William James's radical empiricism and the phenomenology of addiction: A philsophical inquiry (William James)

Addiction to psychoactive drugs is described as a psychopathology. Current research has identified neurophysical correlates and subjective feelings that accompany the addiction process. What has been missing is a philosophical view of reality that encompasses both the objective knowing of the body in its world, the subjective knowing of feelings, and the relationship between the two. William James's model of consciousness, culminating in his metaphysics of radical empiricism, provides a phenomenology of individual experience that is useful to explore how it feels during the immediate experience of addiction, and what meaning to the individual is evoked by the experience. This study examines James's metaphysics of experience and looks at its manifestations in subjective narratives of addiction. This examination reveals a process of knowing derived from: intense pleasures of novel sensate experiences of physical body and objective world, feelings of awe from the sense of expanded time and space that provide opportunity to dwell on the intricacies as well as the global meaning of the experience, a sensible awareness of discrete or accelerated physical processes in harmony or disharmony with the perceived pace of the objective world. It includes a strong feeling of absence in the sense of self and the sense of anticipation of more to be achieved. It reveals the warmth and intimacy that a sense of connection to self and others engenders, counterposed to an intense striving to be free of connection, to be unique and separate. James's metaphysics of pure experience allows for this shifting balance between subjective intimacy and objective distancing from submersion in the collective unity. Feelings of optimism, joy, and empowerment arise from the felt potential for growth and change in the subjective experience not yet differentiated into me and not-me. The feelings of relation revealed in the fringe of consciousness, and reflected in the narratives of drug experience, offer insight into the subjectively experienced allure of addiction and its relation to the changing sense of self. These feelings have implications for the tone of the helping relationship between addict and care giver, and for the therapeutic strategies that emerge from that responsiveness.