Narratives of Addiction: Savage Usury (1st ed. 2021)

Synopsis

Narratives of Addiction: Savage Usury is the first book to argue, in the face of more than a century’s received wisdom, that drug addiction and alcoholism are undoubtedly evidence of individual moral flaws. However, the sense of morality that underlies this book is completely severed from Christianity. Instead, it is influenced in particular by the writings of the nineteenth-century German philosophers Arthur Schopenhauer and Frederick Nietzsche, both of whom insisted that a genuine morality was actually incompatible with Christianity. The sequence of chapters moves from addictions on the streets, into rehab clinics, and finally into the meetings of Alcoholics Anonymous and Narcotics Anonymous. This is the first book to argue that the search for pleasure drives alcoholism and drug addiction and not the “numbing of pain”. Throughout the book I reject the claims of the medical profession, as embodied by the American Medical Association, that drug addiction and alcoholism are diseases, and further argue that they do not have the authority to tell hundreds of millions of Americans that addiction is not a moral failing. I also query throughout the book the claims of neuroscience, psychology, and the social sciences that addictions to alcohol and drugs are attributable to causes that their specific disciplines are best suited to understand. I argue that there is nothing complex about addiction: it is a simple behavioural disorder. The language routinely employed to discuss addiction is similarly not complex, just confused, and so it is also the rhetoric of addiction discourse, especially its use of simile, metaphor and euphemism, that this book evaluates.

Copyright:

2021

Book Details

Book Quality:

Publisher Quality

ISBN-13:

9783030884611

Related ISBNs:

9783030884604

Publisher:

Springer International Publishing

Date of Addition:

05/14/22

Copyrighted By:

The Editor

Adult content:

No

Language:

English

Has Image Descriptions:

No

Categories:

Nonfiction, Literature and Fiction, Social Studies, Language Arts, Medicine

Submitted By:

Bookshare Staff

Usage Restrictions:

This is a copyrighted book.