Addiction & Oedipus
9th May 2026
Addiction or compulsive behaviour may be a consequence of an early drama, where the desire for our first caregiver has to be shifted into an object that is more reliable and more available.
Every child has to deal with the question why the source of all that is good — all needs being met, plus the wonderful surplus of love — doesn't want to be here with it all the time.
The fantasy is that maybe it can merge with the caregiver, but that proves to be impossible. It may become highly anxious at their absence: or try and become the very thing that the caregiver seems to desire in addition to the child (the earliest form of people-pleasing). The child may defend itself against its need, and become emotionally avoidant: or it may just give up and become depressed.
There are a hundred ways to metabolise the Oedipal triangle of child-caregiver-Other (the Other which the caregiver seems to desire). But one way is to conclude — even before speech and cognitive reasoning — that the caregiver cannot be a complete or permanent source of love. This is not a failure of parenting: it is a structural feature of the relationship itself. No caregiver can be fully present, fully available, or fully satisfying, because desire by its nature is never finally met.
Some children encounter this truth earlier, or more acutely, than others — and it is they who may be more vulnerable to the transposition that follows. And so, for some, self-soothing is merely a benign way to wait until the caregiver returns, but later, as we develop, it can lead us to a wholesale transposition of the source of love into a different, more accessible object.
So alcohol, drugs, or any other addictive or compulsive behaviour, may become the substitute for a love we believe will always
be available and reliable. These substitutes work best — are most compelling, most seductive — when they preserve something of the original physical qualities of the caregiver relationship: the warmth, the oral pleasure, the sensation of something taken in and absorbed, something that briefly fills the body from the inside. The mouth, after all, is where the first exchange of love took place — where need was met, where the other's presence was most immediately felt. The most powerful substitutes tend to honour that original register: they are swallowed, inhaled, consumed. They offer a bodily echo of the earliest experience of being held and satisfied, even as the actual relationship they mimic is long gone.
Giving up the substitute threatens to throw us back into that unresolved dilemma — the gap the caregiver could never fill.
And yet, in time, we realise that not only does the love-substitute fail to deliver love: it becomes hostile, and attacks us.