Contenu du sommaire : La nouvelle psychologie des addictions

The care relationship with the addict patient is crossed by the doubt on the word and the will of the met subject. This mistrust degrades the conditions of care and the therapeutic possibilities and so raises a clinical problem as much as ethical in the medical practice. This situation gets closer to the context of dis-quiet such as it is described by Marc-Henri Soulet. The disappearance of the fragile but reassuring context of confidence requires the agent, if he wants to restore his capacities of care, to be completely involved in an action that should be thought and submitted to the validation of others. This way of reconstruction of the care in a climate of dis-quiet starts from the subject and leans on the watch of the other one. Therefore, it subscribes to a careful but demanding ethics of the care of the self such as it is conceived by Michel Foucault in the final part of his work. This approach invites the puzzled carer to cultivate a kind of aesthetics of its knowledge and its practice while looking for a legitimization of its acts by the others.

Promise is necessary to every therapeutic relationships and seems even to be the prerequisite condition. With addict patients, the importance of promise is maybe more evident because reliability of their word is often questioned. This is why in this paper are examined ethical issues of promises from Hannah Arendt' and Paul Ricœur's works. For these authors, promise is paired first with memory to construct an almost similar dialectic to that between identity and otherness and secondly with pardon to allow action to continue face to the irreversibility of past and unpredictability of future. Promise allows the road from self-recognition to mutual recognition to be opened. But to promise too much is dangerous. Promise can proclaim the glory of ipseity by allowing an identity withdrawal. Risk is also institutional and politic, the temptation to remove all unpredictability can construct a totalitarian system.

Although effective psychological treatments are available to treat excessive gambling, most of gamblers do not seek help for their problems. Some of the barriers to seeking help have been brought to light, such as shame, stigma, cost or availability of treatment. In this context, an internet-based treatment, which is easily accessible, available at any time of the day, implicates less stigma and involves a lower cost, could be a useful way to treat gamblers who normally wouldn't undertake a therapy. In this article, after describing the possible benefits of such treatment, we present our current work, which aims to validate an internet-based program for gambling in French.

Self regulation has traditionally been a central concept in many theoretical models of addictive behaviors, whether related to substance use or not. Although numerous studies have established a clear relationship between low self-regulation (lack of impulse control) and addictive behaviours, few have been based on a specific theoretical rational which considers the multifaceted nature of self-regulation and its related psychological mechanisms. The present article emphasizes the necessity to propose an integrative approach taking into account the specific contribution of the various facets of impulsivity in addictive behaviours. We also discuss the limitations of conceptualizing addictive behaviours by focusing solely on individual differences in self-regulation abilities.

The paper analyses the relationship between gambling and the financial markets, starting from the financial behavior toward risk. It uses in that prospect the main results of recent works concerning brain activity. It puts in light the different impact of gains versus losses expectations, underlines the significance of the distinction between the expected uncertainty and the unexpected uncertainty, and shows the paradoxical consequences of the ambiguity aversion on risk taking. Finally, some tentative considerations are proposed about the weight of a virtual dimension in financial transactions.

Pregnant women look for information on internet forums and share their experiences, even though the subject can be sensitive when it involves opiate maintenance treatments for instance. Their free use of this source of information enables researchers to know the experiences about the Subutex (high-dose buprenorphine) use in pregnancy of the women they would not normally have the opportunity of questioning: young women, pregnant or mothers, using internet, living with a partner, working, using an opiate substitution treatment, mostly prescribed by their GPs'.The analysis of the contents of these messages, realized by a thematic tree construction, shows five categories of interventions from the participating people. First, we identified their opinions and representations about Subutex in general and in the particular context of pregnancy. Secondly, we examined their shared knowledge on subjects about which they deplore the lack of information. Thirdly, they had more technical conversations, on how to stop Subutex before the end of pregnancy or on at least how to decrease the doses. The fourth point is that fear and guilty about Subutex intakes during pregnancy carry out an ideal of abstinence, leading women to flout medical advice when faced with the necessity to continue or even to increase the doses. Finally, a closer inspection of the children's future, the newborn withdrawal and maternal lactation, in the context of this treatment, complete this spectrum.

S. Freud's life was marked by a period of fascination (addiction?) with cocaine. He was vilified and accused of being guilty of spreading the “third plague of humanity”. Because of these accusations, his scientific contribution to research in the field of coca and cocaine were overshadowed. He studied all the current literature concerning the subject. He hoped to find a remedy which would restore health to “simply being normal”. With cocaine he followed his own path for the first time. He gave it up after “a productive failure”, a sign which meant that any solutions involving drugs were doomed to fail and that difficult and necessary work was still to be undertaken in order to disentangle the unconscious psychic montage.