From Bruce Fink’s Against Understanding, Volume 1: Commentary and Critique in a Lacanian Key:
“Addiction” is not, in and of itself, a psychoanalytic diagnosis, inasmuch as it refers to activities found across the diagnostic spectrum. Addictions may, like so many other cyclical activities, be viewed as symptomatic (i.e., compulsive) activities that aim at achieving a form of satisfaction or jouissance that they approach but never fully attain. It is, it seems, the very failure to fully reach what is sought that leads to the repetition of such activities. (Missing one’s objective is what brings on repetition, suggests Lacan, 1978.)
It occurred to me that Alan Carr’s account of addiction sits interestingly with this model, in the sense that he argues addiction involves a misidentification of enjoyment. It’s jouissance in Lacan’s terms, a pleasure-in-pain, rather than something which exists as a more straight forward form of pleasure sensation. It could perhaps, in a Lacanian register, be seen as an argument about searching for a positive core to jouissance which can never be found.
Mark Carrigan 