studying very little during his first two semesters, he managed
to take his exams, and even do well—with a little help from his friends.
Distracted as he was, he was still able to manipulate the academic
environment.
The same love cycle was to repeat itself several more times in the next
few years. Guy would throw himself into a relationship totally, and it would
last for three months, six months, a year. Then the woman would grow tired
and angry, and Guy would cling desperately to dying emotion, once more
trying the patience of his friends as they attended him. Each time a woman
left him, he complained that he would never again find someone who would
love him. Gradually, though, he learned to adjust more realistically to his
fate. Seeing that he couldn’t attain the complete love he sought, he looked
for women who would just keep him company for a while. So he began,
opportunistically, to accept the consolation of transitory affairs. These did
not fully meet his needs, though, and there was still a part of himself that
greeted each new affair with the hope that he would never have to search
for another.
What went wrong with these relationships? Guy was involved with
many different women under a wide range of circumstances, and many of
the breakups occurred for the usual variety of reasons. Because of its frenzy,
Guy’s social life appeared to be chaotic. But in retrospect it is possible to
discern a recurrent pattern of futility and self-defeat in his love affairs, a
pattern that stemmed from the way he viewed women in relation to himself.
With the legacy of low self-esteem left him by his father, despite his
acknowledged intelligence and competence, Guy was uncertain about
whether people could like him, and thus whether he had any real reason for
being. So he sought reassurance wherever he could find it. To him, a friend,
male or female, was someone who would listen to and support his
posturings and his complaints. But it was only from women that he felt he
could demand the total allegiance he craved. Sex was the symbol of their
adoration, and Guy’s continual banter with his friends was full of
competitive, sexist overtones: “Do you think I’ll get to make that girl with
the big tits?” Actually, Guy’s talk about sex conveyed his deeper need for
acceptance, and he was ready to fall in love at the slightest pretext. Lacking
any other consuming interests, he gave women a disproportionate place in
his life. A married woman who kept trying to arrange dates for him with
friends of hers remarked, “Guy talks about women as though they were
different from people.”
Women always came first for Guy. When he didn’t have one, he
plodded dejectedly through the events of his life. Intellectual stimulation,
dispassionate interests, good times with friends—these things all were
secondary. His unhappiness was never far from the surface, and his
threshold for expressing his longing was low. This was when he made the
greatest claims on his friends, but all the while he let them know that he
wanted something more than what they could provide, and that he was with
them only under a good-natured but insistent protest.
When Guy met an eligible woman, he wasn’t able to be objective about
her as a person, since he had so much hope wrapped up in her. Though
insecure about being rejected, he would plunge right ahead, sparing nothing
in his initial self-presentation while telling his friends what a superlative
catch he had on the line. A brilliant, witty man, Guy would go through all
his routines in an effort to make his appeal irresistible. With his ability to
put himself forward, he was almost irresistible, except that in this
supercharged state he often went too far. For a time he was known to relate
his entire life story during his first evening out with a woman. This
unrestrained approach alienated women who respected themselves. To such
a woman there seemed something ignoble about a man whose life had so
little meaning that she could immediately become its central focus.
To Guy’s detriment, the women who did accept him were often passive,
easily ruled (at least for a time), and uncertain of themselves and their own
wants. At the outset, these qualities were well-suited to Guy’s repeated
demands, which made themselves felt once he had established himself with
a woman. Far from being a casual swinger, Guy was a serious person who
tried to invest every affair with great depth of concern. He articulated
everything he was thinking and feeling and everything he thought was
happening in the relationship. Unfortunately, though, his requests and
criticisms were all directed toward making his woman friend more
responsive to him alone. He took a nagging tone and imposed a judgmental
outlook on what should have been a spontaneous experience. What he was
after was complete control of the woman—physical, mental, emotional.
There was something persistently inappropriate about Guy’s manner, which
signified an urge to dehumanize that went beyond mere preoccupation with
sex.
The women who acquiesced to these demands were, in some cases,
those who had fewer other options open to them because they had less
appeal for men, or less confidence in their appeal. For this reason, given the
self-serving nature of his desire, Guy soon tired of them. At the same time,
in what seems a paradox, Guy despised these women for their very
responsiveness to him. Fritz Heider’s balance theory holds that it is easier to
like people who value the same things you do, and vice versa. In this way,
your view of the world is balanced. Since Guy did not have enough respect
for himself, he was forced to denigrate those people who valued him and
accepted his requests as legitimate. It pained him to realize that as he gained
a woman’s love, he ceased to regard her (just as he never could regard his
mother) as a meaningful source of esteem and support. And once he was no
longer excited by a woman, he became querulous with her.
Thus a woman who became involved with Guy in the hope of getting
close to him found herself in the midst of irresolvable pressures. The lovers
who remained desirable to him were those who held back from him
emotionally while they accepted his attentions, usually because they were
self-centered themselves. Often they could be aloof because they were
physically attractive, and this, too, added to their appeal for Guy. With these
women Guy initiated sustained campaigns to break through their alluring
psychological reserve—the ultimate conquest that always eluded him. A
woman who became one of Guy’s obsessions found herself increasingly
isolated from the rest of the world. They would spend a lot of time alone
together, and some with his friends, but rarely any time with her friends.
The centering of the affair around Guy’s interests and Guy’s world, and
mostly his private world, derived from the priority he gave his own values
and needs. Consciously or not, he selected women who were, for some
reason, temporarily or permanently open to this domination.
There had to be a breaking point. Guy’s overbearing, authoritarian style
eventually became intolerable both to mature, experienced women, and to
younger women who valued freedom and spontaneity. The outward
compliance he exacted from the callow girls he most often fell in love with
was usually made possible by their childish irresolution, and that in turn
made for volatile relationships. More than once Guy unwittingly served as a
father figure, to be discarded when the girl found a new boyfriend. This
occurred, for instance, with a college student whom he had been seeing for
about a year and who finally left him for “a kid like me, who I can just have
fun with.” When such a woman built up the strength to call it quits, the
break was usually sudden and irrevocable, although Guy would prolong the
agony by imploring her for another chance. The bewildered woman found
her former tormentor clinging to her for dear life. As Guy’s feelings of
inadequacy emerged once again with the crumbling of the relationship, he
had all the more need for this or some other woman’s concern. An addict,
he had to seek more of what was destroying him.
In time, though, he would regain his grip, and a degree of balance
would be restored to his life as he gathered reassurance from the circle of
male and female friends he kept in reserve for these periods. In fact,
underneath his depressing, adolescent litany of big tits without bras, Guy
was a person of good impulses. His loyalty toward his friends, if sometimes
overridden by more powerful drives, was real. With his women friends, too,
he would talk of being “friends for life,” and while he frequently had little
in common with many of the women he happened to get involved with, he
did keep up with his ex-lovers whenever this was actually a possibility. At
times he sought renewed sexual ties with these women, but his friendships
with them were often carried on at a more uncomplicated level of affection
and unsolicited kindness.
Guy was a scrupulous person, though one whose moral sense was
forever being compromised by passivity and egocentrism. As he got older,
he began to nurture more systematically qualities that he had always
possessed in some undeveloped form: an openness to the environment, an
ability to relate enthusiastically to people, and a feeling for where the world
was going. By the time he was in law school, his aesthetic and political
orientations had evolved in a direction very different from that of most of
his classmates. He was genuinely responsive to the moral concerns of his
generation. This often left him at odds with his chosen career, although in
his inertia and self-preoccupation, he was not ready to act on his changing
awareness.
There was to be no place for Guy in the rigid organizational structure of
corporate law, as he first learned during the summer vacations when he
clerked for his father’s old firm. Over such minor matters as his beard and a
loosened necktie he came to be derisively referred to as “the hippie lawyer,”
and he was eased out of the company as the memory of his father receded
into the past. It was now up to him to find a full-time position after
graduation. For the first time he was left to do something important on his
own resources.
He surprised himself by getting a job with another prominent law firm.
But going to work as a corporate lawyer marked a major change in Guy’s
life. Hedonist that he was, he did not adjust happily to ten-hour days as a
titled errand boy. At first, the strain of his new routine and the limitations it
imposed on his social life intensified his need for a loyal woman friend. At
the same time, though, by forcing him to see himself as a responsible adult,
it put a brake on his tendency to disintegrate under emotional pressure. With
colleagues and clients depending on him to produce on a daily basis, he no
longer could afford the indulgence of histrionic collapses before an
audience of sympathetic friends. Meanwhile, he was compelled to evaluate
the purpose of what he was doing, for the simple reason that it was
unpleasant and demanded a substantial commitment of himself. He resented
his position as an inferior in the firm’s hierarchy. Yet he wasn’t motivated to
do the things he would have to do if he wanted to move up, and he had real
doubts about the meaning and value of corporate law.
Finally he resigned from the firm and took a position in government
where he could participate in social planning alongside people less myopic
than his former colleagues. Through this job he has integrated his
moderately left-wing impulses into a stable lifestyle. In so doing, he has
broken out of his father’s mold and his earlier professional passivity. Most
important, he enjoys his work. It is easier for him to resist addictive
involvements now that his daily life is no longer a source of dissatisfaction.
Guy’s development out of the excesses of his addiction has been more a
natural process of growing up—or maturing out—than a deliberate
therapeutic endeavor. For several years he has been cultivating an
independent interest in books and movies and an ability to enjoy these
things wholeheartedly. He has actively sought new friendships without
expecting sexual benefits to flow from them. As he became more at ease
with himself, he began to experience and enjoy longer and longer periods of
self-containment until an opportunity for a reasonable relationship arose.
After a while, this practice enabled him to approach women with something
less than his old frenzy, and his overtures took on a new and appealing
element of restraint and casualness.
On this basis, after going through a number of inconsequential
relationships as before, he has formed a stable involvement which has
lasted for two years. In direct contrast to the unrealistic initial buildups he
had always given women, Guy did not at first find Nancy glamorous or
sexually overpowering. Their contact was friendly and casual and went on
simultaneously with other affairs on both sides. But somehow it outlasted
the others, and in six months they were living together. The relationship
developed with dignity, and the lovers’ mutual feeling grew naturally rather
than being pumped up at the outset and then left to deflate.
Nancy is the first woman Guy has ever lived with. His relationship with
her is hard to figure out, so different are their inclinations, but it seems to be
working. Nancy is more emotionally expressive than Guy, and considerably
more energetic and outgoing. She is mature enough to be serious about her
personal dealings, this being perhaps the primary trait that she and Guy
share. Confident of her ability to attract people, whether lovers or friends,
she has a well-established group of companions who are as important in the
couple’s life as Guy’s friends are. When she wants to go out and do
something, she doesn’t depend on Guy to set things up. She makes plans
with her friends and leaves Guy home to watch television if that is his
preference. They do fight, since Nancy is troubled by the same things in
Guy that have bothered other women, but the tough give-and-take
demonstrates that she is fully engaged with him, and he appreciates this.
Nancy has made him more warmly human and more secure, though it is not
yet clear how deeply he has changed. When she travels alone to see friends
in other parts of the country, he can still become moody and display
glimpses of his old behavior.
In general, Guy’s growth has been marked by increased self-control, but
also perhaps by a more entrenched fatalism. The self-knowledge he has
gained has apparently not been such as to give him a more extended scope
and greater power in the world. Instead, he has moderated his demands on
life, and his personality and habits have taken on some of the conventional
attributes of getting older. He is less open, less vulnerable with his friends
now. Recognizing that no one relationship can give him everything he
needs, he has taken up time-filling hobbies that Nancy does not participate
in, such as playing cards. These, rather than his existential anguish, have
become his avenues for interaction with friends. He is a more pleasant,
gracious person to be with than before, but also a less exciting one, for what
made him stimulating was in large part the expression of his immaturity.
The nonaddictive ideal of excitement with maturity is something he may
never have been cut out to strive for.
As with the illustrations of Anne and Guy, a person can bring an addictive
disposition to a number of successive or simultaneous relationships. From
these examples, though, we might infer that such is not a natural state for
the interpersonal addict. Anne and Guy, at any rate, ended up in
conventionally stable relationships, and their stories suggest that this was
what they were looking for all along.
Multiple sexual contacts (at least as an open and widespread
phenomenon) have appeared relatively recently within the middle class.
They derive from patterns in the lower class and in the most privileged
classes, where transitory but passionate relationships more frequently occur.
This volatile style of coupling has entered mainstream society via the youth
culture, along with drugs and hip mannerisms. In a chaotic world it gives
many individuals a series of temporary props, but the underlying middle-
class desire for a permanent connection remains strong. When that search is
successful, as both Anne and Guy illustrate, the basis of the connection
tends to be something other than sexual attraction.
Although Anne and Guy had this in common, as lovers they looked as if
they were playing different roles. Guy actively ensnared women, while
Anne was passive, driven by fate and circumstance. This difference is more
apparent than real, since Guy was being exploited even as he exploited
others—a condition not uncommon for an addict. A role like Guy’s is also
often played by women. Sybil, like Guy, had a string of lovers while being
unable to manage herself. Her case shows that the woman is not always the
passive partner in addiction and that the “Don Juan” addict is not always a
man. Sybil was much more manipulative in response to her desperation
than Anne, and even more so than Guy. She differed from both, however, in
being so detached from her need for love that she looked to men for little
more than the time-filling oblivion that is the most universal component of
addiction.
Born in a rural area in Western England, Sybil studied historic
preservation at a red brick university. She came to London as an intern on
an urban redevelopment project. Before she decided definitely to accept the
position, however, she had kept her supervisor waiting for several months.
This same irresolution, puzzling in a person of her ability, extended to her
frenetic personal life as well. Never spending any free time by herself, Sybil
went out every night, whether on a date with a man or to play tennis or
volleyball with friends. She had an ill-matched assortment of boyfriends
who were generally not as bright as she and who in many cases felt inferior
to her. For her part, Sybil openly expressed disrespect for them, but
continued to see them nonetheless. Her cutting remarks about these
individual men never grew into a larger awareness of the pattern her life
had assumed. “I just let these things happen,” she said about her affairs.
The men who became Sybil’s boyfriends were those who were willing
to put up with her treatment of them for a long enough period of time. She
made herself available to all while avoiding commitments to any. Most of
these men as a matter of course made sexual advances, and Sybil as a
matter of course accepted them. The only one she said she didn’t “sleep
with,” apparently because he didn’t ask, was a quiet, intelligent chap who,
oddly enough, friends thought was the special, long-term romantic
attachment in her life. When asked whether she felt especially close to any
of her lovers, she seemed not to comprehend the question. Each of them just
served as her fix for the night.
In her social life and elsewhere, Sybil could not sort things out. Her
passivity and indecisiveness combined to carry her on, a spectator to her
own existence. While she showed flashes of insight, her manner of speaking
was detached, and her conversation became interesting only when it took
the form of superficial word play. Neither she nor the people with whom
she associated gave much importance to the things she said, which were
often meaningless or inconsistent. During a period of labor unrest in the
building industry a local newspaper interviewed some young professionals
in government and industry, including Sybil, who were thought to bridge
the ideological gap between the construction workers and business interests.
After endorsing the union’s position on all the issues, Sybil completely
undercut her stand by saying that she was glad that management maintained
the upper hand. “It certainly is good that they’re not letting them have their
way totally,” she concluded. “Where would we be then?”
Sybil had not begun to resolve the clash of values between her
traditional family background and the young, freewheeling crowd she ran
with in London. Out of the composite of beliefs and opinions that she
picked up here and there, she did not know which were really her own. A
sexually active person, she abruptly shifted to chastity whenever her
mother, a stern fundamentalist, came for an extended visit. Yet this was no
real sacrifice for Sybil, since she didn’t seem to value sex inherently
(friends found her manner distinctly asexual), and since her mother’s
presence provided the ballast which, when left to her own devices, she
sought from lovers. Beyond this, she even expressed agreement with her
mother’s strictures against premarital sex. In the swirl of her thoughtless
and diffuse existence, she inwardly craved repression.
Suspiciously urbane to her family, inexplicably shallow to her
colleagues, Sybil found herself in an intellectual role for which she had the
requisite ability but not the slightest predilection. It was as though a partial
brain transplant had been performed on a farm girl, giving her the
knowledge and sophistication of a city planner, but none of the concomitant
interests or habits. Sybil longed to do something different, but she could not
gather the momentum to break away from her professional life as long as
she could remain in a subordinate position where major decisions were left
to someone else.
Whenever she sat quietly alone, as when she tried to read, Sybil would
soon get tense. The energy she generated in her unceasing social life
became an unendurably disruptive force when turned in upon her own
vulnerable being. So she would “get together” with somebody. That only
put her further out of touch with her work and herself, and caused her
additional anxiety. She sought further escape in the one direction she knew
—misuse of people. At the expiration of her internship she married the one
boyfriend she hadn’t been sexually involved with. With this support, she
gave up her career while continuing the round of socializing that was her
life. No one was close enough to her—not even herself—to be able to say
whether she conceived her marriage to be an expression of love.
Anne, Guy, and Sybil used people indiscriminately as objects of
addiction, but all of them eventually settled down with one person. Sybil
did so out of the same uncontrolled self-centeredness that led her to make
use of men in other ways. Anne, searching for a sure emotional object,
ended up in a relationship which resembled the one from which Marie
escaped, at least in terms of the similar outlooks and needs the two women
brought to their marriages. Guy has tried to forge a growing awareness of
his unhappiness and failure into changed patterns of behavior. For him,
possibly, self-recognition and help from others will lead to ultimate growth
out of addiction. More than any of the others, Marie, whose addictive
involvement ended with her divorce, seems to be on a sure path to
psychological freedom. Perhaps this is because her addiction was socially
ordained rather than the result of an addictive personality.
For all these people, issues of survival were very close to the surface.
With so much at stake, how can growth come about? Should the dangers of
change be risked when a person’s existence is in question? And how, in
such a precarious and delicate area, can change be carried out
constructively?
Chapter 9
Love and Addiction pioneered the cognitive-behavioral approach to addiction. Questioning the
dependencies foisted by AA and conventional rehab programs, it outlines a combination of
motivation, purpose, skills, and what would now be called mindfulness therapy to overcome
addictions. Love and Addiction is also explicit in saying that people “are capable of growth—that
they are not addicts anymore—and thus are not bound by any past descriptions of themselves”—
such as their addict identities, a la Alcoholics Anonymous and its 12 steps and permanent
addictification of people. It also recognizes (in the following chapters) people’s ability to leave
addiction behind. These ideas were detailed in our addiction self-help/therapy books, The Truth
About Addiction and Recovery and 7 Tools to Beat Addiction.
Love and Addiction also takes a broad view, seeing addiction as stemming from the very roots of
society. Stanton later detailed this cultural analysis in Diseasing of America. Love and Addiction
uses a literary springboard to dramatize this relationship between society and our inner selves,
D.H. Lawrence’s Women in Love, the story of two sisters, Ursula and Gudrun Brangwen, and
their intimate relationships with two men, Rupert Birkin and Gerald Crich.
Gudrun and Gerald’s destructive connection ultimately leads to Gerald’s death, as Gudrun takes
on another lover. By contrast, Ursula and Birkin continue in the existential attempt to create real
selves and lives in an artificial world that Lawrence recognized is often disconnected from
nature, from pain, from intimacy, from love: “What distinguishes Birkin and Ursula from Gerald
and Gudrun is their ability to think about themselves and the effect they have on each other….
Birkin and Ursula’s self-questioning, balanced by self-respect, is the contrasting image to
addiction, and an image of the way out of addiction. “ In contemporary terms—as described in
Stanton’s book with Ilse Thompson: Recover! Stop Thinking Like an Addict—this means
mindfulness, the ability to examine one’s behavior and its consequences, combined with self-
forgiveness, or a basic acceptance of oneself.
How does this translate into modern, non-addictive love? Intimacy is crucial to human
experience, as we have seen throughout this book. But “growing together can also be artificial,
predicated on the other person’s immediate presence. And the desire to help one another can be
submerged by a strong desire to possess, even if that means sabotaging a lover emotionally,
socially, and practically. So what is actually missing in addictions like Anne’s [in Chapter 8] is
what appears to be the ready chance they offer to explore and know another person, intimately
and yet in relation to a larger world.” Of course, people may accept this state of affairs: “I am an
addict, and I am contented to be one.” However, for most people “addiction is an unrewarding
condition to find oneself in”—one they ultimately seek to escape.
This means that if we want to reduce addiction, we have to change society: “The real cure for
addiction lies in social change which reorients our major institutions and the types of experience
people have within them.” This is a big question that provokes much argument and little change.
The major drivers of our collective existence—climate, the economy, political polarization and
stalemate, the electronification of our and our children’s lives and consciousness—are so beyond
our control as to force many people’s retreat into the home and electronic solitude. The best
answer is to take every opportunity for our children to explore the world in all of its dimensions
and to exercise autonomy in it—taken together, to experience joy and practice competence.
For individuals, Love and Addiction recommends caution against forming dependencies on rehab
and AA—themes that have proven to be long-lasting concerns, and not only for us. In place of
such substitute or replacement dependencies, the book recommends that addicts “learn new ways
of coping with life and of viewing themselves. For a drug addict this may involve such
elementary matters as learning a skill and cultivating sound work habits, along with more
difficult reorientations such as coming to see himself as a contributing person.” Freedom from
addiction also involves becoming more mindful, “to give a person mastery over his or her
compulsive reactions by making him conscious of them.” Combining these elements,
constructive treatment for addiction is a matter of behavior modification and skills training,
mindfulness, setting larger goals, and addressing the “existential issues involved … not only
about food or drugs [et al.], but about oneself in relation to the world.”
The real cure for addiction lies in a social change that reorients our major
institutions and the types of experience people have within them. If we are
to do more than to liberate ourselves one by one—beginning with those
who are already most whole and slowly working to include others less well
off—then we have to change our institutions, and ultimately our society.
Just as we cannot begin to understand addiction without understanding
people’s relationship to their social setting, so we cannot begin to cure it in
the absence of a more universal access to our society’s resources, and to its
political power. If addiction is based on a feeling of helplessness, it will be
with us until we create a social structure that is sensitive to people’s desires
and their efforts at influence.
The interdependency of all individuals and organizations makes the
elimination of addiction contingent upon basic social change. But this same
interdependency means that if we work to influence those institutions that
we normally deal with, we can make a contribution which will be felt
throughout the entire system. In particular, the family is a place where any
individual can be an immediate force for change. When we find new ways
to relate to our parents, our mates, and our children—say, by making those
relationships less exclusive and obligatory—we have an impact on all
aspects of our social structure. We give nonsexual friendships more of a
chance, lessen the strains of marriage, and, most important, modify the way
children grow up and learn to see the world. We give our offspring new
opportunities for life and love.
The commune is a social form which embodies an effort at changing
modern family life. Groups of individuals, and even whole countries, have
adopted it in an effort to counteract the confining pressures of the nuclear
family. Since it gives individuals a broader exposure to others in an intimate
setting, a commune ideally is a return to the spirit of the extended family
and the neighborhood community. For adults, the commune can be an
alternative to the standard organization of society into groups of two. By
enabling people to have a number of trusting relationships simultaneously,
it offers them the promise of a richer emotional life, and frees them from
the need to find one person to satisfy every need. For children, the
commune can provide a diverse set of adult models—along with other
children of all ages to relate to—so that they will not simply grow up
imitating their parents and learning one set of reactions to life. Communes,
of course, whether or not they are organized on ideological principles, can
be as much a total enclosure as marriages. But there are also many instances
where the open dealings practiced within a commune extend to its
members’ relations with the outside world as well.
How well do communes work in reality? Investigations of collective
upbringing in Russia by Urie Bronfenbrenner, and in Israel by Bruno
Bettelheim, indicate that children in these nations are adept at relating to
others and at acting independently to accomplish group goals. These
strengths are achieved through emphasis at an early age on cooperation,
initiative, responsibility, and peer-group, rather than adult, supervision.
They are achieved, however, at the expense of a high degree of group
conformity. Perhaps in America and other Western countries, where
communes are voluntary rather than institutionalized, a greater variety of
communal forms and values will develop. These might include some which
are more capable of encouraging and supporting individual deviations than
is possible within more uniform or totalitarian cultures.
Right now, the problem in America is not one of excessive
communalization, but of its opposite, as Urie Bronfenbrenner indicates in
his article, “The Origins of Alienation.” Bronfenbrenner finds that many
signs of social instability and family psychopathology—including divorce,
child desertion and abuse, juvenile drug addiction, alcoholism, and crime—
are more common than ever before. His conclusion is that a child’s normal
lot is one of isolation from meaningful human contact as well as meaningful
work. To counter this trend, he advocates reforms in education and family
structure that resemble Ivan Illich’s proposals for bringing schoolchildren
into reality. For example, he finds that model housing developments could
be vastly improved by not only allowing children room to play, but also
designing into residential and play areas the opportunity to interact with
children of different ages and adults at work and leisure.
Bronfenbrenner is pessimistic, as is justified by the social conditions he
observes. There are, though, an increasing number of people who are trying
to sort out these issues of alienation and isolation for themselves, as by
arranging to work intermittently or on a freelance basis while devoting
more time to their personal lives and families. Others are creating more
open households—households which, while not organized formally as
communes, welcome visitors and sometimes invite them to be temporary
members of the family.
With the occupational mobility that is commonplace today, many people
in academic and other professions have no permanent homes, and they do
not have a chance to form enduring relationships out of daily contacts with
people over the years. In this there is a loss, which Bronfenbrenner is
acknowledging when he says that personal alienation is more severe than
ever. But there is also a gain, in that many individuals and couples are
actively maintaining the friendships they do make across barriers of
distance and time. Extended live-in visits by friends compensate for what
used to be the regular traffic of neighbors through the house. Children can
see that even in their stable household, people come and go, and come
again. From such experiences they can learn to live with a fluid
environment while learning to value and expect continuity in friendship.
Sex role evolution also is changing the home atmosphere. Bronfenbrenner
sees a negative side to this, insofar as some mothers are neglecting their
children in their search for other gratifications. That happens when women
imitate an unenlightened male pattern of blind self-assertion. There are
other families in which the readjustment of the mother’s role goes along
with a heightened personal awareness in both parents, and here the impact
on children can be positive. With the father spending more time with the
children, and the mother presenting herself as a fully developed, self-
respecting person, children are exposed to two adults for equal amounts of
time, and both parents are able to give fully what they have to offer.
The questions of social structure and custom which we have been
considering are basically questions of the degree to which a child is
exposed to his or her parents and various other individuals—questions of
whom, how many, and how much. These are important issues, but so is the
character of the interactions between parents and children. Whether a
child’s environment is a commune, open household, or unaltered nuclear
family, the criteria for addictive versus nonaddictive childrearing are
essentially the same. The opportunities for constructive breakthroughs are
great, even where parents are themselves struggling within a conventional
setting to overcome their own addictive hangups.
We must be careful, however, to isolate what really matters in producing
nonaddicted children, since in this area people are so confused about what
lessons to draw from experience. Many people, for example, look at the
story of Patricia Hearst and put the blame on the permissive dormitory
policies which enabled her to spend nights at Steven Weed’s apartment
while still a college freshman. Seeking a “rational” explanation for her later
adoption of an antisocial ideology, they infer that her exposure to marijuana
and the politics of Berkeley radicalized her. This explanation is invalidated
by the fact that she lived a secluded, apolitical, self-centered life in
Berkeley. Explosive changes were to be expected in Patricia Hearst’s life
because she didn’t have a coherent idea of who she was and what she
wanted. The moral of her story is not that being strict with children will
somehow fortify them against disintegration later on. It is that people will
fall apart whenever they are removed from the shelter of external control, if
that is what they rely on to regulate themselves. The alternatives for our
children, then, are for them to spend all their lives within the confines of a
strict social structure (which generally doesn’t exist anymore), or to be
taught self-discipline and self-determination when they are young. This
teaching can only be accomplished through an exposure to life in all its
contours, all its difficulties.
This is not a manual, but we can derive some guidelines for childrearing
from what we have seen to be the true causes of addiction. The strict
regulation of children which emphasizes their limitations and disrespects
their status and abilities deprives them of the wherewithal for effective self-
management. But personal futility also results from what is called
permissiveness—an avoidance of confrontation by parents that reflects their
own unsureness about values and their fear of losing their children’s
allegiance. When unaccompanied by any concept of helping children grow,
such parental avoidance forms people who are careless of their
responsibilities to others because they basically don’t care about
themselves. The children develop no precise sense of the value of their
efforts or their words or thoughts, and so they discount the words and
actions of others. Thus the permissiveness-directiveness battle is to a great
extent a phony issue. The real issue is the active encouragement of life and
growth.
Obviously, the attitudes people have about themselves have a lot to do
with whether their children will grow up addicted. When parents are
involved in meaningful activity and have some investment in life beyond
having children, they are more likely to nurture their children’s
independence, joy, and competence, instead of constricting their growth
with fear, guilt, or excessive supervision. When parents don’t need to
begrudge a child his or her identity, the child can develop a respect for his
autonomy and the autonomy of others, instead of the exploitative urge that
is part of addiction. Nonaddicted parents are the best models a child can
have, for a joyous spirit (just like its opposite) is catching. Even if we have
addictions of our own that we are insecure about, we can still show our
children our most positive, constructive face, teaching them ideals that we
may not be quite able to live up to, provided that we don’t try to deny the
disparity or act ashamed of it. In circumstances like this it can be valuable,
too, for children to have other models besides their parents. Still,
considering how seriously children take their parents’ example and how
little else they have to go on in the early years, it is worthwhile to restrain
the expression of worries which may be very natural, but which are not
constructive either as a model for a child to emulate, or as a guide for his or
her behavior.
Children have a natural exuberance and an instinct to explore. Bringing
up children to be nonaddicted means supporting and rewarding their
explorations, thereby passing on to them a spirit of adventurousness that
will persist through their adult years. It means granting them as much
autonomy as possible at any given age, without interfering with the
response—even when it is painful—that they get from the outside world. It
means encouraging them to complete self-initiated enterprises which give
them a sense of their own worth. It means allowing them joint, and
eventually full, responsibility for managing their own lives, as well as for
accomplishing work that has real value in the family or elsewhere. It means
welcoming spontaneous impulses and new personal directions which will
take them beyond the sphere of parental observation and influence. It means
treating them with a respect that teaches them to respect themselves and
others. And finally, it means establishing a relationship of mutuality in
which their communications are part of a genuine interchange. When you
take seriously what you tell a child and do what you say you will, when you
listen seriously to him and give him a real opportunity to influence you,
then he or she has the best chance of becoming a real person. He can count
on himself and others, and he knows that he can make things happen in
human relationships and practical affairs.
How can we assess whether we are addicted, particularly in love relationships? Love and
Addiction establishes these criteria for addiction, and for its opposite, love:
Does the involvement make you feel better about yourself in an enduring way?
Is it part of a constructive, proactive life?
Does it improve your health and relationship to the world?
Does it enhance your other relationships and involvements?
Is it fun?
These keys to determining whether an involvement is healthy or addictive also set goals for you
to aim for in love, in life, and in combating addictions of all sorts.
Addiction is not essentially a problem with a specific substance or activity. “We know that the
problem of addiction is not in the addictive object, but in our orientation toward something
which has become a dependency.” In the case of love, more than any other addiction (except for
food), “we cannot abstain totally from the addictive object.” But, in any case, “abstinence does
not cure addiction—we must aim to become genuinely nonaddicted.” As a result, “the purpose of
a period of abstinence is to relearn our orientation toward something which has become a
dependency, but which can be”—certainly in the case of love—“enjoyed in a constructive way.
To do this, we must fundamentally reshape our motivations, our methods of coping, and our
sources of satisfaction.” Only in this way will we “have increasingly healthy love relationships,
instead of substituting one kind of addictive relationship for another.”
Thus, love addiction is the primary example of harm reduction, or of working within a
dependency to reduce the harmfulness of an involvement, in an incremental way, to approach a
better way of engaging in the involvement. Yet drug addictions—and the fact that people
outgrow them, called “maturing out” in the case of heroin (per Charles Winick)—also show us
the way to overcoming love addiction. That people most often quit addiction, on their own, has
now been firmly established in the case of alcoholism. The largest study (over 43,000 people) of
alcoholism ever conducted—by the U.S. National Institute of Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism—
discovered that “Twenty years after onset of alcohol dependence, about three-fourths of
individuals are in full recovery; more than half of those who have fully recovered drink at low-
risk levels without symptoms of dependence…. Only 13 percent of people with alcohol
dependence ever receive specialty alcohol treatment” (this includes attending AA).
How remarkable is people’s gift for recovery! And the “key to nonaddiction is maturity.” In the
case of love, the “essential attribute of maturity is the ability to handle the inevitable conflict
between our desire for connection with others and our own individual separateness.” And the
“test of our secure being, of our connectedness, is the capacity to be alone” and to enjoy the
world at large: the person who is free to love and to connect in intimacy with others is one “who
is not afraid of his or her individuality and who relates to the environment freely.” And, so,
avoiding addiction returns us to the concepts of joy and competence. The matter of overcoming
addiction is, more than anything, about building our relationship to life: it is that relationship that
“makes addiction seem unappealing, unrewarding, and altogether irrelevant to our lives.”
Stanton has further elaborated these therapeutic/self-help models for quitting addiction over the
decades of his work with addiction and addicts in his books, The Truth About Addiction and
Recovery (written with Archie and with Mary Arnold) and 7 Tools to Beat Addiction.
Addiction in love is the primary concern of this book, but we cannot learn
to cope with that kind of addiction, or any kind of addiction, by itself.
Because addiction is a general predisposition, it cannot be cured without a
basic personal regeneration. Love is possible only when we reach out to
another person from our strengths rather than from our weaknesses. If we
find ourselves in relationships based on weakness, these cannot be fixed
without first, or at the same time, repairing our own spirits. This chapter
considers the self-development that must provide the basis for
nonaddictively relating to others, and lays the groundwork for the
discussion on growth within relationships in the next chapter.
What can we do if we realize that we are addicted to people? Since we
cannot abstain totally from the addictive object—in any case, abstinence
does not cure an addiction—we must aim to become genuinely
nonaddicted. We know that the problem of addiction is not in the addictive
object, but in our orientation toward it. So the purpose of a period of
abstinence is to relearn our orientation toward something which has become
a dependency, but which can be enjoyed in a constructive way. To do this,
we must fundamentally reshape our motivations, our methods of coping,
and our sources of satisfaction. That alone will enable us to have
increasingly healthy love relationships, instead of substituting one kind of
addictive relationship for another.
In the self-examination which we hope will lead us to feel better about
ourselves and to relate to others with integrity, we can anticipate some
dangers. One is that we might evaluate our lives against some notion of
idealized love and, necessarily finding our experience deficient, wistfully
conclude that we have not fully lived. It is just this belief in idealized
romantic love, of course, that engenders our desperate behavior and makes
us liable to addictions. In its place, we should want to be able to feel the
pleasure of being alive and of knowing who we are.
This feeling makes it possible to love, and also not to panic when love is
not immediately available. What the addict wishes to escape from is the
realization that it is impossible to be “all together” all the time. He thinks
there must be some way, if only he can find it, to make things perfect
always. Actually, when we are aware that we will have some unmet
yearnings for love, and that it is normal at times to feel unfulfilled, then we
can come to someone else with the realistic desires and expectations out of
which truly stable relationships are forged. This emotional balance enables
us to act in harmony with our larger interests and needs, along with those of
other people. When we read about remarkably vital and enduring
relationships, such as the one between Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de
Beauvoir, we see that two people cannot always give each other what they
most need at a given moment. Instead, their own individual self-reliance
allows them to maintain their confidence in and affection for each other.
Focusing our attention primarily on love is not the best way to attain it.
The diagnosis of the state of our souls should not be conceived solely in
terms of how well we get along with our lovers, husbands, or wives. Nor
should we congratulate ourselves just because we obviously don’t have
addictive ties with members of the opposite sex. In assessing oneself and
others, it is only natural to look critically at relationships between lovers
which appear to be addictions, either because these relationships are
exclusive or frenetic. But to imagine that addiction exists only between
lovers is as mistaken as to think that only drugs can addict. It can lead to
serious miscalculations about other types of involvements we have, or about
our actual ability to deal with people or love. Since addictions can be
formed to work, religion, friends, and social groups, as well as to drugs and
lovers (whether heterosexual or homosexual), not having a steady lover or
any meaningful sexual contact is no guarantee that one is not participating
in some addiction. In fact, the absence of emotional involvement with
others can be just as much a sign of the lack of wholeness and the fears that
make up addiction as a clinging relationship can be.
If the concept of addiction is to be helpful to us, it cannot be used as a
weapon—either for self-defense, self-flagellation, or the bludgeoning· of
others. If we see it as a way to tear down people we know, we are probably
trying to turn attention away from ourselves, and we aren’t being helpful to
others. On the other hand, if we all too readily find in ourselves every
symptom listed on these pages, and hastily resolve that everything about us
must be changed, we manifest the panic and instability of response that are
more a cause of addiction than part of its cure. But if we honestly apply the
insight that addiction gives us into our own behavior, and use the concept to
understand the behavior of others, we can begin to move ourselves and
those we care for gradually but constantly toward self-realization.
Ideals
Let us first set ourselves an ideal of nonaddiction. How does a person who
is free from addiction think and act? The description that follows does not
correspond in its entirety to any real person, and certainly it is not a
standard we should compare ourselves with literally. But it is a standard that
we can work toward, so long as we are committed to a belief in ourselves as
changing and growing beings.
The key to nonaddiction is maturity. Winick’s discovery that heroin
addiction is often an artificial extension of adolescence, an evasion of adult
responsibility, offers us a sound insight about addiction of all kinds.
Addictive relationships, too, can be temporary refuges on the road to the
clarity of thought and purposefulness of action that people should gain as
they grow older. Addiction is discontinued when a person possesses an
intangible sense of freedom and self-command—a sense of having the
power to fashion the conditions of his or her life instead of being fashioned
by them. It is hard to tell exactly when and why this change comes for any
given person, for it isn’t planned. It happens more as a result of
accumulated experience and an evolving self-conception, a “growing into
oneself.”
An essential attribute of maturity is the ability to handle the inevitable
conflict between our desire for connection with others and our own
individual separateness. With this ability, we need no longer seek from
others a whole life already made up for us. Rather, we can securely interact
out of a firm sense of our humanity, and out of the realization that there is
something in ourselves which does not disappear even if we fail at a
relationship. This stability results from our having formed a variety of
emotional contact points with life. When there is more than one thing we
care about, more than one person through whom we are fulfilled and
revivified, then we cannot be destroyed—no matter how much we are hurt
—by the loss of one person.
The test of our secure being, of our connectedness, is the capacity to
enjoy being alone. The person whose relationships are not compulsive is
one who values his or her own company. It is easier to be comfortable with
a self that is capable of creating satisfying attachments to life. We then
welcome periods of solitude where we can exercise and express that self
both in the real world and in imagination. We can take pride in a self-
sustenance which, while never total, can withstand many pressures. This
self-sustenance also serves as the bulwark for our relationships.
Consider how some people find it easier to get out and move
confidently among others when they already have one relationship to start
from. Being loved gives one a feeling of confidence, a feeling of not having
one’s whole being bound up in the outcome of every new contact. This lack
of desperation communicates itself subtly but surely to others as an
attractive and desirable quality, for people generally find it reassuring to
relate to those who are already certain of their own value. By the same
token, though, why can’t the person whose acceptance and support is so
vital to this feeling of value be yourself? Your relationship with yourself
and your surroundings, rather than any external confirmation of worth, is
the most secure anchor against perpetual uncertainty and escapism. It is also
the best underpinning for the formation of the relationships which complete
an emotionally mature person’s life.
Essential as it is, however, self-acceptance is only a start. A full
description of the nonaddicted person must include that person’s
relationship to his environment. This relationship is one which balances a
sensitivity to outside stimuli and events with a strong self-identity. In The
Lonely Crowd, David Riesman contrasts the “inner-directed” with the
“other-directed” personality. Inner-directed people determine their course
by means of an internal guidance system, while other-directed people rely
on outside cues—especially those provided by other people—to decide
what path to follow. In recent years, Riesman believes, the other-directed
personality has become prevalent in America. But Riesman also speaks of a
composite type which he feels may be evolving today—the “autonomous”
person who is attuned to external stimuli, but not in a purely reactive way.
This autonomous person is able to take in information about the
appropriateness and likely consequences of any course of action without
being totally constrained by current attitudes and other people’s opinions.
We can picture the autonomous person as a competent man or woman
who is not afraid of his or her individuality and who relates to the
environment freely, enjoying the interaction rather than being intimidated
by it. Such persons, secure in their worth, welcome feedback from the
outside world, even when it is critical, rather than suppressing it or blocking
it out. They see this information not as an assault on their self-esteem, but
as an aid in becoming a better person. For example, when rejected by a
lover, the autonomous person can consider seriously the lover’s critical
observations, not simply to get back in the other’s good graces, but to learn
how to deal better with people.
Up to now, our picture of the nonaddicted person has been an abstract
one which does not give us much of the flavor of autonomous behavior.
After all, in the areas where he or she is most self-assured, a healthy person
expresses a spontaneity and a depth of feeling that cannot be conveyed by
the categories I have used, however helpful these may be for formulating
ideas. When I had the most trouble I have ever had in performing a
professional duty that revolved around my style of working with people, I
turned to a concrete example for aid. I had just begun teaching at the
Harvard Business School, where I faced the demands of teaching an
unfamiliar subject in a new setting. The instructor’s role was the
nondirective one of guiding a discussion among eighty students, and in it I
became nervous and ill at ease. I was helped in this situation by a model of
skilled performance in the person of the basketball player Walt Frazier.
Frazier, as playmaker and guiding force for the New York
Knickerbockers, effortlessly combined self-assured control with fluidity and
exuberance. As he roamed down the court, directing and moving his team,
he reacted to everything before him, seemingly without taking notice. He
could respond appropriately to any combination of circumstances, and yet
he did it all with a relaxed ease that showed he was in complete command
of himself and the situation.
Basketball, along with some other performing activities, like jazz,
exemplifies a group enterprise in which a participant must be continuously
aware of what others are doing, while simultaneously playing an active part
himself. The individual’s role is adaptive and cooperative without being
self-denying; it is assertive without being anarchic. A great jazz musician or
basketball player conveys an obvious impression that he is comfortable in
what he is doing as he takes in and molds the apparent chaos around him.
His confident bearing comes from practicing his skill before knowledgeable
onlookers and with fellow artists who appreciate and are affected by his
performance. He knows that he can excel in terms of the rules of the
discipline; he also knows that he can go beyond these rules, expanding and
reinterpreting them to achieve a genuinely personal form of expression.
This level of self-realization—this excellence and intensity which at the
same time carries with it an ease and flexibility of style—is often given the
name of “soul.” Unfortunately, soul in the worlds of basketball and jazz is
no guarantee of general adequacy as a person, for athletes and musicians are
notoriously susceptible to the addictions of our society: sex, drugs, money,
and public adulation. But the spirit of soul, so much the antithesis of
addiction in its self-possession and freedom from external constraint, is
something that has almost limitless applications. We can even make use of
it in our approach to such commonplace daily exercises as driving a car and
cooking.
What can give driving or cooking soul is the confidence, based on
experience and ability, that we can handle just about anything we might
encounter when we perform these tasks. In driving, this means knowing the
road and the automobile so as to be able to adjust more readily to
emergencies or unusual conditions. In cooking it is the ability to deviate
from a recipe when a different taste is desired, or to put together a dish out
of an idea and whatever ingredients are available. These skills involve a
heightened awareness of the components of the setting one works in—the
evolving traffic patterns, the taste of the meal as it develops. The
outstanding cook or driver is calm and responsive, ready to improvise when
he or she sees the need for it. But while he does not panic when strange or
unexpected conditions present themselves, he is not emotionless. An
activity accomplished with a mastery and flair gives a continuous pleasure
in its exercise.
Minor as they are, driving and cooking are examples of the kinds of
activities which, because they are performed directly and not under
institutional supervision, can carry our personal signatures. If they are done
with a truly individual spirit, they can give us a sense of our own worth and
potency. The trick is to extend these feelings more broadly through our
lives.
Pitfalls in Growing
A Case of Change
References
Assessing Relationships
We have already listed some broad criteria for distinguishing love from
addiction. To translate these into useful tools, we must learn to frame
questions out of them which are meaningful to us personally. Some
examples of these, starting with the most direct, are: Can you bear to be
without the person you love when it is necessary or desirable for him or her
to be away? Have you maintained the interests and associations you had
before you met your lover? Have you developed new ones? And more
pointedly: How would you feel toward your lover if he or she went off on
his or her own? Can you imagine still being friends with this person if you
were no longer totally involved with each other? And, finally: Are you a
better person, is your lover a better person, as a result of your relationship?
These questions, to whatever extent they are answered in the negative,
should make you probe further. They lead naturally to questions about the
feelings which underlie the relationship, and, in turn, about you and your
lover as individuals. What motivates each of you; what is it that makes you
anxious about your partner’s absence, or his growth as a person? How do
you convey your needs to your partner; how do you gain his conformity to
the limits you want to place on him? How does he react; what sacrifice does
he demand in return? The answers to all these questions will in some cases
be relatively straightforward, in some cases extremely complicated. You
may dread spending time alone because you have few interests. Or it may
be because you are not at ease with yourself. Your motivations may include
the wish to avoid boredom, or insecurity about whether or not your lover
finds you desirable. You may complain when your partner wants to do
something you don’t want to do, or you may accede, but with the intent to
sabotage. And you may give in to your partner’s irrationalities and
weaknesses in order to insure that he or she will do the same for you.
All these are normal human impulses. In themselves, they are not
unhealthy or disastrous. But when they all point in the same direction, when
they dictate the overall pattern of your life, and when you cannot
acknowledge or deal with them, then you are in danger of allowing your
relationship to be an addiction. The alternative is the kind of existential
analysis which brings these mechanisms into the realm of consciousness,
thus making them manageable. Along with it, as in individual change, a
smaller-scale—almost trivial—kind of behavioral analysis is an essential
step toward escaping addictive patterns in a relationship.
If your interactions unavoidably fall into a set routine—if a predictable
act on your part guarantees an equally predetermined response from your
partner—no progress can be made. The relationship is at a standstill. For
example, say that every time a couple goes to a party the man ignores the
woman because he feels she is overly effusive. When they get home the
woman reacts angrily to his slighting behavior. For his part, the man may
return the spirit of her attack, refusing to acknowledge his error and
attacking her for her failures. Or he may be extremely apologetic and rush
to make amends by flattering and cajoling her. The latter response often
concludes with an “I love you” on both sides. Neither of these denouements
changes the man’s or woman’s behavior, and they do the same things the
next time they go out. Their interaction is static. Because they cannot
overcome the inertia of the relationship to talk things through or work on
their problems except when they are angry (at which time they do so
superficially or antagonistically), they are doomed to reenact the scenario
whenever similar circumstances occur.
More directly tied in with addiction is the example of a man living with
or dating a woman until he becomes sickened or oppressed by the
relationship. He then calls it off, only to find after a while that he is lonely
and distraught without the woman. He returns, she accepts him, and they
proceed to the next breakup. No matter how many times the cycle is
repeated, they do not jointly change the nature of their relationship when
they are together, either so as to make it more durable, or to limit it to the
level of intensity that it can withstand. Nor does the man, on his own,
anticipate the next stage of his discontent enough to temper his behavior
either when he is seeing the woman or when he is not. She, on the other
hand, refuses to demand from herself or the man any indications that she
and the relationship have integrity. And so they persist, unhappily, until
some arbitrary point where things may be finally resolved by outside
events, often with great trauma for one or the other or both. It should be
noted that this tumultuous cycle is just an extreme version of the mini-
disillusionment, rejection, and uneasy rapprochement which is enacted by
the bickering couple, and which appears so often in stable relationships.
What is required to interrupt these never-ending, repetitive patterns of
interaction is, first, an awareness that they are occurring, and, second, an
understanding of why and when they occur. These, in turn, are only possible
if there is a commitment to the relationship and an ability to bear up under
what self-analysis will reveal about it. Working against the possibility for
change, even where understanding exists, is the tendency for unhealthy
patterns to solidify with time. This is the negative side of longevity. The
longer two people have been together, the more ingrained are the cues each
sets up for the other, and the less flexibility there is in the responses to these
cues. People learn standard ways of dealing with any situation, and that
learning becomes an integral part of their face to the world. In the first case
above, the man looks for his wife’s usual social behavior at a party, and
then is put off when he sees it. The woman herself knows well when her
husband has withdrawn from her, and just as readily seeks refuge in her
rage.
Expectations people have of those close to them are powerful, and work
in subtle ways. The woman may anticipate her husband’s disapproval, may
feel that she has no chance not to confirm what he expects, and may act as
she always does at parties even when she herself does not approve of her
own behavior. Or she may resolve to act differently, but he, fixed in his
perceptions of her, may not be capable of seeing anything but that vestige of
her old conduct which could not possibly be eradicated in one outing. So
the next time, she refuses to make any effort to move in her husband’s
direction. For this couple, a gathering like the one which provoked their last
fight may be perceived as a continuation of the battleground, with each of
the partners setting out for the evening with the intention of finding
derogatory evidence to use in the next, imminent argument.
Wasteful, draining cycles of interaction do not have to be as overtly
hostile as this. Two people can relate in an easy, harmonious way which still
forces both into roles they would not endorse and cannot be totally happy
with. A woman may invariably defer to a man, allowing him to make the
decisions and permitting his opinions to prevail. Whenever a choice comes
up, or whenever the two of them participate in a discussion with others, the
woman shrinks back, almost with relief. The arrangement is a smooth one,
yet it prevents the woman from asserting herself and the man from learning
to accept an equal partner in life. With its inequities, the arrangement is also
potentially explosive, because the woman may suddenly gather herself
together and break out of it, much as Gail did after she and Allen moved to
Eugene.
In fact, to counter the argument made earlier for preserving old
connections, separation may be the only way for some people to change. It
may only be by breaking away from old contacts that one can freely realize
a new self-definition. With those who conceive of a person in a set way no
longer around to send out signals reminding her of what they expect, and to
force her to maintain their image of her even in her own mind, she has a
better chance to try out a new, desired identity. Psychotherapists, for
example, are now realizing that releasing a patient to the family
environment which originally created that person’s problem may be self-
defeating. Sometimes it takes some running away, as it did for Mitch, to get
to a place where a person can be who he feels he is, or wants to be.
Given the difficulty of weighing this consideration against the
accumulated positive meaning and value in a relationship, two people may
want to find a middle ground where they can continue to relate to each
other at a lower level of intimacy, if this solution lies within their emotional
capabilities. They may preserve their involvement as a long-term
friendship, while acknowledging that they will have more intense romantic
attachments elsewhere. On the other hand, the imperative need to break
down ingrained expectations often makes it desirable for a couple to
separate for a time, thereby serving warning that they will be renewing the
relationship as changed individuals coming to each other afresh. But it may
be impossible ever to have strongly positive feelings again without having
the negative feelings return as well.
Thus, individuals and couples who find themselves mired in limiting,
unproductive relationships do have a range of options to consider. All
constructive paths, however, begin with recognizing the nature of the
addictive patterns in the relationship. The examples in this book have
ranged from very antagonistic styles of relating to styles that are quite
comfortable in their certitude and predetermination. The absence of overt
disruptions is most typical of complacent couples like Vicky and Bruce,
who, when presented with any novel opportunities, burrow back into each
other like two kids in a bunk. All of these patterns can be classified as
addictive. Because the interaction holds each of the partners back from
expanding themselves, because it operates to constrain them through
regular, repetitive mechanisms, and because the lovers accept these
limitations out of a need for the reassurance that the constancy of the
relationship provides, addiction is present. To want to change within a
relationship, or to want to change the relationship, is to oppose addiction.
To be able to do so is to overcome addiction.
Correcting Relationships
What obviously happened to these people was that they got out of their
very set, depressed patterns of relating to each other, and found out how
much fun they could have. Hopefully, the pleasure this produced will cause
them to continue to look for more constructive things to do together. I
believe that the function of marijuana in this discovery was, although
necessary, tangential. Without it the family would never have been moved
off the course they had set for themselves. They still have a lot to do besides
getting high to incorporate their new insights into a regular approach for
dealing with each other. There are, of course, other means, aside from
smoking dope, for people to begin to break the molds into which they have
poured their lives. That is one way, however. The continued use of such an
aid should be evaluated for its ability to inject fresh contributions into the
household, and not as the one stock way to bring about good feelings there.
I believe there is also a need to think about relationships away from
home (as the woman quoted did go on to do). The malaise this family felt
had much to do with the larger social setting in which the family existed. In
the same way, its members’ treatment of each other was related to their
accustomed ways of treating others not in the family. In the case of a
couple, it would be immoral and ultimately unsuccessful for them to go out
into the world purely for the purpose of improving their own relationship.
Such excursions, if they are to have any lasting value, have to be true
emotional experiences in themselves. We quoted Marx as saying, “It is
nonsense to believe … one could satisfy one passion separated from all
others….” It is also nonsense to believe that you can relate to one person in
a wholesome way while dealing with everyone else superficially. This is the
message the addiction concept has for love. It says that we must aim to
expand our honesty, intimacy, and trust to include others besides just one
person. To do so would carry us farther—to a consideration of
organizations, relating to other couples, and loving more than one person at
a time. But these things are beyond the scope of this book.
In what he had written to me, I saw specific positive signs, and points of
departure for expanding his healthy contacts with women.
I wrote back:
Your less intense friendships with women are a good basis for fighting addiction. If you
keep them going at the same time that you become romantically involved with someone,
you will find yourself better grounded in people and life, so that you will be less tempted to
be irrational and overconcerned with a lover. Continue to turn to your friends for company
and warmth, and fit a lover into these established relationships. Then you can let your
feelings and your interaction with her grow more naturally. Of course, the same goes for the
other interests you already have [the man was a successful professional]. You should always
retain in your perspective a sense of the importance of these interests to you.
Your ability to deal easily with women whom you don’t characterize as lovers may be
helpful in other ways, too. After a time, friendship can grow into an emotional experience
which is very satisfying, especially if past romances have been unhappy. Along these lines,
think of how you act with a woman whom you regard as a longstanding friend, and try to
behave around a lover with this same equanimity, no matter what your emotional response
to her is at the outset.
I answered:
I was somewhat reluctant to answer your letter, because you seem to be asking for help that
I cannot give, and that I don’t think would be good for me to give if I had it available.
I am worried that you still want to be relieved of a burden—by a lover, by me or by
someone—that it is impossible to give up. I think that you must be willing to maintain your
consciousness of yourself, at the same time that you make that consciousness more
pleasant, by working to increase your appreciation of yourself.
In your letter, you seem to be saying that you wish men were more willing to tell you
they love you, and that they be genuinely in love with you. I know that it is gratifying to be
loved, and that everyone seeks this feeling. But if in doing so you deny too much of
yourself, you lose what it is that might make you attractive as a person.
In the same way, I think you are too concerned with finding a therapist, relative to
finding your own cure. And this, I fear, includes your communication to me. I would like to
know more about your work as a caseworker. How do you proceed with welfare clients who
are uncertain or concerned? How do you get them to think better about their problems and
to decide what they want to do and how to do it? How do you know when you have done a
good job? Is it possible to try to go through some of these steps for yourself ? Perhaps in
thinking about this, you will be able also to improve your techniques in your work.
In response to your request for my aid with the difficulties you are having relating to
men, I would say start on a very modest scale. Develop your analysis of your problem into
some specific steps you would like to take. Later, review how well you are keeping to your
plan, and how successful this plan is. Talk to people you know about your efforts. If you
don’t have people with whom you find this possible, make such intimacy with people part
of what you are attempting to achieve.
Don’t get together all the time. Restrain yourself from expressing a
total need for your partner’s company. See what comes up when you’re
apart, even making the separations last a day or two, or more, as in
taking a trip alone or with other people.
Reserve some experiences for private contemplation. Decide on one
involvement or activity that you won’t keep your lover informed
about. Not something you want to hide; just something you won’t feel
pressure to reveal instantaneously, as though you must keep your lover
in constant touch with it.
See other people when you are in your lover’s company, especially in
the fast, furious weeks at the onset of love. Try talking about these
group interactions afterwards, and about what they have told you about
you and your lover as well as the people you were with. Inquire and
reveal, but try not to criticize or scrutinize. As you come to understand
each other, though, you shouldn’t need to do this all the time.
Include trips with your partner and other forays into the outside world
as a regular part of your experience together. These joint experiences
are among the most informative ways to spend your shared time, and
ultimately form the most solid and enduring basis of the relationship.
Be patient. Don’t force your feelings, or your partner’s; especially the
vocalization of them. Don’t ask questions where you want certain set
answers; don’t constrain the truth to make yourself or the other person
feel better, or more loved.
Don’t take these rules too seriously. Make up some rules that seem
sensible to the two of you. Follow them, change them, replace them;
talk about why.
And, finally, take it easy. No one relationship can give you life or take it
away from you. Don’t worry about anything you do or don’t do. If you live
and grow, your commitment is to life, and love comes in that same spirit—
love that is a joyous desire to share all that is best in yourself and others.
Appendix A
The major health hazards of tobacco are in the areas of lung cancer,
emphysema, chronic bronchitis, and heart disease. Coffee, according to
Marjorie Baldwin’s article “Caffeine on Trial,” is being implicated in heart
disease, diabetes, hypoglycemia, and stomach acidity. In addition, recent
research has concentrated on the increased incidence of birth defects and
increased risks in pregnancy with both of these drugs, as well as with
aspirin. The U.S. Public Health Service has reported that smoking on the
part of mothers is an important contributor to the high rate of fetal mortality
in this country. Lissy Jarvik and her colleagues, investigating chromosomal
damage from LSD (see Appendix E), find that long-time aspirin users and
“coffee or Coca-Cola addicts” run similar risks of genetic damage and
congenital abnormality in their offspring, and women who take aspirin daily
are now being observed to show a higher than normal rate of irregularities
in pregnancy and childbirth.
While American society has been slow in recognizing the deleterious
consequences of these familiar drugs, it has from the outset exaggerated
those of heroin. Along with the myths of addiction after one shot (for which
only a psychological explanation is possible) and unlimited tolerance,
heroin is thought to lead to physical degeneration and death. But the
experience of lifetime users in favorable social climates has shown that
heroin is as viable a habit to maintain as any other, and medical research has
not isolated any ill effects on health from heroin use alone. The main cause
of illness and death among street addicts is contamination from unhealthy
conditions of administration, such as dirty hypodermic needles. The addict’s
lifestyle also contributes in many ways to his high mortality rate. Charles
Winick has concluded, “Opiates usually are harmless, but they are taken
under unsatisfactory conditions. Malnutrition caused by loss of appetite
probably is the most serious complication of opiate addiction.”
The physical danger that heroin is most widely believed to present for
its users is that of death by overdose. Constituting perhaps the most
persistent misapprehension about the drug, “heroin overdoses” have vastly
increased in recent years while the average heroin content in doses available
on the street has been shrinking. Citing an investigation by Dr. Milton
Helpern, New York City’s Chief Medical Examiner, Edward Brecher shows
that so-called deaths by OD could not possibly result from that cause. The
best current guess is that deaths attributed to overdosing are actually due to
the use of heroin in combination with another depressant, such as alcohol or
a barbiturate.
The information presented here is not intended as an argument favoring
the use of heroin. In fact, it is true that heroin offers the most sure and
complete chance for eradicating one’s consciousness, which is the basic
element in an addiction. The premise of this book is that addiction as a way
of life is psychologically unhealthy both in its causes and consequences,
and the values which the book is meant to encourage run directly counter to
those of a drugged or otherwise artificially supported existence. The
exculpatory data on heroin, together with the evidence of ill effects from
cigarettes and coffee, are offered in support of the proposition that a
culture’s—our culture’s—estimate of the physical as well as psychological
hazards of different drugs is an expression of its overall attitude toward
those drugs. What must be dealt with is our society’s need to condemn
heroin from every possible angle, regardless of the facts, even while that
society is so strongly susceptible to heroin and other forms of addiction.
Appendix E
LSD Research
Ball, John C.; Graff, Harold; and Sheehan, John J., Jr. “The Heroin Addicts’
View of Methadone Maintenance.” British Journal of Addiction to
Alcohol and Other Drugs 69 (1974): 89–95.
Blum, Richard H., & Associates. Drugs I: Society and Drugs. San
Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1969.
Bruch, Hilde. Eating Disorders: Obesity, Anorexia Nervosa, and the Person
Within. New York: Basic Books, 1973.
Cameron, Dale C. “Facts About Drugs.” World Health (April 1971): 4–11.
Carter, Hugh, and Glick, Paul C. Marriage and Divorce: A Social and
Economic Study. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1970.
———; Gerard, Donald L.; Lee, Robert S.; and Rosenfeld, Eva. The Road
to H. New York: Basic Books, 1964.
Davis, Virginia E., and Walsh, Michael J. “Alcohol, Amines, and Alkaloids:
A Possible Biochemical Basis for Alcohol Addiction.” Science 167
(1970): 1005–1007.
Dishotsky, Norman I.; Loughman, William D.; Mogar, Robert E.; and
Lipscomb, Wendell R. “LSD and Genetic Damage.” Science 172
(1971): 431–440.
Fromm, Erich. The Art of Loving. New York: Harper & Row, 1956.
Ginott, Haim G. Between Parent and Child. New York: Macmillan, 1965.
Graham, Sheilah, and Frank, Gerold. Beloved Infidel. New York: Bantam
Books, 1959.
Henry, Jules. Culture Against Man. New York: Random House, 1963.
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Stanton Peele has been a cutting-edge figure in the addiction field for four
decades since the publication of Love and Addiction in 1975. He has been a
leader in opening up the field to an experiential, culturally and
environmentally sensitive understanding of addiction and to practical, life-
management approaches to treatment, harm reduction, and self-help. Along
the way, Stanton has written 12 books (including The Meaning of Addiction,
Diseasing of America, The Truth About Addiction and Recovery, 7 Tools to
Beat Addiction, and Addiction-Proof Your Child) and 250 professional
articles, won numerous awards (including from the Journal of Studies on
Alcohol and Drugs and the Drug Policy Alliance—the leading drug policy
reform organization in America), and created the Life Process Program for
addiction treatment, which continues to be utilized worldwide. His latest
book, Recover! Stop Thinking Like an Addict and Reclaim Your Life with
The PERFECT Program (Da Capo, 2014), written with Ilse Thompson,
incorporates mindfulness and meditation techniques into a comprehensive
self-help program. Stanton also lectures on addiction around the world,
writes the Addiction in Society Blog in Psychology Today
(http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/addiction-in-society), and blogs as
an addiction expert for The Huffington Post
(http://www.huffingtonpost.com/stanton-peele/). He was named the best
addiction blogger by All Treatment and one of the ten most influential
figures in the addiction field by The Fix.
[†] In fact, one way in which Fromm sees man trying to overcome his feeling of separateness is through orgiastic states, including
drugs. In a culture like ours where this behavior is disapproved of, “while they [drug users] try to escape from separateness by
taking refuge in alcohol or drugs, they feel all the more separate after the orgiastic experience is over, and thus are driven to take
recourse to it with increasing frequency and intensity.”
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