The particularity of freedom and recovery from addiction in practice: On the therapeutic limitations of generalising addiction science

Addiction science is very often cast as an indispensable source of political justification and clinical resources for engaging addicts therapeutically rather than punitively. It is said to promote an image of overcoming addictions as projects of recovery from disease or mental disorder rather than merely a repudiation of one's formerly troubled ways. Thusly, it is said to inform more compassionate and effective approaches to fostering constructive personal change than merely blaming and punishing addicts for their difficulties. In this essay I argue that because mainstream addiction science seeks to generalise regarding the nature of addiction and recovery, it invariably fails to capture the practices of freedom through which particular people undertake to recover from their particular addictions. I show how theoretical resources drawn from Michel Foucault, Harry Frankfurt and Donald Davidson allow us to develop the insights of posthumanist scholarship to provide in detail for the specific practices of freedom through which people undertake to recover from their particular addictions under the diverse practical conditions in which they seek to do so. This attention to particularity keys addiction science much more closely to the actual exigencies people encounter in the work of therapeutically fostering recovery from addiction in practice.