Addiction, cure or care?

Abstract

Addiction has been historically conceived and widely researched as a brain disease. While there has been much criticism of brain-centred approaches to addiction, this paper aims to reject such an approach by applying insights from phenomenology of psychiatry. More precisely, the paper applies Merleau-Ponty’s insightful distinction between the biological and the lived body. In this light, the disease model emerges as an incomplete account of addiction because it captures only its biological aspects. When considering addiction as a brain disorder, it will be shown, research fails to account for the contextual, functional, and emotional aspects of subjective health. It is concluded that, while the disease model is fundamental to understand what happens in the brain, its brain-centred approach is cure-oriented. Tackling the lived body experience, what we label here as care-oriented, allows for a more encompassing therapeutical interaction: for it cares for understanding and treating the psychological feel as bodily experience situated in an environment.