When we talk about addiction, our perspective often becomes narrow. It focuses on the substance, the behavior, the ‘wrong choice’—as if the problem exists exclusively within the individual.
However, both history and therapeutic practice suggest something different: addictions do not emerge in a vacuum. They arise during periods of social distress, disconnection, and loss of meaning.
Social Disintegration and Psychological Pain
Émile Durkheim described as early as the 19th century the concept of anomie: situations in which social bonds weaken and collective narratives no longer hold the individual together.
In such environments, people do not simply ‘fail.’ They are left without a framework of meaning.
Psychological pain does not disappear when it has no space to exist. It transforms.
Erich Fromm put it simply: when a person cannot truly be, they try to numb themselves. In this context, addictions are not an abnormality—they are a form of adaptation
History: When Societies Fracture
The connection between social crisis and addiction becomes particularly clear throughout history. In the 19th century, China experienced profound political, economic, and cultural disintegration. During the same period, opium use spread massively.
The Opium Wars were not merely commercial conflicts. They revealed how addiction can function:
• as a social anesthetic
• as a means of control
• as a response to a reality that had become unbearable
Addiction flourished where social cohesion had already been fractured.
From History to the Present Day
Matsa, in the book
In the book We Searched for People and Found Shadows, Matsa summarizes it aptly:
The culture of addiction emerges as a response to the culture of decline.
Today, the forms have changed, but the underlying structure has not.
In place of opium, we now find: substances, screens, compulsions, and addictive relationships.
Zygmunt Bauman spoke of a liquid society, in which nothing remains stable long enough to provide a sense of security.
Within this fluidity, addiction often functions as a false form of stability.
Addiction as an Attempt at Self-Regulatio
In the psychology of addiction, Edward Khantzian’s self-medication hypothesis suggests that substances are not chosen randomly. They are used to regulate emotions that cannot otherwise be endured.
The narrative approach of Michael White goes a step further: addiction is not an identity, but a story of survival amidst difficult life circumstances.
Concurrently, Michel Foucault helps us see how modern societies:
• individualize pain
• shift responsibility to the individual
• and often pathologize what does not “work”
A personal therapeutic reflection
In my therapeutic practice, I do not encounter people who “failed.” I encounter people who tried to endure conditions that could not accommodate human vulnerability.
That is why, for me, therapy is not limited to abstinence or behavioral control.
It is a space for:
• de-blaming pain
• reconnecting with meaning
• and rewriting the story of the self within the relationship
We do not treat substances.
We treat life ruptures.
And this, almost always, is a deeply relational and social process, not an individual failure.
Bibliography
Durkheim, E. (1951). Suicide: A Study in Sociology (Trans. J. A. Spaulding & G. Simpson). London: Routledge. (Original work published 1897).
Foucault, M. (1977). Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (Trans. A. Sheridan). New York: Pantheon Books.
Fromm, E. (1955). The Sane Society. New York: Rinehart & Company.
Khantzian, E. J. (1997). The self-medication hypothesis of substance use disorders: A reconsideration and recent applications. American Journal of Psychiatry, 154(4), 505–513.
Maté, G. (2008). In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts: Close Encounters with Addiction. Toronto: Knopf Canada.
White, M., & Epston, D. (1990). Narrative Means to Therapeutic Ends. New York: W. W. Norton & Company.
Bauman, Z. (2000). Liquid Modernity. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Matsa, K. (2018). We searched for people and found shadows. Athens: Agra.
