Addiction as Distorted Religion

Woodman’s master formulation of the archetypal reading of addiction: “An addiction to me is a distorted religion” (Woodman 1993, p. 127). Divine creative intelligence, denied its natural outlet through the imagination, routes itself through compulsion. “If it can’t find an outlet through the imagination, which is its natural route, it will find it in a concretized way. That becomes compulsive because there’s no way it can find what it’s looking for in a concrete way. You can’t find the Divine Mother in gobbling food” (Woodman 1993, p. 127).

Each addictive object carries an archetypal misidentification. “With food, it can be mother; with alcohol, spirit; with cocaine, light; with sex, union. Mother, spirit, light, union — these can be archetypal images of the soul’s search for what it needs. If we fail to understand the soul’s yearning, then we concretize and become compulsively driven toward an object that cannot satisfy the soul’s longing” (Woodman 1993, p. 124). The addictive substance is the wrong name of a real god. The remedy is not abstinence alone but the recovery of the metaphor the addiction has concretized — the restoration of the imagination as the legitimate route of the divine’s passage through a life.

Woodman places addiction in the same structural register as her reading of eating disorders: a religious problem, not a behavioral one, whose cure lies in the conscious encounter with the archetype whose presence has been refused. The framing aligns her with the archetypal-addiction literature of david-e-schoen, ernest-kurtz, and the christina-and-stanislav-grofs, though she arrives at it from the interior of Jungian analysis rather than from recovery literature.

Relationships

• addiction-as-distorted-religion
• embodied-consciousness
• surrender-ego-death
• mundus-imaginalis

Primary sources

• woodman-addiction-to-perfection (Woodman 1982)
• woodman-conscious-femininity-interviews (Woodman 1993)