An Integrated Model of Addiction: When Will We Integrate Biological and Affective Processes?

Jean-Pascal Assailly

Abstract

Our work on addictions has led us to the idea that the relative risk of an individual, his/her risk trajectory is the product of a double history: a biological history will generate resistance to the effects of sensations, an affective history will generate alexithymia, the inability to identify one’s emotions. The biological history will produce incentives to increase the doses of psychoactive substances uses, the levels of risk taken and the frequency of transgressions to feel (finally) something; the affectivehistory will produce incentives to replace the lost emotions by compulsive sensation seeking (whether intense or novel sensations)aiming vainly to find again the primitive emotions.