How the relation between desires, satisfaction and addiction becomes to an own creation of a vicious circle.
DESIRES —
Issue No. 01 AW 2021
TR A N S I T I O N
THE INDEPENDENT MAGAZINE ABOUT PHILOSOPHY, PSYCHOLOGY AND ART.
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Issue No. 01 AW 2021
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Nostalgia - the trigger of our desires
A bittersweet longing — In life, change is the default, not the exception; transformation is baked into every aspect of our world, from physical growth to scientific progress. Novelty, meanwhile, is an antidote to boredom, stagnation and satiation. Nonetheless, people long for stability. Change can threaten well-being, especially when it requires a new set of skills to meet new demands. Stress can accompany unexpected or extreme change, since our ability to control situations depends upon a reasonable degree of predictability. (Imagine not knowing if a stone would fall or rise when you let go of it.) Nostalgia is a bittersweet yearning for the past. It’s sweet because it allows us to momentarily relive good times; it’s bitter because we recognize that those times can never return. Longing for our own past is referred to as personal nostalgia, and preferring a distant era is termed historical nostalgia. Although nostalgia is universal, research has shown that a nostalgic yearning for the past is especially likely to occur during periods of transition, like maturing into adulthood or aging into retirement. Dislocation or alienation resulting from military conflict, moving to a new country or technological progress can also elicit nostalgia.
33 Desire becomes addiction after you have that first little taste of something - alcohol, great sex, getting stoned - that comes so close to complete satisfaction . . . then you start chasing it. The same thing happens in meditation: having that first bit of bliss, then it’s gone. You want the perfection back. But you’re chasing something you’ve already lost. If you stay with that widening dissatisfaction and think, “Oh, yeah, of course,” then insight can begin to happen. Mark Epstein, M.D. Quote from: Tricycle: The Buddhist Review article: The Merry-Go Round of Desire Right Page: Photography by Alexander Krivitskiy
Nostalgia - the process to yearning
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An Excerpt of Sigmund Freuds’ “Mourning and Melancholia” — The distinguishing mental features of melancholia are a profoundly painful dejection, cessation of interest in the outside world, loss of the capacity to love, inhibition of all activity, and a lowering of the self-regarding feelings to a degree that finds utterance in self-reproaches and self-revilings, and This picture becomes a little more culminates in a delusional expectation of punishment. intelligible when we consider that, with one exception, the same traits are met with in mourning. The disturbance of self-regard is absent in mourning; but otherwise the features are the same. Profound mourning, the reaction to the loss of someone who is loved, contains the same painful frame of mind, the same loss of interest in the outside world—in so far as it does not recall him— It is easy to see that this inhi- the same loss of capacity to adopt any new object of love (which bition and circ u m s c r i p t i o n would mean replacing him) and the same turning away from any of the ego is the expression of an activity that is not connected with thoughts of him. exclusive devotion to mourning which leaves nothing over for other purposes or other interests. It is really only because we know so well how to explain it that this attitude does not seem to us pathological. We should regard it as an appropriate comparison, too, to call the mood of mourning a ‘painful’ one. We shall probably see the justification for this when we are in a position to give a characterization of the economics of pain.1 In what, now, does the work which mourning performs consist? I do not think there is anything far-fetched in presenting it in the following way. Reality-testing has shown that the loved object no longer exists, and it proceeds to demand that all libido shall be withdrawn from its attachments to that object. This demand arouses understandable opposition—it is a matter of general observation that people never willingly abandon a libidinal position, not even, indeed, when a substitute is already beckoning to them. This opposition can be so intense that a turning away from reality takes place and a clinging to the object through the medium of a hallucinatory wishful psychosis.
Left Page; Photography “Emil” by Agnes Lumière
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Normally, respect for reality gains the day. Nevertheless its orders cannot be obeyed at once. They are carried out bit by bit, at great expense of time and cathectic energy, and in the meantime the existence of the lost object is psychically prolonged. Each single one of the memories and expectations in which the libido is bound to the object is brought up and hyper-cathected, and detachment of the libido is accomplished in respect of it.1 Why this compromise by which the command of reality is carried out piecemeal should be so extraordinarily painful is not at all easy to explain in terms of economics. It is remarkable that this painful unpleasure is taken as a matter of course by us. The fact is, however, that when the work of mourning is completed the ego becomes free and uninhibited again. Let us now apply to melancholia what we have learnt about mourning. In one set of cases it is evident that melancholia too may be the reaction to the loss of a loved object. Where the exciting causes are different one can recognize that there is a loss of a more ideal kind. The object has not perhaps actually died, but has been lost as an object of love (e.g. in the case of a betrothed girl who has been jilted). In yet other cases one feels justified in maintaining the belief that a loss of this kind has occurred, but one cannot see clearly what it is that has been lost, and it is all the more reasonable to suppose that the patient cannot consciously perceive what he has lost either. This, indeed, might be so even This would suggest that melancholia is in some way related to if the patient is aware of the loss which has given rise to his melan object-loss which is withdrawn ancholia, but only in the sense that he knows whom he has lost but from consciousness, in contradis- not what he has lost in him. tinction to mourning, in which there is nothing about the loss that is unconscious. In mourning we found that the inhibition and loss of interest are fully accounted for by the work of mourning in which the ego is absorbed. In melancholia, the unknown loss will result in a similar internal work and will therefore be responsible for the melancholic inhibition.
Freud, S. (1917). Mourning and Melancholia. The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Volume XIV (1914-1916): On the History of the Psycho-Analytic Movement, Papers on Metapsychology and Other Works, 244-245
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Novalis’ Dream —
The Blue Flower is the symbol of Romanticism. Romanticists were marked by yearnings they claimed Each night like Novalis, to feel for something I dream distant of a blue and flower, Only to find it in a bower. unattainable. In daylight I search
Only to see in reality Until I fall asleep. In my dream I love thee, blue flower. Never to find u in daylight. I die at night, Only to dream in vein, Again, and again.
Written on Friedrich von Hardenberg aka Novalis & his unfinished novel Heinrich von Ofterdingen and the Blue Flower it is to some extent experimental poetry. The story told about young Heinrich who dreamt about the blue flower which called to him, after which he embarked on a journey, during which he searched for the flower. Novalis died before he finished the novel.
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16 Basic Desire Theory —
A theory of motivation by Steven Reiss, the 16 Basic Desires Theory talks about the sixteen fundamental needs, values and drives that motivate a person —
The 16 Basic Desires Theory is a theory of motivation proposed by Steven Reiss, Psychology and Psychiatry professor emeritus at the Ohio State University in Ohio, USA. The concept for this theory originated from the time when Reiss was hospitalized during the 90s. As he was being treated in the hospital, he was able to observe the devotion and hard work of the nurses who took care of him. As he saw how the nurses loved their work, he began to ask himself questions about what gives happiness to a person. From the questions “What makes a person happy?”, “What makes another person happy?” and ‘What makes me happy?”, Professor Reiss started to search for answer to these questions in the field of motivational research. He found out that there was little emphasis and no analytical models for the structure of human desires. Following his recovery, he commenced his own series of studies about human desires. In his vigorous research, he found out that there are 16 essential needs and values he called “basic desires”, all of which are drives that motivate all humans. After conducting studies that involved more than 6,000 people, Professor Reiss came up with these 16 basic desires:
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Acceptance the need to be appreciated
Family the need to take care of one’s offspring
Independence the need to be distinct and self-reliant
Curiosity the need to gain knowledge
Honor
Eating
the need for food
the need for social justice
Idealism
the need to be faithful to the customary values of an individual’s ethnic group, family or clan
Order
Physical activity
Physical activity, the need for work out of the body
the need for prepared, established, and conventional environments
Romance
Power the need for control of will
Saving
socialthe need to be secure and protected
Tranquility
the need to accumulate something
the need for mating or sex
need
Social status the
for
Social contact Social contact, the need for relationship with others
Vengeance
the need to strike back against another Social status, person significance
3. Elaboration. As the desire gains access to working memory, the person becomes conscious. The more people elaborate on their desires, the more likely it becomes that people will generate justifications that allow them to indulge. For example, they may say, “this is definitely going to be my last indulgence before I start my diet.” Elaboration may involve generating expectancies about the consequences of desire enactment (“A drink would make me feel relaxed, sociable or happy”).
2. Situational cues. Temptations (problematic desires) are triggered by situational cues (stimuli), by means of Pavlovian conditioning, that promise immediate satisfaction at the cost of important long-term rewards. Our preferences are sensitive to cues like the smell of cookies baking or sight of a bowl of ice cream. These cues are associated with past consumption of habit-forming goods.
1. Automatic occurrence. In general, desire begins in a relatively automatic manner as the brain pleasure centers evaluate external incentives against the state of mind (e.g., hungry, craving, or feeling lonely). For example, negative mood can be a cue that triggers desires to improve one’s current state. In the case of impulse buying, the consumer responds spontaneously when exposed to desirable objects without any further hesitation.
Elements of desire formation How we give into temptation? —
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25 4. Attention focus. Biased attention (fixation) for food cues trigger food cravings. The opposite is also possible: craving for food grabs attention for food cues. Craving result in attention being drawn preferentially to the desirability of the stimulus (e.g., palatability of high-caloric foods) making it harder to resist the desire. The more attention a person allocates to a rewarding stimulus (a high-caloric food), the more likely he will be to experience a subjective feeling of craving.
5. Opportunity to act. When you know a reward is unavailable, you stop craving and shifts your attention elsewhere. For example, when the smoker is placed in a context in which the substance is not available (during a nine-hour flight), but the craving will intensify at the airport where there is an opportunity to smoke. Thus, craving is eliminated or at least blunted when smokers believe that they will be unable to smoke in the near future.
This Page; Artwork “Trippy series� by Collageno Collageno
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This is a quote from the movie Fight Club. The materialistic and consumeristic world that is part of modern day existence — does it undermine the authenticity of our being? The film shows how the idea of materialism and consumerism impacts one’s authenticity, abandoning the political “must do’s” that are present in society. Materialism in society challenges the consumeristic lifestyle that we all possess and turns the narrator into a repetitive machine. Consumerism creates humans with artificial wants and desires, which possibly destroy one’s authenticity. This is evident as the narrator describes existence as nothing more than storing and organizing things. In order to go deeper into this question, I’d like to explore the idea of consumerism.
The authentic problem of desire
“WE BUY STUFF WE DON’T NEED, WITH MONEY WE DON’T HAVE, TO IMPRESS PEOPLE WE DON’T LIKE”
WE ARE LOOSING
23 This is evident in the loss of rationality in the way we make decisions. An example of this is polluting. We pollute the environment knowing that we are damaging it, which as a result can affect that human race as a whole. But we still do it as a result of the instrumental society, because it’s the most ‘efficient’ for us. This society also worsens one’s ability to show concern. What this means is that one is more focused on themselves than any other person or society. The pollution example works within this idea too. The idea of narcissism has the same effect as ‘being in itself ’. This is because both suggest we do what we do for our own personal benefit and to survive in society, all forgetting the foundations of what’s more important, and only doing what we do to satisfy the created wants. We pollute the earth because we want electricity, but not only to survive. It is also used to power desires which we don’t need. Which is effectively a result of materialism. If one is choosing not to commit themselves to the world of their awareness, then they are becoming a ‘being in itself ’, which undermines the authenticity of one’s self.
[mirror image]
OUR AUTHENTIC SELF.
Left Page; Photography “O Que Te Define” by Luisa Francescutti Article written by Tom Sutton; published in 2018
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Love and desire in a time of hopelessness
The need for love and human connection is more important than ever. It must be rescued from the claws of capitalist logic — The last time someone kissed me without the exclusive intent of it leading to sex was in August 2019. On the 29th to be exact. I had gone for a brief drink with someone I had recently met. We both had evening engagements and we kissed as we parted. The sole purpose of the drink and the kiss was to indulge in the sheer pleasure of each other’s company. The purpose was, one could say, romance. I haven’t experienced any kind of romance since, and even casual sex has been a non-occurrence in the past few months. I note with sadness how much I yearn for intimacy and affection that goes beyond the platonic. I am also horny. A few years ago, when I was still in my 20s, my sexual and emotional interactions were more often than not punctuated by a degree (even if performative) of tenderness. Dinner or cinema dates were still a thing, people would text back with a modicum of speediness, ghosting and breadcrumbing had just started becoming the phenomena we know and hate today. Things fizzled and hearts were broken – those things are part of human condition – but the pot of emotional resources never felt so meagre that a kiss was synonymous with foreplay.
The task of managing our relationships with other human beings did not only feel worthwhile if in exchange for something (sex, money, shelter). Those transactions have existed for millennia, of course, but that is why sex work is work, emotional labour is labour. The idea that all human interaction, especially human interaction relating to love and desire, must limit itself to a bartering exercise is not only a travesty, but indeed the apogee of our economic system. That’s right, for my feelings of frustration and pent up energy I can only blame one thing: capitalism. And while my own story is only anecdotal, you don’t need to look far to find examples of this social emergency. This week’s London edition of Time Out magazine decided to dedicate its centre-spread to Londoners’ “most important relationship”: the one with their flatmates. Unironically, the magazine features four sets of cohabitants, aged between 28 and 61, surviving the capital’s barbarous housing market. Two young women in Hammersmith tell us about a previous landlord that locked up the boiler so they couldn`t turn on the heating.
A 30 year-old man from Croydon recounts how he subsists on takeaways because of how long his working hours are. An asylum seeker in Barnet relies on his hosts for shelter, since his application does not yet allow him to work and earn money. All credit their flatmates for pulling them through hard times, but no comment is made by either reporter or interviewees about a system that left them this vulnerable. The solidarity between these humans is conditional, brought out of a shared experience of survival. These flatmates aren’t more important than “pals and partners”, as the article’s blurb suggests. They are simply all that is left with a semblance of care and human affection within the logic of exploitation. With London rents rising at twice the speed of homes everywhere else - in a city where the average rent already costs £2,119 per calendar month – this hostage situation is likely to continue. And our misreading of kindred bondage for friendship and devotion is too. Under capitalism women feel the turning of the screw first. In an economy where, despite its ill health, the system remains
This Page; Painting “Kiss Ukraine” by Agnes Lumière
the same or even worsens, it is women who rapidly experience and express the consequences thereof. Kristen R. Ghodsee’s ‘Why Women Had Better Sex Under Socialism’ was a massive success when it first came out as an essay in the The New York Times in 2017. The book not only had a more assertive title, replacing the verb from the past into the present tense, but also talks very little about sex. In its list of contents alone the words “capitalism”, “work”, and “exploitation” dominate. The word “sex” features twice. That’s in part because the reason why women had better sex under socialism was not because those Bolsheviks were better at fingering. At the root of their happier lives, as ever, lay financial freedom. Recounting how East German women were happier than West German women, Ghodsee notes: “(...) East Germans created a situations in which women were no longer dependent on men, giving them a sense of autonomy that encouraged more generous male behaviour in the bedroom.” Women in the West were often, even when working, too financially dependent on men to demand ‘better head, or else’. In fact, when in 1984 Kurt Stark and Walter Friedrich asked people under 30 in the GDR how satisfied they were with their sex lives over 65% of women eagerly remarked that they “almost always” reached orgasm. In contrast, a 2018 report by Public Health England found that nearly 50% of women aged between 25 and 34 were unhappy with their sex lives.In my mid 20s I saw my partners and my peers struggle with precarious employment and low pay, but the belief in opportunities lying ahead had not yet fully vanished. Plus, we couldn’t afford lavish restaurants or expensive holidays, but we could still afford to fall in love with the wrong person, because, we thought, we would always manage on our own later on.
Spread; Painting “Kiss Ukraine” by Agnes Lumière Article written by Joana Ramiro;; published in 2020
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London Spits out Desperate Charmers — Riddle mimed cravings Stumper perky takings I heard Saturday’s day holds surplus fortune Today Someone mentioned that today is Tuesday Waiting Scraping Mostly taking Scratching your balls might pass the time Surely satisfying the itch is a Buddhist crime Most monks love to do so Letting go Letting rubbish nip at ya soul Addictive punishing crack whoopee Yo—Yo Meditative pick pocket Pocket 2 lover’s constipated desire Pocket 23 Nitrous Oxide canisters Therefore a couple boneheads doomed forget laughters Pocket inauthentic praise splattered with cringe imagined vomit Wash your hands Sir
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This Page; Photography by Matt Flores Poem written by Sonny Hall; published in 2019
Spread; Photography by Adrian Hylka
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Three months into his treatment, Hall started writing poems as a way of ordering ‘all the madness’ in his head. Two years on he’s written 300-400 poems and plans to self-publish his first book, The Blues Comes With Good News, in April. ‘It was a surprise to me because I never studied writing or anything,’ he points out. ‘Now, whenever anything happens, I write about it. Before that, I was destructive to myself. It’s like I’ve rewired my brain. I couldn’t imagine not having it.’
Hall is not the first model to enter rehab (and he won’t be the last) but his career in the fashion industry, which started when he was scouted at a gig in Camden aged 16, actually has little bearing on him becoming an addict. In rehab, he explains, ‘things came up that I hadn’t thought about for years. I was facing trauma I didn’t even realise I had because I had normalised my life to everyone I met as a way to cope with it.’ Most poignantly, those things include ‘living in a home of drugs and alcohol and violence’ until he was adopted (alongside his twin brother, Harvey) aged four and losing his biological mother to a heroin overdose in 2015.
“Scumbag is the old me, scallywag is the new”
Within a fortnight, the London-born model for Burberry and Vivienne Westwood was on a flight to the treatment centre for alcohol and drug addiction. It was 2017 and he was 18 years old. ‘That’s the thing with life,’ he ponders. ‘As much as something bad can come and hit you in the face, something good can as well.’
Sonny Hall can pinpoint the exact moment he decided to get clean. It was 11am on Gloucester Road, he’d just scored some pills and he was about to have his first drink of the day ‘to function’ when his friend’s mum phoned him out of the blue. ‘She didn’t call it rehab, but she told me about this place, [notorious celebrity addiction clinic] The Cabin in Thailand that’s a bit Zen and you can get away from it all,’ he recalls. ‘I’d been to therapy before but I always went straight to my dealer afterwards. On this one morning, something just clicked in my head.’
Sonny Hall on rehab, writing and reinventing himself
14 The millennial poet and model speaks to Martha Hayes about overcoming his teen struggles —
Most revealing is when Hall describes his personal style as ‘scally, like the Artful Dodger; kind of like the underdog who has the shine, you know? He was abandoned and he’s mischievous but he’s also a bit charming. He found his way in life and I kind of relate to that.’
‘I see the flip-side, where people are talking about their feelings now, but I’m also aware of the stiff upper lip,’ he nods. ‘[Men] not actually knowing how they’re feeling. I’ve been like that 80 per cent of my life.’ The line ‘Some no man old man’ is a direct reference to ‘having an absent father and not being taught much’, he explains. ‘Don’t get me wrong, my parents who adopted me have given me the world, but the other things have skewed certain things.’
Inspired by Allen Ginsberg, Charles Bukowski and others ‘who tell it like it is’, Hall and his potent, painfully raw, hand-scrawled poems have amassed more than 100,000 followers on Instagram. From articulating addiction (‘The Thing That Killed My Mother’) to reacting to a recent break-up (‘The Worst Investment I’ve Ever Made’), he is hugely prolific, writing ‘Crafty Gag Reflex’ (hand-printed) exclusively for ES Magazine’s men’s edition, which he is happy to dissect. You can watch Hall’s reading of the poem in the video above.
But he’s still only 20, I remind him. We talk about his 20 tattoos, half of which were done since he got clean and half before. There is a deeper significance to ‘scallywag’ than the word recently inked into his arm might suggest. ‘I had scumbag on my leg when I was very young, so I thought I’d get scallywag as an upgrade,’ he says. ‘Scumbag is the old me, scallywag is the new.’
Adwoa Aboah on what it’s like to be immortalized as a Barbie I bring up his appearance last year in Rita Ora’s video for ‘Let You Love Me’, in which he plays her love interest. He blushes. I ask him why. His rep jumps in to explain that he was ‘requested’ to be in that video. ‘I think if I wasn’t connected with Rita it would have been a shambles, but me and her got on so well, it made it easy. I was nervous before I got there, then I got into this mode. I’m actually doing acting lessons at the moment,’ he smiles. ‘I can’t model forever.’
As well as rehab and writing, Hall credits a ‘support group’ of stable influences, including fellow models Adwoa Aboah and Iris Law, and DJ Fat Tony, to whom he has spoken at length about addiction. ‘I’ve been lucky to have people around me since I decided to sort myself out,’ he continues. ‘I’m almost happy that I was very destructive, very fast, because it made me realise how bad it was, sooner.’
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About desire and satisfaction
An Excerpt of “Journal of Phenomenological Psychology”, 20 No. 2 — If we think satisfaction according to a physical metaphor and in analogy to a container being filled, we can come to think of appetite or desire as a particular capacity for eating, drinking, fornicating, loving. This capacity would be gradually taxed and eventually overcome in the pursuit of our appetites or desires. Desire would refer us to a physical emptiness and to a network of actions designed to fill that emptiness. Or, we could think of desire as referring us to a pressing physical fullness that requires an analogous complete physical emptying. The object of our life understood in terms of such a desire would be to achieve as much as possible a state of physical emptiness or fullness that would correspond to a being satisfied.
The psychological sense of satisfaction would ultimately be nothing more than the psychical noticing of a physical state of emptiness or fullness. Yet, a first reflection on our experience of desire and satisfaction warns us of what remains wholly false in such a description. “Being satisfied” does not mean that we are confronted with a mysterious fullness or emptiness. On the contrary, the moment of satisfaction announces itself as a shift away from a particular preoccupation. Suddenly we want to do something else than lie in bed, and our thoughts turn to the possibilities of the day. Being satisfied means getting up from the table to go to work, to read a book, to go for a drive in the country.
Article written by Bernd Jager; published in 1989 Right Page; Artwork “Trippy series” by Collageno Collageno
satisfaction guaranteed!
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Or it could mean that after hearing someone offer his apologies we suddenly are ready to let bygones be bygones and we are no longer held enthralled by our injuries and feel free to turn to other things. In all these instances the feeling of satisfaction does not issue from the contemplation of a fullness or emptiness or from the noticing of a physical barrier beyond which we cannot proceed. On the contrary, in all these instances satisfaction announces itself in a shift in our attention, in a gradual opening of a new horizon. To be satisfied means here to be free to explore a different aspect of the world.
In essence it means to become aware of and to assent to a difference. We discover that there is more to life than sleeping or eating or collecting injuries or reading books or pursuing the meaning of a dream. Satisfaction understood this way constitutes liminal activity. It carries us across a fateful boundary from one thing to the next, from one activity or perspective to another. Within satisfaction we shift gears, we pivot on our axis and turn in a different direction. Successful weaning must thus be understood in analogy to our getting.
Addiction - the disposition to generate desires
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It should now be evident that there is a rational kernel to the presumption against addiction. By becoming addicted one becomes more or less bound to a disposition to generate desires. That, however, is a common enough phenomenon and far from objectionable in itself. By developing a keen interest in one’s own career, in music, knowledge, art, sport, a love affair, or in any number of human projects, one may well be binding oneself to such a disposition. What separates addiction from these more common (and presumably acceptable) dispositions are the two properties of resilience and dissatisfaction. Because of resilience, the addictive desires will be hard to resist even when their fulfilment is not in the addict’s best interests. This is because the strength of an addictive desire can be well out of proportion to the importance of its fulfilment. And because of dissatisfaction, if either the addict can and does choose to, deny an addictive desire, or the addictive desire is thwarted by external circumstances, the addict will suffer. So we have two sorts of bad cases for the addict. The first kind of bad case is that in which it is possible for the addictive desires to be fulfilled, but in which it is not the best thing (either for the addict, or perhaps for the world) for the addictive desires to be so fulfilled. When the resilience of the addictive desires becomes complete, and the addict is in a position to fulfil the desire, then she simply has no choice but to keep in step with the addiction, even when that is not in her own best interests. But if the addiction
is not complete, the addict can overcome the addictive desire only at the cost of dissatisfaction. So by becoming addicted a person may well be engineering for her future self situations in which she cannot win. Either she will be bound to the addiction even when it is not in her own best interests to act on the addictive desires; or, even if she is not so bound, resisting the addictive desire will carry with it dissatisfaction. The second kind of bad case is that in which external circumstances deny the fulfilment of the addictive desire. Then, of course, the addict will again suffer dissatisfaction. Thus there is a prima facie case against voluntarily becoming addicted based on conceptual features of addiction: that it generates the possibility of bad cases. Bad cases arise from the fact that denying the addictive desires will be difficult and unpleasant, together with the fact that denying them may be either necessitated by circumstances beyond the addict’s control, or in the addict’s own best interests. That is the down-side of addiction in general. But how good is the argument from bad cases? Its strength will clearly depend on local features. More precisely, it will depend on just how likely, and how bad, bad cases are likely to be. In other words, it will depend on how likely it is that the fulfilment of addictive desires will conflict with one’s best interests or with overall value, how likely it is that circumstances will make fulfilment impossible, and how much disvalue attaches to lack of fulfilment.Consider three fairly unproblematic cases:
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The argument from bad cases —
Left Page; Artwork “Trippy series” by Collageno Collageno
.Article written by Graham Oddie; published in 1993
becoming addicted to coffee; becoming addicted to heroin when one would otherwise have a long future and good prospects; becoming addicted to morphine in the last year of a terminal illness. Many of us elect to become addicted to coffee. Drinking coffee has its modest pleasures, and an addiction to coffee may enhance the pleasure of drinking it. The supply of the substance is fairly well assured, and it is cheap - so to keep feeding the addiction one does not have to forego a lot of other important options. Coffee addicts are usually aware that there might well be a point at which continuing to drink coffee will not be in their own best interests, because of the likelihood of kidney damage, headaches and so forth. But, if the coffee addict is forced to forgo consumption by lack of supply, or chooses to forgo because of countervailing disvalues, the dissatisfaction is not usually so great that it cannot be handled. Withdrawal from caffeine addiction is uncomfortable, but not disastrous. So, not unreasonably, many of us judge the pleasures to be gained from caffeine addiction to be worth the risk. The coffee addict may well be engineering bad cases for his future self, but the risk is small and the disvalues whichever way he chooses in a bad case will not usually be so great. Heroin addiction, at least for a youngster with otherwise good prospects, is quite a different matter, at least under current conditions. While the pleasures of heroin are much greater than those of coffee, the dissatisfaction which results from the addictive desires being thwarted are much greater. The difficulty of withdrawing from the addiction is considerable. Further, it is an expensive addiction, and so, for all but the very wealthy, the addict must forgo lots of other opportunities to assuage the addictive desires. And because it is both illegal and expensive, the supply is by no means assured, the quality of the substance is difficult to guarantee, and there are obvious risks involved in procuring it. In contemplating activities likely to produce heroin addiction a young person with an otherwise promising future would probably be well advised to turn the offer down. By becoming addicted he will almost certainly be engineering for himself some very bad cases.
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Where is my mind? - Pixies
Produced by Steve Albini; Album Surfer Rosa / Come on Pilgrim
[Verse 1] head on the the air and your With your feet on ground n it, yeah (Yeah) Try this trick and spi thing in it se, and there’s no lap col l wil Your head lf rse And you’ll ask you [Verse 2] the Caribbean I was swimmin’ in behind the rocks ing hid re we ls Anima h fis le Except the litt ing to I swear he was try Bumped into me, i -ko koi talk to me,
[Outro] the air and your With your feet on d un gro the head on n it, yeah Try this trick and spi
[Chorus] Where is my mind? Where is my mind? Where is my mind? , see it swimmin’ Way out in the water
[Verse 3] ad the air and your he With your feet on d on the groun n it, yeah Try this trick and spi lapse, and there’s col l wil Your head nothing in it rself And you’ll ask you
[Chorus] Where is my mind? Where is my mind? Where is my mind? , see it swimmin’ Way out in the water
[Intro] (Ooh)—stop
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Stage 5 Eventually
The vicious circle of desire
The circuits interconnect almost simultaneously: Brain event --> Bad feeling --> ‘Can’t do without X’. Now: X is in possession. It may be very difficult indeed to separate out this structural sequence. The client’s experience, after all, is of one event. And it will be very tempting for the client to assume that somehow X is controlling them, rather than that the simultaneity of events is being experienced by them as a lack of control. “It is at this stage”, says addiction specialist Alistair Rhind, “that the spirit begins to diminish.” Thereafter illusion itself runs the loop. Figure of Stage 6 of addiction process Stage 6 Finally There may be no respite from: Emotional overload, leading to mental, spiritual and eventually physical: Breakdown. The mind gives up trying to make sense. Rage and paranoia may overwhelm the personality, and suicide or overdose may result. It is a desperate irony that the addictive process which enabled the personality to survive its early experience of ‘non-being’ ends in the parting of body and soul which the addiction was originally designed to prevent.
Article written by Philip Harland; published in 1999 First published in Rapport, journal of The Association for NLP (UK), Issue 45, Autumn 1999 POSSESSION AND DESIRE: A deconstructivist approach to understanding and working with addictions
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Cover: quote from:Bernd Jager; “Journal of Phenomenological Psychology” 20 Nr. 2
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Nostalgia - the trigger of our desires Nostalgia - the process to yearning 16 basic desire theory Elements of desire formation The authentic problem of desire Love and desire in a time of hopelessness
Contents and Credits
The Beginning —
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Sonny Hall on rehab, writing and reinventing himself About desire and satisfaction Addiction - the disposition to generate desires The vicious circle of desire
The End —
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Cover: quote from:Bernd Jager; “Journal of Phenomenological Psychology” 20 Nr. 2
The verb “to consider” is closely allied to “desire.” Here also we must evoke a Latin antecedent, con-siderare, which translates “to look closely at something,” “to observe carefully,” “to contemplate,” “to meditate.” But originally it meant
“to observe the stars.”