O VÍNCULO POR UM FIO: A TOXICOMANIA COMO OBJETO TRANSICIONAL

Abstract

Based on psychoanalysis, the present work has as its objective to study the family ties between a drug addict and his family. According to DSM-IV, the medical nosography insists on considering drug addiction a disease; however, would that be one of the causes or just the consequence of other pathologies? On the other hand, drug addiction seems to be what some authors call “modernity excesses”. This way, it is regarded as a sign of abuse, of law breaking; that is, it is the absence of reference points, limits, rules. The drugs say what cannot be said (Olievenstein, 1989), they expose the susceptible family ties. They sustain an identification in the emptiness, without a body, they are the sign of what is “missing”. A drug addicted recognizes in the abstinence what is lacking, that is why he dedicates himself completely to this cause that is why drug addiction exists (Rassial, 1999). Through the psychoanalytical listening process, two clinical interviews were held in two different moments: first with the father and later with his addict son. The results show family ties as a “transitional object”; ties that put in evidence the fragile link between father and son. This fragility is the result of the poor identification of the subject with the object, what seems to end up in the son’s fixation on a position of demand, a position between primary narcissism and the entrance in the Oedipus. The results make us suppose that the transitional object’s paradigm is an important theoretical model that enables the understanding and the clinical intervention in cases of drug addiction.