Addiction as an Attachment Disorder

Name: Addiction as an Attachment Disorder
Author: Philip Flores

Addiction as an Attachment Disorder is a work by Philip Flores (2004).

Core claims

Flores does not merely apply attachment theory to addiction—he reconceives addiction itself as a failed attachment strategy, making the substance or behavior a substitute transitional object that forecloses the very relational capacity it mimics.
The book’s deepest contribution is its argument that group therapy, modeled on Twelve-Step fellowship, functions as a corrective attachment environment, effectively replacing the interpersonal neurobiology that was never installed rather than merely treating symptoms.
Flores bridges the clinical split between psychodynamic depth work and the pragmatic communalism of AA by demonstrating that surrender to a “higher power” is neurobiologically identical to the infant’s surrender to a reliable caretaker—a claim that collapses the spiritual/scientific dichotomy that has paralyzed addiction treatment for decades.

How does Kalsched’s daimonic self-care system in The Inner World of Trauma map onto Flores’s account of insecure attachment as the engine of addictive self-soothing, and where do the two models diverge on the question of treatment?
Woodman claims the addict’s binge ritual is a degraded form of sacred feminine ritual seeking the “divine Mother”—how does this mythic reading complement or challenge Flores’s neurobiological account of the addict’s failure to internalize a regulatory other?
Hillman argues in Re-Visioning Psychology that pathologizing has autonomous psychological necessity and should not be cured but seen through—does Flores’s attachment-based treatment model implicitly reject Hillman’s position, or does the group setting itself function as a form of “seeing through” the symptom?