January 2017
Clearly, there are other determinants of addiction, but I believe a self-medication motive is one of the more compelling reasons for overuse of and dependency on drugs. Clinical findings based on psychoanalytic formulations have been consistent with and complemented by diagnostic and treatment studies that support this perspective, which, I believe, will enable researchers and clinicians to further understand and treat addictive behavior
For example, Steele and Josephs’ (1990) alcohol-myopia theory posits that alcohol ‘‘restricts attention to the salient, immediate aspects of experience’’ and ‘‘reduces processing capacity so that a greater proportion of this capacity has to bedevoted to the demands of immediate, ongoing activity’’ (p. 929). Consider a man who has a bad workday and returns home to drink. Alcohol may relieve his worry if he is distracted by television, but he may ‘‘cry in his beer’’ if no such distraction is available (Steele & Josephs, 1990). Although alcohol-myopia theory continues to stimulate much research, core elements of the theory remain unresolved. For instance, as noted by Steele and Josephs (1990, footnote 3), it remains unclear which cues will be most salient to a person who is drinking (see also Sayette, 1993). In typical studies, salient distractor cues are explicitly manipulated. For example, intoxicated participants may be asked to prepare a stressful speech, and during this preparation, some of these participants may be given a series of pleasant images to evaluate. Intoxicated participants given no explicit distraction feel at least as anxious as sober participants, presumably because they focus on the upcoming speech, whereas intoxicated participants who are distracted by the images feel less anxious than sober participants (Josephs & Steele, 1990).
The mind and its relationship to the brain have been investigated extensively in neuroscience and philosophy. However, either way of their determination raises principal problems whose solution seem rather difficult. These problems shall be called ‘mind-problems’ (see Figure 1) and are discussed either implicitly or explicitly in the ‘philosophy of mind’. Empirically, themind is determined by neuronal states, which are supposed to characterize the brain. Neuronal states of the brain are investigated empirically and related directly to different psychological and physiological functions. Meanwhile mental states can neither be investigated empirically nor related directly to neuronal states. Unlike neuronal states,mental states are not accessible in Third-Person Perspective, whichmakes their direct empirical investigation impossible.