The passions of addiction: the memory turn in addiction neuroscience

The meaning of addiction is changing. Until the 1970s, the word addiction seldom referred to anything other than drug use. By the mid-1990s, however, cultural critics and social scientists started to diagnose an “epidemic of addiction attribution” [Sedgwick, 1995] in which the pathological idiom of addiction started to be liberally applied to vast aspects of human life.

According to the historian David Courtwright [2019] we now live in an “age of addiction” from compulsive gaming and shopping to binge eating and opioid abuse, which the neurosciences help to explain. But how do neuroscientists think about addiction? How has this changed in the past twenty-five years? And how might developments in addiction neuroscience in this period, assist the us in thinking about addiction in a way that is attentive to the suffering of human beings without reducing their affliction to a “brain disease” [Leshner, 1997] or a “disease of free-will” [Volkow, 2005]?

Sam’s talk responds to these questions by showing how between 1995 and 2015, addiction emerged as a new kind of problem for neuroscientists and psychologists.

Speaker:  Dr Sam McLean is a lecturer in the Department of Global Health and Social Medicine. He is currently working on two research projects: one is on addiction and memory in the neurosciences and psychology; the other is on the passions and excess in European philosophy and psychiatry.