The Heart of Addiction: A Biblical Perspective

The Heart of Addiction: A Biblical Perspective is a work by Mark E. Shaw (2008).

Core claims

• Shaw’s framework collapses the distinction between idolatry and addiction into a single diagnostic category, but in doing so it inadvertently reproduces the very extroverted God-concept that Jung, Peterson, and Hillman identify as the psychic root of addictive compulsion itself.
• By insisting that sin is the sole etiological mechanism of addiction, Shaw eliminates the symbolic dimension of addictive substances and behaviors — the precise dimension that Woodman, Kalsched, and the depth tradition identify as the pathway through which healing actually occurs.
• The book functions less as an account of addiction than as an exercise in what Thomas Moore calls “fundamentalism” — reducing the rich, multi-layered story of human compulsion to a single moral axiom, thereby foreclosing the soul’s capacity for deepened self-understanding.

Related questions

• How does Shaw’s identification of addiction as idolatry compare to Marion Woodman’s claim in Addiction to Perfection that addicts are “profoundly religious people” whose substances carry specific symbolic meanings — and what does the gap between these two positions reveal about competing models of the sacred?
• In what ways does Donald Kalsched’s concept of the Protector/Persecutor in The Inner World of Trauma expose the limitations of any volitional model of addiction, including Shaw’s sin-based framework and certain readings of the Twelve Steps?
• Thomas Moore argues in Care of the Soul that using the Bible for “moral certainty” differs fundamentally from using it for “insight” — how does this distinction illuminate the conflict between Cody Peterson’s Jungian reading of the Twelve Steps in The Shadow of a Figure of Light and Shaw’s nouthetic approach to the same spiritual territory?

See also

• Library page: /library/recovery/shaw-heart-addiction-biblical/

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