Narratives of Addiction

Savage Usury
1. Auflage 2021
ISBN: 978-3-030-88460-4
Verlag: Springer International Publishing

Buch, Englisch, 222 Seiten, Format (B × H): 153 mm x 216 mm, Gewicht: 438 g

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.

Zielgruppe

Research

Autoren/Hrsg.

Mccarron, Kevin

Fachgebiete

• Geisteswissenschaften Literaturwissenschaft Englische Literatur
• Interdisziplinäres Wissenschaften Wissenschaft und Gesellschaft | Kulturwissenschaften Kulturwissenschaften
• Geisteswissenschaften Literaturwissenschaft Literarische Stoffe, Motive und Themen
• Medizin | Veterinärmedizin Medizin | Public Health | Pharmazie | Zahnmedizin Medizinische Fachgebiete Psychiatrie, Sozialpsychiatrie, Suchttherapie
• Sozialwissenschaften Soziologie | Soziale Arbeit Spezielle Soziologie Gesundheitssoziologie, Medizinsoziologie
• Sozialwissenschaften Psychologie Psychotherapie / Klinische Psychologie Suchttherapie

Inhaltsverzeichnis

Chapter 1: ‘Define Your Terms’.- Chapter 2: Language and Addiction.- Chapter 3: Morality and Addiction.- Chapter 4: Philosophy and Addiction.- Chapter 5: The Streets and Addiction.- Chapter 6: Prostitution and Addiction.- Chapter 7: Rehabilitation Clinics and Addiction.- Chapter 8: The Rooms: Alcoholics Anonymous.- Chapter 9: Works Cited.- Index.

Über Autor(innen)

Dr Kevin McCarron is the author of two previous monographs: William Golding, and The Coincidence of Opposites, and a co-author of Frightening Fiction. He worked as a stand-up comedian for many years. He has published forty chapters in edited collections and nineteen peer-reviewed journal articles on a range of subjects including The Dead Sea Scrolls, university teaching and stand-up comedy, blasphemy, prison narratives, tattooing, prostitution, alcoholism and heroin addiction, begging and homelessness, and the Marquis de Sade.