Addiction Culture & The Repetition Compulsion
By: Lauren Reiff
Tags: Culture, Mental Health, Psychology, Addiction, Self

Zooming out to peer at the nation at large, it almost seems as if we are viewing a panorama of coping mechanisms acted out in millions of everyday lives. There’s something pitifully inadequate about it all, wrenchingly insufficient.

And addiction is far more commonplace than any one of us typically has the causal readiness to admit. Sure, there’s the man on the street corner who feels the fresh flow of heroine in his veins who’s addicted. But there’s also the woman in her sparsely lit kitchen at night forking ice cream into her mouth for the fifth time this week who’s also, to some degree, just as familiar with the well-worn paths of addictive behavior.

And then there’s the man feverishly enamored with the frenzied rush of work that so handily absorbs all of his waking moments, so that he has no time to think for himself, and perhaps that is exactly the point. And then there’s someone addicted to the heady, pleasurable dopamine surges of social media recognition and someone else burrowed away in bed enslaved before the screen to hours of streaming content, comfortingly infinite and always-just-stimulating-enough. Just-stimulating-enough to stave off the existential discomfort hiding somewhere in the bushes, that is — if we were brave enough to admit this, anyways.

Disappointment quickly follows an installment of an addictive behavior and reality seeps back in. This slow dawning of soured realization of having never escaped what one originally sought to escape (because addiction is an attempt at escape, however irrational) many of us can personally attest to, and could readily serve as the criteria for admitting our own addictive behaviors. Often, there is a delay between engaging in the behavior and consciously recognizing ourselves taking part in it. This is the repetition compulsion in action — starkly laying bare the exceedingly powerful pull of addictive behaviors.

It is no secret to us when we are addicted — it is something we know in our bones, even if we try mightily to avoid voicing the realization in words, dragging it out into the bright light. Usually, we are darkly troubled by the addiction’s futility — that is, its irritating inability to satiate us. We consume and yet it still leaves us hungry. Thus, we are partly angry, partly anxious.

There’s something tellingly primitive about this rustle of anxiety that crops up — it appears to harken back to our days as an infant when we craved sustenance, made a fuss, and were subsequently appeased. Thus, it feels almost wrong that our addiction cannot assuage that hunger. It feels, on some unconscious level, incorrect and unjustifiable and we thus rush to repeat the behavior and perhaps remedy the offense, hoping that this time might yield the outcome we seek. Of course, this smacks of your typical definition of insanity — but the unconscious (the stage whereon this entire process would be acted out on) has no qualms about rationality, let alone an ability to conceive of it.

Call it a generalization but the evidence is sprinkled throughout society: Lots of people are in psychological distress. Various states, and to various degrees, no doubt. Familial conflict sows discord, economic unrest sows anxiety, career unfulfillment begets existential floundering and digital life begets loneliness, to name a few. Absent of ways to consciously navigate the tumult of emotions that usually accompany such developments, all of the associated phenomena is relegated to the underground — that is, to the unconscious.

Indeed, the classic Freudian split of the unconscious and the conscious applies remarkably well here. Addictions roughly mirror the Freudian repetition compulsion — the desire to repeat scenarios which do not actually help us. We do not realize how much, in the course of daily life, we play to the rhythm of our unconscious, cyclical behavioral patterns. Many of us do not realize how gripped we are in patterns technically of our own making. But that they are “self-inflicted” is almost besides the point. They serve some sort of purpose, after all. Repetition compulsions power addictive behaviors and play a crucial part in directing the entire drama of the Self.

Lost in the shadowy realm of unarticulated psychological territory, we are endlessly subjugated to the compulsion to repeat addictive behaviors, to keep re-running the same drama over and over again. Few of us are exempt from such a phenomenon. We need only watch ourselves carefully one time or another, to catch ourselves in the act of something, something we are irrationally and unwisely partaking in that never yields the full gratification we are after. Psychological awareness, then, cripples the repetition compulsion and bleeds the energy from addictive behaviors, prying it out of unconscious territory.