Changes

Alcoholism, the first recently widely acknowledged [[addiction]], is paradoxically in the common [[mind ]] less [[thought ]] of as an addiction than [[cocaine ]] or heroin addction, though it kills vastly more [[people]]--indeed is the only one of the [[three ]] the mere cessation of which can kill--and costs [[society ]] a great deal more, which facts make it the more troubling that this [[cause ]] of the most addictions, which in turn as an etiological [[category ]] account for more hospitalizations than any [[other]], and where accurate diagnosis is practiced are recognised as constituting the [[reason ]] for the majority of people presenting at outpatient settings, has as yet not been much addressed or properly theorized by psychoanalysiis, which with this as so many other [[conditions ]] is simply yielding the field to those whose claimed competence in psychopharmacholgy and new [magical] one shot "fixes' are fads one month and fade the next. Yet [[work ]] on [[trauma]], the [[repetition ]] [[compulsion]], indeed possibly the [[death ]] [[instinct ]] by those who accept it, as well as the classic Batesonian work on the [[double ]] [[bind ]] and complentarity now taken up by relational [[analysts ]] and their work on the "[[third]]", might well prove of more lasting [[value ]] once the phenomenolgy of addiction is fully taken in by this field, which is more equipped than most to do so. Lacans beginnings could be said to have been in [[public ]] health, and indeed in my own [[lacanian ]] supervision, as oppsed to personal [[analysis]], some of the most helpful guidance seemed to come from that [[dimension ]] even for my private [[practice ]] cases, especilly the many alcoholics who claimed to e able to [[remember ]] [[nothing ]] bad [[about ]] their [[childhood]], as over against the "gifted" [[adult ]] [[children ]] of alcohoics who certainly did.