Addiction as Automatic, Motivated Action

An editorial post by Daniel Goldin, Psy.D.

The word “addict” comes originally from the Latin “addictus”, combining the prefix “ad-” “for” and the verb “dicere” “to speak.” Originally, then, “addicted” meant “spoken for.” A person was “addicted” or “spoken for” in ancient Rome when he was handed over by a judge to a greater authority, usually a creditor, the army or the penal system. So completely was such a person under the control of another that his voice was no longer his own. The historical essence of addiction then is a loss of voice or agency. The addict can’t say no. They are spoken for. They make no choice. They simply do.

But of course, a person struggling with addiction doesn’t necessarily see their relationship to their drug in this way. Often enough, they see their drug as the very source of an agency that organizes their life and gives them and their friends a sense of purpose.

Psychoanalysts tend to avoid talking about the neurobiology of the brain as a determinate of human action. We know from our many conversations with people that meaning, at least as it serves us in the everyday world and in talk, lies in experience and in depictions of experience, where brain, body and historically constituted world come together to form provisional sketches that point to the future. The brain is just one character in the story. But people struggling with addiction seem to be exceptional in that they already operate directly on their own brains by taking in chemicals or in other ways overloading their system with dopamine. Addiction is thus often referred to as a “chronic relapsing brain disease.” According to many addiction researchers, damage to the the plasticity of the nucleus accumbens means drugs hijack the “reward system,” making people highly sensitized to drug-oriented “cues,” both internal and external.

One must always take the “discussion” section of a psychological research report with a grain of salt. Empirical researchers tend to use a vocabulary of distance to describe their findings. But words are just words, not the findings themselves, and they often reflect a particular ideology hiding behind the neutral data. Phrases such as “reward system” and words such as “cues” evoke metaphors drawn from behaviorism that are anathema to most people who feel the world through their own skin and view the world through their own eyes. When a person struggling with alcoholism passes a liquor store and feels compelled to go in and buy a bottle of something, is the liquor store really a “cue?” Perhaps it would be closer to the person’s experience if we think of the liquor store as holding a powerful storyline buried deep in it by many past actions, a storyline that involves going in, paying for a bottle and then pulling from that bottle in the parking lot. That storyline can be understood as a kind of narrative envelope that insists on being filled in unique ways, that sucks the person into enacting an actual story – buying a different kind of alcohol today, sitting in a different parking spot in the parking lot.

The affordances of objects

We can think of our relation to all objects in our world as similar to that of an alcoholic to a liquor store. The ecological philosopher Gibson argues that we don’t perceive objects objectively and then infer how to use them. Rather, we see objects immediately, holistically, in term of what we can do with them. Objects appear to us as affordances for action.

Take the example of a fly. A fly sees the world in terms of its use for him, in terms of surfaces to land on, open spaces for flight, or obstacles that need to be avoided. Rather than “seeing” a world made of abstract objects, the fly’s sensory system is tuned to detect those features that are immediately relevant to its survival and behavior. The fly perceives the world in terms of what it can do with it - — landing here, flying that way, or dodging a potential threat. For the fly, and by extension for all organisms, the world is understood through its affordances — the opportunities for action that it presents.

In the human world, an affordance is a suggestion for a sequence of meaningful actions. For example, my office chair affords my sitting on it, turning on my computer and creating stuff with words on my desktop. The storyline pulls to be filled with a particular story that completes but also inevitably overflows its sketchy structure. This notion of objects exerting narrative pull revises the Freudian idea of cathexis, in which motivation starts in the body and then attaches to things. Here motivation lies neither in the body nor in things themselves but in a relation between the two, in the way things appear to a person and in what that person does with the object’s call to action, which depends on that person’s history with the object and on the culture in which that person lives. In short, as things become narratively weighted with our actions, they can be understood as exerting a pull for us to enact stories that fill their narrative outline.

So what is going on when the nucleus accumbens of an alcoholic under an FMRI machine lights up when an image of a liquor store flashes on the screen? This is not a simple matter of cause and effect. The affordances of a liquor store don’t cause the nucleus accumbens to light up any more than the lit-up nucleus accumbens causes the liquor store to pull powerfully toward the enacting of a story that fills its outline. Rather, both brain and liquor-store are best understood as operating on each other in a tight reciprocal relation. It is in the extreme tightness of this relation that life under addiction differs from ordinary life. The nucleus accumbens loses its plasticity, as does the liquor store. Both are highly sensitized toward each other. An addict’s attention tends towards objects that offer powerful storylines around use that suck them in with a rush toward a single ending: getting high. These affordances demand to be followed, allowing little creative surplus, only the merest variations in action and reaction. Human motivation in this mode is a drive, where mind and object fit so perfectly little room is left for doubt or hesitation, much less improvisation.

The addict’s voice isn’t quite their own, and yet they are likely to feel an even stronger sense of agency than other people. They want, they desire, they go after. What is going on here?

Some initial thoughts about agency

In the contemporary Western world we put a lot of stock in the idea of agency. Having agency” seems to mean that a person takes a forceful position to the world and its objects. But the idea resists easy definition, so let’s take a brief excursion into etymology, as I think it will help us understand the pseudo agency of addiction. “Agency” comes from the Latin “agere,” meaning “to set in motion or drive forward.” “Motivation” comes from the Latin “movere,” meaning “to move,” sharing the same root as “emotion,” which also describes “motion.” Mind and world are entangled in these sensorimotor concepts, as human motion or emotion is always situated in the world, toward or away from something. One cannot understand a person’s anger without first understanding what they might be angry about. In other words, human motivation or agency has two sides, mind and world, and can be understood best as residing in a relation between the two.

Most of the objects in our life pull on us along multiple affordances, each simple storyline offering a sketch we can fill in many creative ways. We can sit at a kitchen table to talk, to eat, to scroll through our phone and so on. All of these canonical possibilities have sedimented into our perception of the table through our use of tables within a particular culture. They are not inherent in the table itself when considered objectively as a rectangular base on four sticks. The table’s affordances are suggestions, not demands, and human motivation lies in which storyline we chose to fill and how we chose to fill it. We can even subvert the affordances of a table in imaginative ways. For example, a child can make believe the table is a cave in which they can hibernate like a bear. When the child is called to dinner, the table might then awaken to its canonical affordance of being a place on which one can eat and talk. Following these simple affordances brings about a creative surplus of action and thought that exceeds an object’s narrative bounds. Human motivation in this mode can be understood as a rich collaboration between mind and object, whether that object is material, human or imaginative.

A pseudo experience of agency

The addict indeed experiences themself as highly motivated, perhaps more so than ordinary people. But they experience a strange, paradoxical form of agency. Instead of collaborating with the affordances objects present to them, they rush again and again to follow the single storyline demanded by the object to a foregone conclusion. The liquor store is for going into and buying a bottle and that’s it. The addict is thus motivated in a heightened but automatic way that gives the behavioral idea of “cue” some credence. If in ordinary life the emphasis in motivation is on the mind – hence we see a person as having motivation – in addiction it is switched so that motivation lies primarily in the pull of objects. One is highly motivated under the regime of addiction in that one acts decisively and with determination. But this motivation is automatized in that one is pulled blindly by objects whose affordances for action have been reduced to a single compelling storyline, with one simple ending. One wants, but one’s wanting comes almost entirely from outside oneself.

Addiction as an answer to the anomie of dissociation

As I thought about this phenomenon, it occurred to me that the automatic but motivated action of addiction might serve some purpose for some people. My mind went quickly to those victims of intense or repetitive trauma who constitute 25 to 50 percent of people who seek substance abuse treatment, people who regularly experience intrusive thoughts, nightmares and somatosensory flashbacks around trauma reminders. A hallmark of PTSD is that one dissociates in the moment of the experience and later when “remembering” implicitly in one’s body. In a dissociative state, one has the experience that everything is unreal or that one is no longer one’s self, an experience that usually involves a failure to link feelings to events that gave rise to them. This ungluing of emotion from incident makes it nearly impossible to make sequential sense of stressful experiences. Broadly speaking, instead of remembering in the form of stories or episodes, one repeats the experience again and again in the form of visual and somatosensory flashbacks.

This changes the tenor of a person’s lifeworld. One’s objects lose their canonical meaning. Life becomes deadened and flat. When one looks out the window, all one sees is the window-pane. Or the reverse: one becomes hyper-vigilant to danger. Van Der Kolk refers to PTSD as the “not-conditioned-enough response to trauma.” Tiny resemblances are registered as identities. The smell of garbage on a hot day feels exactly the same as the smell of a burn pit in Iraq. An Iraq war veteran might not even register the smell in consciousness, just feel the hot rage in their fists. One tends to confabulate to “explain” unexplainable emotions. The rage and fear that veteran feels at the smell of garbage thus might become nonsensically attached to the happenings in the here-and-now, leading them to believe, say, that a person across the way staring at them wants to kill them. When one’s emotions feel deadened, or wildly disconnected from the world, it makes sense to operate directly on them with drugs. But it may well be that the pseudo experience of agency that comes with addiction offers a wider solution than drug use itself to to the hypersensitivity or anomie that comes with dissociation. The backward-looking effects of trauma are partially undone by the forward-looking effects of addiction. One wants, one is motivated, agentic, active. Objects come alive again, they pull one forward. This is one reason it is so hard for people to leave their addiction. The choice is not between the pleasure of the moment vs. the long-term satisfactions of being sober. The choice is between a vital world, where one feels a strong sense of pseudo agency vs. a deadened or dangerous world, where one feels helpless.

This is the first part of a two-part article. The second part will look at the influence of social media, where our actions are also often highly motivated and at the same time automatized, in this case by algorithms designed by technology companies..

Daniel Goldin is the Editor in Chief of Psychoanalytic Inquiry. His book Pragmatic Psychoanalysis will be published by Routledge next year.

References

Goldin, D. (2014). Addiction and temporal bandwidth. International Journal of Psychoanalytic Self Psychology, 9(3), 246–262. https://doi.org/10.1080/15551024.2014.917468

James J. Gibson. (2015). The ecological approach to visual perception (Classic ed.). Psychology Press. (Original work published 1979)

Bessel A. van der Kolk, Alexander C. McFarlane, & Lars Weisaeth (Eds.). (1996). Traumatic stress: The effects of overwhelming experience on mind, body, and society. Guilford Press