Psychology of the Drug Taker
Something exciting about drugs, not so much the high and alteration of consciousness, but the social excitement of partcipating in something illicit. Holding the drugs, being in possession of something illegal that most people do not have makes the drug taker feel special, important, different, unique. This boosts the insecure person's ego, allows them a rebellious stance, a form of criticism: I criticize and reject the norm, the status quotidian, because I may find it difficult to fit in and belong according to generic, generalized standards of personality and behavior that my specific culture allows.
As a drug user, I may have some problem with authority. I feel myself out of control with my feelings/emotions, and thus when someone else steps in to control me (society, parents, teachers, police), I project my own self loathing and underlying wish to control myself onto those people. The authority stands in for my own lack and power/control vacuum. I rebel against them, hate them, imagine myself persecuted, matryred, with a Christ archetype, a romantic revolutionary suffering self image, saint like. Yet, I need the authority figure because it gives me a purpose.
Drugs serve many purposes: rebellion, rejection of social structures to which my limited, liquid self cannot seem to fit, the ecstasy of escape with the high and temporary vacation from that self, and a very creative form of self mutilation, which furthers my own suffering agenda.
In other cases, drugs might simply serve the function of allowing me to escape. Deep inside is a fear of life, a fear of death, a core belief that life is some absurd joke, a hopeless endeavor, and because such a position is unbearable an unmaintainable for long stretches, drugs give me the womb-like euphoria I need to countnerbalance such a mind set. (Sex also can serve this function.)
Drugs become a stunted, preverted pursuit of some utopia, some enchanted promised land wherein there will be no suffering, where I will be safe, happy, beyond desire, yet the truth is that this imagined land inspired by the elevation and alteration of normal waking consciousness is actually a distopic cocoon of desire, lousy with desparate desire and wishful thinking: the impossible desire to escape nature, mainly, our own. (Perhaps there are parallels here with the religious function, but more on that at a later date.)
Something exciting about drugs, not so much the high and alteration of consciousness, but the social excitement of partcipating in something illicit. Holding the drugs, being in possession of something illegal that most people do not have makes the drug taker feel special, important, different, unique. This boosts the insecure person's ego, allows them a rebellious stance, a form of criticism: I criticize and reject the norm, the status quotidian, because I may find it difficult to fit in and belong according to generic, generalized standards of personality and behavior that my specific culture allows.
As a drug user, I may have some problem with authority. I feel myself out of control with my feelings/emotions, and thus when someone else steps in to control me (society, parents, teachers, police), I project my own self loathing and underlying wish to control myself onto those people. The authority stands in for my own lack and power/control vacuum. I rebel against them, hate them, imagine myself persecuted, matryred, with a Christ archetype, a romantic revolutionary suffering self image, saint like. Yet, I need the authority figure because it gives me a purpose.
Drugs serve many purposes: rebellion, rejection of social structures to which my limited, liquid self cannot seem to fit, the ecstasy of escape with the high and temporary vacation from that self, and a very creative form of self mutilation, which furthers my own suffering agenda.
In other cases, drugs might simply serve the function of allowing me to escape. Deep inside is a fear of life, a fear of death, a core belief that life is some absurd joke, a hopeless endeavor, and because such a position is unbearable an unmaintainable for long stretches, drugs give me the womb-like euphoria I need to countnerbalance such a mind set. (Sex also can serve this function.)
Drugs become a stunted, preverted pursuit of some utopia, some enchanted promised land wherein there will be no suffering, where I will be safe, happy, beyond desire, yet the truth is that this imagined land inspired by the elevation and alteration of normal waking consciousness is actually a distopic cocoon of desire, lousy with desparate desire and wishful thinking: the impossible desire to escape nature, mainly, our own. (Perhaps there are parallels here with the religious function, but more on that at a later date.)
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