At the center of every addiction, as at the center of every cyclone, is a vacuum, a still point of emptiness that generates circles of frantic movement at its periphery. By addiction, I do not mean the physical necessity that binds a junkie to heroine or a smoker to nicotine. I use the word to connote a psychic state that remains unchanged throughout the career of his substance abuse. It is characterized not only by feelings of worthlessness, the conviction that one deserves nothing more than the destiny of a drunk or a junkie but by a blurred and tenuous sense of a self-a fundamental uncertainty about one's own existence. That uncertainty breeds hunger, a ravenous desire to be filled, to be validated, to be made whole. When the addict takes his fix or the alcoholic his drink what he experiences is not so much pleasure as a sense of completion that has been missing until that moment. His drug gives him a brief assurance of his own boundaries and substance; it tells him "here you are." The void calls out for satisfaction, a satisfaction that must be repeated endlessly, since the void is unfillable and that cycle of hunger, momentary completeness and renewed emptiness comes to be the sole drama of the addicts life
Peter Trachtenberg
