Reviews

Discussions of addiction too often get tangled up in the ideological preoccupations and agendas of contemporary culture, and in a domain of speculation and proscrip-tion where psychology abuts the state. On the one hand, metaphors of addiction have spread well beyond the discipline to account for our abnormal attachments to cyberspace (in ‘internet addiction’) or to each other (in forms of ‘co-dependency’). On the other hand, the ‘war on drugs ’ expands the remit of governmental inter-vention from the injunction to just say ‘no’, to military intervention in its own dependent states. The problem, as Rik Loose points out in The Subject of Addiction, is that attention is thereby drawn to the range of ‘objects ’ to which we are supposed to be addicted nowadays at the expense of a serious consideration of what addiction is for the subject hooked on toxic substances; scary messages about what these substances will do to you feed the very fantasies that structure enjoyment. This path-breaking book provides a wide-ranging theoretical review and synthesis of psycho-analytic arguments that have clinical implications for our understanding and treatment of addiction