Unspeakable aspects in addiction and their impact on psychotherapy

The unspeakable corresponds to a hollow in the fabric of psychic representations. It is what cannot be said because it is unrepresentable. It contributes to the constitution of the addiction finding. Because the person cannot grasp what makes him suffer, he will try to find a solution in psychoactive products. The very process itself of addiction then reinforces this erasure of psychic life.

Considering addiction as a potential language, psychotherapy opens a space where one’s own thoughts can unfold. This approach uses the countertransference dynamic to search for traces of a buried psychic life and give it a right of citizenship. It involves the therapist’s words to open the way to the patient’s own.The course of care, which is not without its pitfalls, aims at distancing itself from this addictive prosthetic functioning in order, above all, to allow the subject to’find-create’ himself, so to speak, as a subject.