Homo Addictus

TopicPsychology

AuthorGérard Pirlot

PublisherDunod

Towards an Addictophile Society

Addiction covers drug taking, alcoholism and smoking, along with every behaviour that creates dependence with or without a substance: eating disorders, sexual addiction, addiction to work, to sport, to gambling and so on.

In the postmodern Western world they have become the sickness of the age. Their explosion is not unconnected with a consumer society that stimulates the individual continuously with one object of satisfaction after another, and does so from the earliest age: sugary foods, screens, stimulants, alcohol, drugs, advertising, consumer goods. That society makes the individual “addictophile”, constantly seeking to be addicted to continuous stimulations of pleasure that involve the same neural reward circuit.

This book examines addiction and the addictive “passion” of our society, its addictophilia, through the prisms of metapsychology, psychopathology and psychosomatics, in the social, economic and political context in which these behaviours are developing ever further.