Psychic Structure and Addictions

I am reading a very interesting book – Addictions as an Attachment Disorder, by Philip Flores.  It is a textbook and so can be very technical and uses the language of the psychiatric and psychological professions – but it might be worth a read if you are a mental health practitioner.  It is one of those books that puts into words what I think I see in my counseling work.  In chapter 4 the author says this, “Addiction is an attempt at self-repair that fails.”  This is a profound thought, because it can change the way a person thinks about compulsive behaviors and addictions.

Instead of looking at addictions like alcoholism as diseases, which in this context are malfunctions of the brain, we can see that an addiction is something that is in place before the brain problem exists, or at best from a medical perspective, is created in tandem with the brain disease.  This has major ramifications in treating addicts of all kinds.  If the medical community focuses on addiction as a brain disease but that is not the real problem or source of the trouble, we will leave the addict vulnerable to relapse or substitionary addictions.  (Often called replacement behaviors by those in the recovery community.)

If an addiction is not a brain disease, or as I said above “the real problem”, then what is?  In the book, Flores suggests we might look at what he calls psychic structure.  What the heck is psychic structure?  Well, I am glad you asked………..

Freud, a pioneer in mental health treatment introduced the world to psychic structure when he invented what has been called the three structures of personality, and/or the three levels of consciousness – the Id, the Ego and the Super-ego.  It was the first serious attempt at trying to explain the structure of that somewhat mysterious thing we call the soul.  (Remembering here that our English word soul is “psyche” in Greek, from which we get the term psychology, and for this essay, psychic.)  Freud didn’t call his invention “psychic structure” (he called it psychic apparatus) but that was what it was in the sense of what he was trying to describe.  It was a Freud critic, Jacque Lacan, a French psychoanalyst, who gave us the term, he also gave us new words such as psychosis, neurosis, and perversion to describe what he thought psychic structure meant.

Approximately one hundred or so years after Freud and Lacan, psychic structure can be found defined many ways by many different psychologists, it seems to have become a convenience term, meaning that each psychological analyst will define it for their own expediency.  Here I am only going to point out that we should probably understand it in a simple way.  Just as a body, the visible material part of us, has a structure, so does the invisible immaterial part of us, that we call the soul.  The big difference is that our body structure is determined by the fact we are human, and the minor difference between one human and another is created through genetics.  The structure of the soul, however, is always developing and changing, and is not determined through genetics, but through experience and environment.

Our psychic structure begins to develop in early childhood (although unproveable at this time, it may even begin forming in the womb).  Freud, Lacan, Ericson and other developmental theorists postulated that our basic personality is formed very early through stages of development and is highly influenced by caregivers, mostly mothers and fathers.  Later Bowlby, in the 1950s and 60s, introduced attachment struggles as early life problems that continued through a person’s lifetime.  He can be thought of as the first attachment theorist, and the work that followed this gives us what we now call attachment theory.  All the developmental and attachment work done over the last century leads us the call the first few years of a person’s life, “the formative years.”  And that is when a core psychic structure is built (formed).

As said earlier to a certain extent psychic structure can mean what a person wants it to mean.  Here is a definition from the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI):

The concept of psychic structure refers to enduring aspects of the personality and to means-end functions that do not have to be created de novo each time one is faced with a similar situation. A psychic structure is a functional organization that generates a range of meaningful contents.

Translating this into easily understandable terms:

Psychic structure is like the software that tells a computer what to do and they jointly produce an output.  The psychic structure (software) is stored on the hard drive of the computer (brain), and it runs our lives.  If we have bad programming we produce dysfunctional results.

As we grow in early and maybe middle childhood, we are developing our psychic structure, our nurturing and our environment jointly create our structure and we use that to respond and react to what life throws at us.  So, when we do not attach well we develop what might be called wounds or deficits.  For example, if our parents do not give us reasonable levels of attention, we are programmed to look for it more, or possibly grab whatever attention we can, in case it disappears on us; those are example wounds.  Later in life the program kicks in when we need some attention (such as some tender loving care from someone).  So, we develop ways of getting it such as being a class clown, having hook up sex and sports achievement.  I am sure that each reader can come up with their own examples of these kinds of wounds or shortages of connecting activities.

As we become older, and reach at least physical maturity, we still operate with that personality programming developed as a child.  And this is where psychic structure and addiction meet.

What we attempt to do as an adult is to make our programming more functional, we try to repair our psychic structure.  So, we drink too much, and we find that helps fix the software, at least temporarily.  We then drink some more and at some point we compulsively drink alcohol and become addicts (alcoholics).  The root cause of the drinking is a broken personality, a badly formed psychic structure.  Therefore, simply stopping the drinking does not really fix the problem – because the psychic structure is still malformed, and a drinker will remain vulnerable to relapse.

This line of thinking can be used on all addiction cases and to a certain extent on personality disorders such as narcissism.  The source of all compulsions, according to this kind of approach to mental health problems is a badly formed psychic structure.

For me, the most interesting behavior we call an addiction is that of compulsive sexual behavior.  I have no trouble at all seeing how dysfunctional attachment histories can create the chase for intimacy that we call sex addiction.  In fact, poor psychic structure explains not only why we act out sexually, but also explains why certain treatments work and some don’t.  On top of this, we can also observe why 12-step and similar groups are so helpful in treating compulsive sexual problems.  The group fellowship and the steps all work to repair a person’s psychic structure.

As Philip Flores in his book – Addiction is an attempt at self-repair.