Transcending Addiction

Addiction is often thought about in terms of cause, be that brain chemistry, attachment patterns or cognitive schemas. But this does not allow an understanding of what addiction "is". It does not illuminate how addiction is lived. A phenomenology of addiction reveals that addiction is characterised by an intolerance of pain, a pursuit of pleasure, immediacy, technocratic solutions, alienation, ambiguity and is drenched in deception. These are its individual clinical manifestations, but this is a