Alteration and intoxication

Phenomenology of the addicted body

Abstract

The main aim of this paper is to explore the possibilities of a phenomenological description of addiction as such kind of experience and relationship with the own body. The complexity of this field justifies the possibility of a scientific description from a first person perspective. I try here to offer an analysis of the disturbances in the own body experience level as a spiritual-animic unity. First, from descriptions of the second book of Ideas by Edmund Husserl, I try to justify the pertinence of this concept of corporality as a tool that allows to amplify and to go deeper in the scientific descriptions of addictive processes. Second, I define the toxicological disturbing in analogous sense to chronic pain, as a disturbed mood which beyond simple sensations determines the personal life. Third, I complete this definition of the mood disturbances of addiction as becoming alter to body itself, an alien thing for the ego. Finally, in the fourth part, I try to describe the order of spiritual motivations which perform this experience.