Janus Head

Volume 6, Issue 2, Fall 2003

Special Issue: Addiction

Robin Room
Pages 221-234

The Cultural Framing of Addiction

The concept of addiction is historically and culturally specific, becoming a common way of understanding experience first in early nineteenth-century America, This paper considers the relation to the concept of elements in current professional definitions of addiction (as dependence). Addiction concepts have become a commonplace in storytelling, offering a secular equivalent for possession as an explanation of how a good person can behave badly, and as an inner demon over which a hero can triumph.