We do not know how to renounce anything, Freud has once observed. This type of relation to the object indicates an inability to mourn.
The addict is a non-renouncer par excellence (one think of the way Goethe mastered renunciation) ; yet, however haunted or hounded, the addict nonetheless establishes a partial separation from an invading presence.
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Discipline and addiction. Practice your scales. Repetitions. Bach on coffee. Berlioz on hallucinogen (but also on coffee and cigars): The Witches’ Sabbath, a concoction of Faust and the opium dreams Berlioz read in De Quincey’s Confessions of an English Opium Eater. Mussorgky’s wine, Stravinsky’s cigarettes.
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Crisis in immanence. Drugs, it turn out, are not so much about seeking an exterior, transcendental dimension – a fourth or fifth dimension – rather, they explore fractal interiorities. This was already hinted at by Burrough’s algebra of need.
Avital Ronell
(Crack War. Literature Addiction Mania. University of Illinois Press, 2004)
Freud was a neurologist 