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 traum