Black holes: Some notes on time, symbolization, and perversion in the psychodynamics of addiction

Abstract

In day-to-day clinical practice, we regularly meet individuals who struggle to endure very painful emotional states and to face these in the here-and-now. The evasion of the pain felt in the present can lead addicts to attempt, through the use of alcohol and other drugs, to collapse their sense of temporal perception. In this paper, I suggest a cosmological analogy to these dynamics of addiction as this may aid in furthering our understanding. It is suggested that, in the same way that a black hole represents a region of space from which matter and energy cannot escape due to the intensity of the gravitational field, addicts appear to collapse intrapsychically into sealed-over states of being. Like the black hole, which only becomes apparent due to the effects it exerts on objects around it, the psychodynamic internal world of the addict emerges forcibly in the therapeutic relationship. In this sense, addictive transference, issuing from the timeless dynamic unconscious described by Freud, can be viewed as mirroring the seductive attraction of substances and their power to return the user to an infantile period, a period before a chronometric perception of time had been achieved, when attempts were made to pull everything towards and into a primitive and inchoate self structure. In this paper, the author explores such dynamics of addiction with reference to clinical cases of individuals attending for weekly psychodynamic psychotherapy in a community-based addiction treatment centre.

Keywords:

• addiction
• time
• unconscious
• black holes
• projection
• anti-time

Notes

¹Black holes are the evolutionary endpoints of stars at least 10–15 times as massive as the sun. If a star that massive or larger undergoes a supernova explosion, it may leave behind a fairly massive burned-out stellar remnant. With no outward forces to oppose gravitational forces, the remnant will collapse in on itself. The star eventually collapses to the point of zero volume and infinite density, creating what is known as a “singularity.” Around the singularity is a region in which the force of gravity is so strong that not even light can escape. Thus, no information can reach us from this region. It is therefore called a black hole, and its surface is called the “event horizon.”

²It might be added that chronic addictions to substances often develop in response to a sense that the person has had of not experiencing a world of their own, in which they can find space to grow, but rather one in which they feel captured: as if in the orbit of another for whom they act as an addictive object that cannot on any account be given up. This, in my opinion, represents an extreme form of pathological narcissistic parasitism and is perhaps more common in the addictions than we have, to date, realized.