Addictive Personality

There is a debate whether there is such a thing as a “addictive personality. Earlier psychoanalysts confirmed that there was such a thing as an "addictive personality". New information allows us to refine our understanding of addiction (Johnson, 2003) . By definition, addiction is a behavior over which the person has impaired control, and which is associated with harmful consequences (Meyer, Rahman, Shepherd, 2007) One type of addiction is a character type; a second is a biological disorder. An addictive character is repetitive, stereotyped response to compulsive behaviors. Physical addiction is due to production of genes of the abdominal pathway with lifelong drug craving and drug dreams. Both disorders have overlapping features including

Diagnosis is essential in guiding the treatment for addiction (Johnson, 2003). Dodes made a breakthrough in the psychoanalytic description of addiction. He was able to explain that addiction is a very similar to compulsion. The addicted individual is predisposed to being overwhelmed by helplessness due to childhood experiences. The addicted person cannot respond directly and effectively. When the person makes the decision to perform his addictive act, however, he no longer feels helpless, because in making the decision. Dodes pointed out that all addictions are displacements, in which the person my find another thing to focus on other than their primary addiction.

Addictive behaviors are often pursued in an expression of the panicked need to escape from this affect-generated helplessness. Terror of aloneness, based on early experiences, is also often responded to with addictive behaviors. One more factor that may contribute to the status of addictive personality is that Sigmund Freud was extremely addicted to patients with addictive character styles require much more substantial treatments where the focus is on responding to conflicts and stresses without resorting to addictive behaviors. (Johnson,

They filled out a scale of hypomania personality scale in the form of a 96-question questionnaire measuring addictive tendencies and twelve domains and positive and negative scales. They hypothesized that individuals with hypomanic tendencies would report greater tendencies to develop addictions to a variety of substances and activities, ranging from music and exercise to gambling or drugs. They also hypothesized that hypomanic individuals would be more likely to report tendencies to have “addictive personality features,” regardless of specific substance or activity. (Meyer, Rahman, Shepherd,