The Globalisation of Addiction: A Study in Poverty of the Spirit

The Globalisation of Addiction: A Study in Poverty of the Spirit is a work by Bruce K. Alexander (2008).

Core claims

• Alexander’s central thesis—that addiction is a predictable consequence of the dislocation imposed by free-market globalization—constitutes the most radical sociopolitical extension of the Jungian intuition that alcoholism is a spiritual disease, translating “poverty of the spirit” from metaphor into epidemiology.
• By reframing addiction as an adaptive response to the destruction of psychosocial integration rather than a brain disease or moral failure, Alexander dismantles both the biomedical and the voluntarist models simultaneously, exposing them as ideological props for the very economic system that manufactures dislocation.
• The book’s historical scope—from the Highland Clearances to the colonization of Indigenous peoples to contemporary consumer capitalism—provides the missing structural complement to depth psychology’s intrapsychic accounts of addiction, demonstrating that the “mythlessness” Jung and his successors diagnosed is not an accident of cultural evolution but a deliberately produced condition.

Related questions

• How does Alexander’s concept of “dislocation” as the root cause of addiction complicate or deepen Kalsched’s account in The Inner World of Trauma of the self-care system as an archetypal defense against overwhelming experience—can structural dislocation itself be understood as a form of collective trauma that activates archetypal defenses at a civilizational scale?
• In what ways does Alexander’s critique of the biomedical “Official View” of addiction parallel Marion Woodman’s insistence in Conscious Femininity that addictive substances must be understood symbolically rather than pharmacologically, and where do these two critiques diverge in their implications for treatment?
• If Peterson, following Edinger, argues that the Twelve Steps fulfill the function of a new collective myth emerging from Jungian psychology, how does Alexander’s analysis of free-market globalization as the producer of mass mythlessness challenge or refine the claim that such a myth can heal what is fundamentally a political and economic catastrophe?

See also

• Library page: /library/recovery/alexander-globalisation-addiction-study/

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