UC Berkeley

This dissertation charts a deep and widespread shift in the American discourse on addiction in the late twentieth century. It argues that across several domains of U.S. society, including scientific knowledge about addiction, clinical approaches to diagnosing and treating addiction, as well as popular and political understandings of addiction as a social problem, the addict became “normalized” starting in the 1980s and 1990s. For most of the twentieth century, the addict was variously yet consistently imagined as a broken or corrupt form of the human. Hence, for instance, most scientific research on addiction was focused on determining that aspect of the addict’s constitution that rendered them fundamentally different from more moderate drug users, whose normal personality or psychic formation allowed them to voluntarily modulate their use of drugs. But over the last forty years, such construal of the addict as an aberrant or abnormal subject has disappeared from the American social landscape. Today, the addict is widely seen, described, and treated instead as a paradigm of the human, and addiction is understood not as a failure of, but an elaboration of, the normal dynamics of volition, attachment, and desire. Reading a range of materials including scientific articles, diagnostic protocols, popular writings, and policy documents, the dissertation shows how addiction has become constructed as a normal phenomenon in recent decades, and how the human itself is now construed as ever an addict in waiting, or in miniature. It illuminates this shift and studies its consequences not only for the theorization and treatment of addiction, but also for the imagination of the human subject in late-modern times.