Contenu du sommaire : Les conduites addictives : un débat complexe

This text collates a “philosophical” and a “sociological” point of view on the issue of addiction. The first point of view leads to question the diagnosis of “brain illness” which dominates today in neurobiological analyses and to show the banality of the “addict” behaviour which is only a flight of the very ordinary search for reward and well-being. The second point of view puts the “addictive illness” in the context of modern extremisation of pleasures, of the opening of the markets and the evolutionary bents of humans to look for an intensification of positive emotions and a reduction of negative emotions. From here on the text questions the coherence of public policies and proposes a few markers with a view to a decriminalisation and reasonable regulations of uses.

To explain the causes of the addictions, one observes a circularity between psychological dimension related to education in childhood and the determinisms economic and ideological. Capitalism thus remains the dominant cause of the various forms addictions, with psychological dimension. We will thus examine the various psychosociological analyses of the addiction's mechanisms of to consumption, the power, the social recognition. Lastly, we will see in what, the voluntary restraint, the “voluntary simplicity” can be remedies against the addiction for consumption, violence and disproportion.

Borderline personalities and addictive behaviours represent two clinic and psychopathological groups more and more often met by practitioners. I am defending here the argument that such personality disorders (defined in an extensive way) and such pathological behaviours (in particular the most severe ones) do characterize the same patients. To support this assertion I present evidence, both clinic (with rather large similarities in semiology) and psychopathological (quality of the object relationship, nature of anxiety, regression level, defence mechanisms, resort to central depressive line, nature of the intra-psychic conflict) that, I hope, will convince the reader or invite him to contribute to the debate.

In the heart of the speech of bulimic, alcoholic people, drug addicts, pathological gamblers… we can find with an astonishing recurrence the same family of dreams based on deserts, deep caves, ends of the world, forgotten forests… in a nutshell, on places where to hide from life in general and society in particular. Our article will explore these dreams of evasion, make an inventory of them, classify them, clear up their logic and their fundamental mechanisms. We will then conclude by asking ourselves in which way, beyond their obviously painful and deleterious character, addictive behaviours can also be considered coherent adaptations to a particular feeling which would be the reflection of a certain social condition itself; the feeling of being odd, always and everywhere, the feeling of illegitimacy.

The contemporary success of gambling can be explained by its becoming common and by the popularity of certain forms of games like poker. In spite of this, the negative consequences of excessive gambling are known. In many European countries pathological gambling is considered as a public health problem. Responsibility has become the new emblem in the battle against gambling addiction. Gambling is a source of considerable financial profits for the European states. The social stake is to regulate the online gambling market and to find a necessary balance between social benefits and costs.

This article explores two registers of causality which can clarify the conduits of excess of the young generations: on the one hand, it gives a report on the lengthening of youth, the identity changes and the deficit of ritualisation which does not make it possible any more to hear the traditional languages of the body and to incorporate the young generations in the adult world. In addition, it is interested in the major changes which affect the social function of the festival: weakening of the ceremonial practices, loss of directions of dynamic emotional, less matrimonial vocation, marchandisation of urban… Finally, one poses that factors identity, relational, and the capacity to control the emotions are in the middle of the mechanism of “festive consumption”, and a typology is proposed to dissociate the behaviors of the young adults starting from these two axes of analysis.

In France the model of the care given to drug addicts is currently dominated by the paradigm of reduction of risks. Narcotics Anonymous groups propose its members an alternative offer based on abstinence from any products which would modify their behaviour. That mutual support group makes the promotion of uninitiated expertise which takes from the register of the sensitivity and the emotions, and which presents the use of drugs as a suffering and the participation to the group as a kind of redemption. A double approach centred as well on the analysis of the interactions inside the NA group, and the relations with the other professional approaches is proposed in this article.

Facing an important demand of lodging in C.H.R.
S. (Centre d'Hébergement et de Réinsertion Sociale, French for Lodging and Social Reinsertion Centre), social workers have to select the public. That research is founded on the functional theory of cognition initiated by Anderson (1981, 1996). It was lead in the French Rhone-Alps region with forty social workers who have interviews for admission in a C.H.R.S. Results show that visible alcohol intoxication on the day of the interview considerably reduces chances of admission in an insertion C.H.R.S. Indeed they suggest that facing a competition between interested people, social workers tend to judge on the basis of stereotypes of the “good poor” and the “bad poor” as Geremek (1987) emphasized.