THE CAPTIVE IMAGINATION

A pertinent study of the possibilities for reconceiving addictive behaviors.

In this provocative book, Dakwar, a professor of psychiatry at Columbia, draws on his extensive clinical and research experience to offer what he calls “a work of imagination” that reframes addiction as a complex and universal form of meaning-making. What distinguishes addicts from the “normal,” he argues, is simply a more extreme reliance on finding comfort in a ritualized symbolic world. Such worlds are made up of stories, and understanding the suffering that informs the patterns of anyone’s storytelling can be liberating. In several insightful case studies, the author introduces patients with representative problems related to addictive behavior and sets forth the possibilities he envisions for therapeutic interventions. His own wide-ranging commentary places these personal struggles in relation to canonical works of philosophical and imaginative literature—such figures as Plato, Shakespeare, Cervantes, Goethe, Nietzsche, and Schopenhauer appear throughout. Dakwar also carefully notes how the “trance of Western culture” can blind us to disabling prejudices and perpetuate harm. A balance of reverence and irreverence toward past understandings of addiction is, in fact, characteristic of the book, which frames itself, with some credibility, as breaking new ground in understanding healing possibilities. Though the author can seem self-indulgent in his striving for poetic expressiveness, he ultimately offers a compelling overview of a modern crisis along with plausible suggestions for possible avenues of mitigation. Dakwar establishes interesting links between addiction and “systems that perpetuate suffering, such as the war on drugs, social iniquities, and the correctional-industrial complex.” Finally, the author is persuasive in his suggestion that “there is a great deal that addiction can teach us about the many ways we strive for a better world, while at the same time destroying one another, the earth, and ourselves.”

A potent, incisive reconsideration of a fundamental human behavior.