Dissociative Retreat and Addiction: Trauma, Dissociation, and Affect Dysregulation

Dissociative Retreat and Addiction presents a new theoretical and clinical model for understanding and treating addiction. Giuseppe Craparo examines how addictive behaviors develop as the result of complex psychic and physical conditions, working in conjunction with a specific drug object, and explores factors including poor relational and developmental history, strong emotional pain and psychopathological conditions including anxiety, depression, personality disorders and psychosis. Craparo’s clinical, developmental-relational model conceptualizes addictive symptoms as reenactments of traumatic memories and observes how drug objects are used as defensive somato-psychic retreats from the intense emotions associated with traumatic memories. The book provides a full overview of the model with clinical examples and theoretical underpinnings. Dissociative Retreat and Addiction will be of great interest to psychoanalysts, psychotherapists and other professionals working with addiction and trauma.