Zoey Lavallee

ABSTRACT Addiction is widely taken to involve a profound loss of self-control. Addictive motivation is extremely forceful, and it is remarkably hard to abstain from addictive behaviors. Theories of addiction have sought to explain how self-control is undermined in addiction. However, an important explanatory factor in addictive motivation and behaviors has so far been underexamined: emotion. This paper examines the link between emotion and loss of control in addiction. I use the concept of affective scaffolding to argue that drug use functions as a form of emotion regulation that, especially in certain psycho-socioeconomic conditions, can escalate into what I term addictive affective dependence. Addictive affective dependence is extremely motivating of drug use, and in this way contributes to the agent losing control. An upshot of the paper is that it predicts something that is known to be true about addiction treatment and recovery: strategies that address psycho-socioeconomic conditions are particularly successful in bolstering agency in addiction. Furthermore, my view explains why these strategies work. Thus, the view provides a conceptual framework for existing effective methods of addressing addiction.

This paper seeks to make a contribution to addiction research by introducing some key phenomenological concepts and discussing how they can illuminate the lived experience of people with addiction. We begin by briefly sketching the historical and philosophical background of phenomenology, highlighting its focus on subjective experience and its clinical relevance. In the second part of the paper we introduce some fundamental aspects of lived experience, for example, temporality, affectivity, embodiment and intersubjectivity, and explore alterations in these aspects that occur during addiction. We also discuss how an awareness of the socio-cultural dimension of such alterations has the potential of improving clinical encounters. In the third part of the paper, we focus on three articles on addiction published in Philosophy, Psychiatry, & Psychology in 2024. We explore how phenomenology can add nuance to some of the ideas discussed in these pieces. Our key message is that phenomenological concepts and a critical phenomenological attitude can make a crucial contribution to current research initiatives.

This paper seeks to make a contribution to addiction research by introducing some key phenomenological concepts and discussing how they can illuminate the lived experience of people with addiction. We begin by briefly sketching the historical and philosophical background of phenomenology, highlighting its focus on subjective experience and its clinical relevance. In the second part of the paper we introduce some fundamental aspects of lived experience, for example, temporality, affectivity, embodiment and intersubjectivity, and explore alterations in these aspects that occur during addiction. We also discuss how an awareness of the socio-cultural dimension of such alterations has the potential of improving clinical encounters. In the third part of the paper, we focus on three articles on addiction published in Philosophy, Psychiatry, & Psychology in 2024. We explore how phenomenology can add nuance to some of the ideas discussed in these pieces. Our key message is that phenomenological concepts and a critical phenomenological attitude can make a crucial contribution to current research initiatives.

This paper seeks to make a contribution to addiction research by introducing some key phenomenological concepts and discussing how they can illuminate the lived experience of people with addiction. We begin by briefly sketching the historical and philosophical background of phenomenology, highlighting its focus on subjective experience and its clinical relevance. In the second part of the paper we introduce some fundamental aspects of lived experience, for example, temporality, affectivity, embodiment and intersubjectivity, and explore alterations in these aspects that occur during addiction. We also discuss how an awareness of the socio-cultural dimension of such alterations has the potential of improving clinical encounters. In the third part of the paper, we focus on three articles on addiction published in Philosophy, Psychiatry, & Psychology in 2024. We explore how phenomenology can add nuance to some of the ideas discussed in these pieces. Our key message is that phenomenological concepts and a critical phenomenological attitude can make a crucial contribution to current research initiatives.

This paper argues that the emotional dynamics that structure a person’s relationship to drug use and their environment over time are central to understanding how agency is both operative and constrained in addiction. Drawing on qualitative interviews with 69 people with alcohol and opioid addictions, we conceptualize drug use as a form of affective scaffolding – a socially and materially situated strategy for emotion regulation. When this scaffolding becomes inflexible and monopolizing, immediate emotion regulation is prioritized over long-term self-regulation, and an emotional distress and regulation loop results, systematically inclining the agent toward ongoing drug use. We propose that this dynamic gradually constricts a person’s affective repertoire, diminishing the salience of certain diachronic concerns and values, and making it more difficult to sustain behaviour oriented toward recovery. The paper closes by introducing the concept of affective recovery niches – structured environments that support alternative patterns of emotion regulation to develop. We focus, in particular, on the important role that other people can play in the recovery niche. Recovery niches disrupt the distress and regulation loop and restore one’s affective repertoire. Thus, they counteract the affective dynamics that we argue keep people stuck in addiction and make new forms of agency possible.

This paper brings the concept of affective scaffolding to bear on a much-debated controversy: the expanding use of psychiatric medications to treat an increasingly broad range of human discontents. ‘Affective scaffolding’ refers to the variety of ways that agents engage with, recruit or modify their environments to actively shape their emotions, moods, or other affective phenomena. Psychiatric drugs are designed, marketed, and prescribed as technologies that have the special power to transform affective life by intervening on the pathological underpinnings of distress and suffering to change how we feel. The paper develops an account of psychiatric drug use as affective scaffolding and examines how psychiatrization – the complex social process through which psychiatry comes to influence more and more domains of human life – impacts this form of scaffolding. I propose that psychiatrization influences affective scaffolding by biasing individuals toward psychiatric drugs to manage an expanding array of affective experiences. In some cases, I argue, this results in bad pharmaceutical scaffolding. Bad pharmaceutical scaffolding emerges when an agent is influenced to select and rely upon psychiatric drugs in attempts to exert individual control over distress and suffering where (1) at least some of the key determinants of these affective experiences are properties of the agent’s environment, in contrast to, in a strict sense, properties internal to the person, and (2) pharmaceutical scaffolding obviates the need for or displaces other non-pharmaceutical options that would better serve the agent's affective needs and interests.

Psychiatric language and concepts, and the norms they embed, have come to influence more and more areas of our daily lives. This has recently been described as a feature of the ‘psychiatrization of society.’ This paper looks at one aspect of psychiatrization that is still little studied in the literature: the psychiatrization of our emotional lives. The paper develops an extended account of emotion pathologizing as a form of affective injustice that is related to psychiatrization and that specifically harms psychopathologized people, i.e., people who are socially perceived to be mentally ill. After introducing an initial account of emotion pathologizing as articulated in Pismenny et al. (2024), we extend the account by demonstrating how processes and practices of emotion pathologizing are informed by (1) the dominant biomedical approach to psychiatry and (2) sanism, a system of discrimination and oppression that disadvantages people who have received a psychiatric diagnosis, or are perceived as in need of psychiatric treatment. We then argue that emotion pathologizing can manifest as an affect-related hermeneutical injustice that disadvantages psychopathologized individuals by unfairly constraining how they make sense of and understand their own emotional experiences.

Research in the philosophy of addiction commonly explores how agency is impacted in addiction by focusing on moments of apparent loss of control over addictive behavior and seeking to explain how such moments result from the effects of psychoactive substance use on cognition and volition. Recently, Glackin et al. (2021) have suggested that agency in addiction can be helpfully analyzed using the concept of affordances. They argue that addicted agents experience addiction-related affordances, such as action possibilities relating to drugs, drug paraphernalia, and drug-related activities, as aberrantly salient motivations for action. Building on this approach, we present a novel two-tiered affordance model of addiction. In doing so, we suggest that what is significant about the addicted person’s world is not simply what affordances are experienced as salient, but also the way in which the addicted person’s world is shaped by a dominant concern. It is not only that addiction-related affordances become more prominent as addiction progresses but that one’s plurality of concerns become monopolized by and funneled through addiction. Our model endorses Glackin et al.’s idea that addiction-related affordances become aberrantly salient, while proposing why they become and remain so. This way of viewing agency in addiction also brings to light important implications for recovery and treatment. For, if an addicted person adopts a new, even “socially approved”, dominant concern, there is a risk that the shape of addiction is preserved, even though the content changes, leaving an individual at the risk of addiction substitution or relapse.

Addiction is widely taken to involve a profound loss of self-control. Addictive motivation is extremely forceful, and it is remarkably hard to abstain from addictive behaviors. Theories of addiction have sought to explain how self-control is undermined in addiction. However, an important explanatory factor in addictive motivation and behaviors has so far been underexamined: emotion. This paper examines the link between emotion and loss of control in addiction. I use the concept of affective scaffolding to argue that drug use functions as a form of emotion regulation that, especially in certain psycho-socioeconomic conditions, can escalate into what I term addictive affective dependence. Addictive affective dependence is extremely motivating of drug use, and in this way contributes to the agent losing control. An upshot of the paper is that it predicts something that is known to be true about addiction treatment and recovery: strategies that address psycho-socioeconomic conditions are particularly successful in bolstering agency in addiction. Furthermore, my view explains why these strategies work. Thus, the view provides a conceptual framework for existing effective methods of addressing addiction.

In “What’s Wrong with the (Female) Nude?” A. W. Eaton argues that the female nude in Western art promotes sexually objectifying, heteronormative erotic taste, and thereby has insidious effects on gender equality. In this response, I reject the claim that sexual objectification is a phenomenon that can be generalized across the experiences of women. In particular, I argue that Eaton’s thesis is based on the experiences of women who are white, and does not pay adequate attention to the lives of racialized women. This act of exclusion undermines the generality of Eaton’s thesis, and exposes a more general bias in discussions of the representation of women in art. Different kinds of gendered bodies have been subjected to different kinds of objectifying construal, and the ethics of nudity in art must be extended to take such variation into account.

I would like to thank Owen Flanagan and Douglas Porter for their interesting and insightful commentaries, both of which inspired me to think more deeply about aspects of addictive craving. In this response, I will make some clarifying points, particularly regarding my views on the relationship between neuroscience and phenomenology, and I will expand on my thesis, focusing especially on addiction treatment and the role of testimony.I will start with two central concerns that Flanagan raises, then I will address three of his additional criticisms. First, Flanagan takes issue with my claim that the dominant neurobiological view of craving does not capture the phenomenology of craving. The worry is that I am asking...

If a list were compiled of all substance and process addictions, we would find ourselves with a long catalog, including heroin, methamphetamines, marijuana, fentanyl, exercise, pornography, gambling, cocaine, and video games, just to name a handful. Addiction is diverse. And in severe cases, addiction can have devastating consequences in the lives of addicted individuals. There is currently no widely accepted definition of addiction that crosses social, philosophical, scientific and medical discourse. In fact, there is no uncontested definition within any one of these domains. However, across fields of study, the phenomenon of craving is widely taken to be an important, if not central, feature of addiction. Craving...