It has been often and truly observed that the addict in many ways resembles a lover with a fatal attraction to an injurious, possibly even a deadly love object. Such destructive and even fatal love of one individual for another is of course by no means unknown. It has many enduring literary representations, from the poems of the Roman poet Catullus to W. Somerset Maugham’s novel "Of Human Bondage." Just about everyone is familiar with this phenomenon of unhealthy love – if not from their own experience, then from that of their friends or acquaintances. Individuals in the grip of such a pathological obsession are "unable to live with" and "unable to live without" the object of their affections. Such relationships are stormy, painful, often violent – and always unhappy. In some cases the lover is perfectly well aware of being abused, misused, deceived and maltreated by the one he loves – but he seems strangely powerless to stay away from a relationship that is obviously unhealthy and injurious to him.
Such lovers, like all lovers, are of course obsessed with the object of their love. They long for it, pine away when deprived of it, and think constantly about ways to reunite with it. The beloved becomes the center of the lover’s mental universe, the center from which all radii emanate and around which all circumferences are drawn. Everything is organized in a hierarchy on top of which the beloved reigns supreme and secure and to which everything, absolutely everything else is now subordinate. Nothing that seriously threatens the beloved object is likely to survive for long – and even everything that does not pay it sufficient homage or which is even suspected by the lover of being critical of it is likely to retain respect or regard that once were unquestioned. Friends, family, traditions, even ethical and moral values once held sacrosanct: all must and do give way if they threaten the continued relationship with the beloved. By means of a "transvaluation of all values" the addict now finds himself truly "beyond good and evil" – at least when it comes to his relationship with his beloved.
If a lover in the grip of such a dire obsession for his beloved is advised by others to give up the relationship "for his own good" or for the good of others –one thinks of the Montagues and the Capulets of "Romeo and Juliet" here- he will recoil in anger and disgust from the very thought of a life without his beloved – and he is surely apt to distance himself, even to regard as actual or potential enemies those who dare to give him such absurd and intolerable advice. He may even declare that since life would not be worth living any longer if deprived of his beloved, he is perfectly prepared to hazard every danger, even if necessary to die in an effort to prevent what for him would be the ultimate and irreparable disaster, the loss of his beloved. And whether his "beloved" is a person or an addiction, he may upon occasion do just that.
Although it is the rare addict who thinks consciously of his relationship to his addiction in terms even remotely resembling those just described, an analysis of addictive behavior and values reveals many remarkable similarities between a certain type of love of one human being for another, and the love of an addict for his addiction. Common to both experiences is what might be called a totalizing tendency to reshape not only the world of the lover but even his very identity in a manner congruent with the object of his love. The very existence of the addicted individual can often be divided, both subjectively and also objectively, into "Before the addiction" and "After -actually during- the addiction." Of the experience of what truly comes "after the addiction," i.e. recovery from addiction, the addict as a rule has no conception whatever beyond the projected state of perpetual mourning and living death described above.
It is worth dwelling for a moment longer upon the remarkable attachment of the addict to his addiction – and upon his profound sense of loss when he is - or even imagines himself to be- deprived of the comfort, solace and sense of security he derives from it. For in a psychological sense this track takes us very close to the lair of the addictive beast itself.
Although breaking the bonds of a serious addiction is actually a huge step toward personal freedom and a richer, deeper and more satisfying life for the formerly addicted person, it is almost invariably experienced by the addict himself as a massive, often a catastrophic loss and resulting state of permanent deprivation. Even the faintest threat of such a potential loss is often enough to activate frantic emergency behavior designed to head it off at the pass. The long habit of addiction has made the addict accustomed to it and caused his other coping strategies and tools to wither from disuse atrophy. In many if not most cases he literally does not know what to do with himself without his addiction.
A large part of the addict’s double-mindedness about recovery results directly from his longstanding intimate relationship with his addiction as a security object –in fact, as a soothing and comforting parental surrogate- and the painful negative emotions that are inescapably connected to the loss of such a familiar and, as the addict sees it, protective relationship. For strange and even starkly opposed to the actual facts of the case as it sounds, the addict actually feels sheltered and protected from danger by his addiction. Without his addiction the addict feels terribly insecure, exposed, and liable to all kinds of harm. For the addict, his addiction is a kind of pacifier that can always be depended upon to produce the feelings associated with safety and security – even though in his case these feelings, because they are artificially derived and thus bear no relationship to the addict’s real circumstances, are dangerously misleading.
Addictive behavior aims to modify the emotional and hedonic(pleasure) state of the individual directly by artificially creating positive feelings and avoiding negative ones. This means that the addict’s own internal guidance mechanism, his "survival compass" becomes progressively disconnected from his actual internal and external environment with its constantly shifting and changing stimuli and cues, and is replaced by the "false compass" of the addiction whose needle is always pointing toward itself and hence bears no relationship at all to what is good or bad for the individual who attempts to navigate by it.