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Understanding addiction requires grasping its full complexity: between the death drive, failures of symbolization, and the body’s silent suffering, major psychoanalysts have long tried to put words to what resists language. This second part explores contemporary theories and the deeper mechanisms that turn dependency into a symptom of modern malaise.
Understanding addiction means looking beyond the mere fact of dependency. If the first part traced the origins of emptiness and the formation of lack, the challenge now is to grasp why—when suffering cannot be symbolized—the body steps in and makes the symptom speak. Since Freud, psychoanalysis has tried to probe what escapes language: repetitive acts, the drive to consume, the inability to delay gratification. For many clinicians, addiction has become the most contemporary expression of civilization’s malaise: it exposes a silent suffering at the threshold between the psychic and the somatic, where words fail. It is against this fraught backdrop that the major psychoanalysts of the 20th century framed their reflections.
For Lacan, the addict is someone who, unable to position themselves within the Law, is effectively excluded from the symbolic order. The object of jouissance—the source of intense, unregulated pleasure—then takes the place of the Name-of-the-Father. The substance or behavior becomes all-powerful, and the subject—the sense of self—fades away.
Jean Bergeret, studying so-called “borderline” structures, speaks of “white depression”—a state of anxiety stripped of affect, a void without representation. It is not pain that prevails, but the absence of feeling itself. Addiction then erupts, jolting the subject like a sudden electric shock.
Joyce McDougall describes “normopathy”—individuals who seem well-adjusted yet suffer from a complete absence of fantasy life. In these cases, addiction acts out suffering in an archaic form. What the Ego cannot process, the body enacts through ingestion, combustion, violation, or expulsion. In Theatres of the Body, she shows that some addictions reveal a profound impoverishment of psychic life, with the body functioning simultaneously as stage, actor, and spectator of a silent drama.
Michel Fain focuses on patients whose abilities to internalize, wait, and differentiate are impaired. For them, addiction becomes a hallucinatory act: a desperate attempt to reconnect with the lost object, to ingest its trace, or to violently cast it away.
Winnicott introduces a key concept: the “good-enough” environment. If, in early infancy, the maternal environment fails to contain the baby’s anxiety, the child may later develop ways to contain themselves—through drugs, sex, or self-harm. The addictive object then becomes a substitute for the transitional object—the security blanket—but it is a toxic one.
The connections between psychosomatic illnesses and addictive behaviors are numerous. In both cases, an untreated psychic conflict finds expression in the body, without the mediation of language. The somatic symptom—or the addiction—serves to compensate for a deficient psychic function.
Pierre Marty describes individuals who live without dreams, without fantasy, without a true inner life. Their world is made up of facts, actions, and urgencies. They fall ill—or become addicted—because they cannot “think” their internal tensions. The body becomes the sole stage of conflict. Asthma expresses the anxiety of being overwhelmed, eczema the hatred held inside, bulimia the love that cannot be held. Alcohol, drugs, or self-harm can serve the same function: voicing what cannot be spoken, restoring a psychic boundary, marking the absence of a dependable Other.
The addict should not be seen as a being of excess, but as a wounded subject waiting to be genuinely acknowledged, not for what they consume, but for what they have lost or were never given.
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