Abstract
The chapter offers an overarching anthropological understanding of the use of psychoactive substances. With the help of mythological examples, it is argued that the human search for the absolute, in its various forms, is what orients the use of psychoactive substances, anthropologically speaking. Through the action of certain psychoactive substances on its central nervous system, the human historical self manages to dissolve the fractions that constitute it, to abandon the realm of proportionality and to inhabit an artificial paradise, in which the absolute reigns supreme and a primal re-union with the world seems possible. It is therefore in the dialectics between anthropological proportionality and experiential absolute that the participation of substance misuse in the pathologies of existence is investigated.
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Notes
- 1.
Although nicotine addiction is a major public health issue, it is not covered in the psychopathological model I use here. The reason for this is that it produces little change in consciousness and so interferes very little in the dialectics of the conditions of possibility of existential development. It causes somatic damage, which falls outside the scope of this work.
- 2.
The somatic changes wrought by substance use, such as increased risk of cardiovascular disease or cancer, fall outside the scope of this work. Although they are legitimate public health concerns, they are not within the narrow scope of psychopathological interests.
- 3.
As the constitution of existence is intersubjective, one of the consequences of substance misuse is harm to others, as seen in the association between binge drinking and driving under the influence, for example.
- 4.
In a strictly phenomenological sense, as we will see throughout the text, the psychopathological alterations induced by substance misuse and said to be psychotic are not actually psychoses, because they are not based on any rupture in the intersubjective constitution of reality (Messas 2015–2016). However, I will use the term as it is already established in the psychopathological literature.
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Messas, G. (2021). The Proportions of the Absolute – Introduction. In: The Existential Structure of Substance Misuse. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-62724-9_5
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