A burning for earning: A brief look at ‘wealth addiction’

Back in 1996, I published a paper on behavioural addictions in the Journal of Workplace Learning. One of my introductory paragraphs in that paper noted:

“There is now a growing movement (e.g. Miller, 1980; Orford, 1985) which views a number of behaviours as potentially addictive, including many behaviours which do not involve the ingestion of a drug. These include behaviours diverse as gambling (Griffiths, 1995), overeating (Orford, 1985), sex (Carnes, 1983), exercise (Glasser, 1976), computer game playing (Griffiths, 1993a), pair bonding (Peele and Brodsky, 1975), wealth acquisition (Slater, 1980) and even Rubik’s Cube (Alexander, 1981)! Such diversity has led to new all encompassing definitions of what constitutes addictive behaviour”.

The reason I mention this is that I was recently asked to comment on a story about ‘wealth addiction’ and I vaguely remembered that I had mentioned (in passing) Philip Slater’s 1980 book (also entitled Wealth Addiction). Slater’s book was written from a sociological standpoint and was both controversial and provocative. Slater claimed on the book cover that: ““Money is America’s most powerful drug. Here’s how it weakens us and how we can free ourselves”. I also came across an interesting 2012 article by journalist Scott Burns (on ‘wealth addiction revisited’) who noted that:

“One of the hallmarks of wealth addiction is very simple: more possessions but less use. We become so interested in possessing the thing that we lose the experience it provides. This can be as vast as owning homes all around the world, as some of the very rich do, as simple as Bernie Madoff’s shoe collection, or as obsessive as a collection of rare watches. Whatever it is, the wealth addict confuses possession with experience”.

Slater argued that our increasing reliance on money and all of the things that it can buy has the potential to become an obsession that can destroy individual lives. According to short article by Dr. Paul Hokemeyer, wealth addiction has three key characteristics:

• Tolerance: More and more money is needed to attain a baseline level of satisfaction.
• Withdrawal: The thought of losing money or not making it fills a person with fear, anxiety and stress.
• Negative consequences: In their pursuit of money, the person forgoes emotional fulfillment, intimate relationships and peace of mind.

These are actually three of the six criteria that I personally believe comprise genuine addictive behaviour (although I use the word ‘conflict’ rather than ‘negative consequences’; the other three criteria are salience, mood modification and relapse – see my previous blog on behavioural addiction for further details).

The reason why wealth addiction has made a re-appearance over the last month is because of an article published in the New York Times by Sam Polk, a former hedge fund trader that worked on Wall Street (and who since the article has been published has been compared to Jordan Belfort, the person that Leonardo DiCaprio portrayed in the true story film The Wolf of Wall Street).

Polk’s article is an interesting read (whether you think wealth addiction exists or not) and I thought I would pick out some of the text and relate it to my own views about what constitutes addictive behaviour.

• Extract 1: “In my last year on Wall Street my bonus was $3.6 million – and I was angry because it wasn’t big enough. I was 30 years old, had no children to raise, no debts to pay, no philanthropic goal in mind. I wanted more money for exactly the same reason an alcoholic needs another drink: I was addicted”

Here, Polk refers to his work bonuses becoming bigger and bigger and that they were never enough. To me, this sounds like some kind of tolerance effect with more and more money needed to achieve the desired (presumably mood modifying effect). Polk also claims – after the fact – that he had become addicted.

• Extract 2: “I was also a daily drinker and pot smoker and a regular user of cocaine, Ritalin and ecstasy. I had a propensity for self-destruction that had resulted in my getting suspended from Columbia for burglary, arrested twice and fired from an Internet company for fist fighting”.

Polk openly discusses his previous use of potentially addictive substances and made the comparisons himself between his self-confessed behavioural (wealth) addiction and his previous self-destructive chemical abuse. Some readers may jump to the conclusion that Polk had (or has) an ‘addictive personality’ but this is not something that I personally believe in. To me, Polk is displaying ‘reciprocity’ (swapping one potential addiction with another) rather than being a function of an underlying personality trait. Giving up one addiction often leaves a large void and sometimes the only way to fill it is by engaging in other behaviours that provide similar feelings and sensations.

• Extract 3: “My counselor didn’t share my elation [at earning more and more money]. She said I might be using money the same way I’d used drugs and alcohol – to make myself feel powerful — and that maybe it would benefit me to stop focusing on accumulating more and instead focus on healing my inner wound”.

Here, Polk’s therapist appears to hit the nail on the head in relation to what money represented for Polk. I would describe the feeling that Polk gained from both drugs and money was omnipotence (something that I have also written about in relation to my research on gambling).

• Extract 4: “I was terrified of running out of money and of forgoing future bonuses. More than anything, I was afraid that five or 10 years down the road, I’d feel like an idiot for walking away from my one chance to be really important. What made it harder was that people thought I was crazy for thinking about leaving. In 2010, in a final paroxysm of my withering addiction, I demanded $8 million instead of $3.6 million. My bosses said they’d raise my bonus if I agreed to stay several more years. Instead, I walked away”.

Polk’s language here is very much rooted in what addicts say about their drug or behaviour of choice (“terrified” of being without the thing they love doing). The weighing up of the costs clearly led to a decision for Polk to quit his “withering addiction” and there are obviously signs both here (and the rest of the article if you read it) that leaving behind the wealth left him with some feelings of regret.

• Extract 7: “The first year was really hard. I went through what I can only describe as withdrawal — waking up at nights panicked about running out of money, scouring the headlines to see which of my old co-workers had gotten promoted. Over time it got easier — I started to realize that I had enough money, and if I needed to make more, I could. But my wealth addiction still hasn’t gone completely away. Sometimes I still buy lottery tickets”.

Here, Polk uses addictive terminology (i.e., withdrawal) to describe giving up the activity that led to him gaining wealth. Again, the fear of running out of money appears psychologically similar to the fear that other more traditional addicts have about running out of their drug of choice. It could also be argued that he has given up one form of gambling (financial trading) with partially doing another (buying lottery tickets).

• Extract 8: “I was lucky. My experience with drugs and alcohol allowed me to recognize my pursuit of wealth as an addiction. The years of work I did with my counselor helped me heal the parts of myself that felt damaged and inadequate, so that I had enough of a core sense of self to walk away”

Polk uses his experiences in giving up drugs with the help of his therapist as a way of helping him give up wealth acquisition. Knowing you have managed to give up one addiction shows that you have the mental strength to give up another.

Obviously I have never met Polk and I can only go on how he described his experiences during his time on Wall Street, However, the insights shared do seem to suggest that some of the wealth acquisition behaviour had addictive elements and that there was at least some evidence that Polk – at least on some occasions – experienced salience, tolerance, withdrawal, conflict and mood modification. Whether he was genuinely addicted to money in the same way as drug addicts are addicted to psychoactive substances is debatable. However, theoretically, I can see how someone might be become addicted to wealth. There are also interesting questions as to whether wealth acquisition may be an underlying motivation for those addicted to work.

Dr. Mark Griffiths, Professor of Gambling Studies, International Gaming Research Unit, Nottingham Trent University, Nottingham, UK

Further reading

Alexander, R. (1981). A cube popular in all circles. New York Times, 21 July, p. C6.

Burns, S. (2012). Beyond envy: Wealth addiction revisited. Dallas News, December 15: Located at: http://www.dallasnews.com/business/columnists/scott-burns/20121215-beyond-envy-wealth-addiction-revisited.ece?nclick_check=1

Carnes, P. (1983). Out of the Shadows: Understanding Sexual Addiction. CompCare, New York, NY.

Glasser, W. (1976). Positive Addictions. Harper & Row, New York, NY.

Griffiths, M.D. (1993). Are computer games bad for children? The Psychologist: Bulletin of the British Psychological Society, 6, 401-407.

Griffiths, M.D. (1995). Adolescent Gambling, Routledge: London.

Orford, J. (1985). Excessive Appetites: A Psychological View of the Addictions. Wiley: Chichester.

Peele, S. and Brodsky, A. (1975). Love and Addiction. Taplinger: New York, NY.

Polk, S. (2013). For the love of money. New York Times, January 29. Located at: http://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/19/opinion/sunday/for-the-love-of-money.html?_r=1

Slater, P. (1980). Wealth Addiction. E.P. Dutton: New York, NY.

Stats entertainment (Part 2): A 2013 review of my personal blog

My last blog of 2013 was not written by me but was prepared by the WordPress.com stats helper. I thought a few of you might be interested in the kind of person that reads my blogs. I also wanted to wish all my readers a happy new year and thank you for taking the time to read my posts.

Here’s an excerpt:

The Louvre Museum has 8.5 million visitors per year. This blog was viewed about 860,000 times in 2013. If it were an exhibit at the Louvre Museum, it would take about 37 days for that many people to see it.

Click here to see the complete report.

Excess in success: Are celebrities more prone to addiction?

One of the recurring questions I am often asked to comment on by the media is whether celebrities are more prone to addiction than other groups of people. One of the problems in trying to answer what looks like an easy question is that the definition of ‘celebrity’ is different to different people. Most people would argue that celebrities are famous people, but are all famous people celebrities? Are well-known sportspeople and politicians ‘celebrities’? Are high profile criminals celebrities? While all of us would say that Hollywood A-Listers such as Tom Cruise, Johnny Depp, Angelina Jolie, Brad Pitt and Julia Roberts are ‘celebrities’, many of the people that end up on ‘celebrity’ reality shows are far from what I would call a celebrity. Being the girlfriend or relative of someone famous does not necessarily famous.

Another problem in trying to answer this question is what kinds of addiction are the media actually referring to? Implicitly, the question might be referring to alcohol and/or illicit drug addictions but why should other addictions such as nicotine addiction or addiction to prescription drugs not be included? In addition to this, I have often been asked to comment on celebrities that are addicted to sex or gambling. However, if we include behavioural addictions in this definition of addiction, then why not include addictions to shopping, eating, or exercise? If we take this to an extreme, how many celebrities are addicted to work?

Now that I’ve aired these problematic definitional issues (without necessarily trying to answer them), I will return to the question of whether celebrities are more prone to addiction. To me, when I think about what a celebrity is, I think of someone who is widely known by most people, is usually in the world of entertainment (actor, singer, musician, television presenter), and may have more financial income than most other people I know. When I think about these types of people, I’ve always said to the media that it doesn’t surprise me when such people develop addictions. Given these situations, I would argue that high profile celebrities may have greater access to some kinds of addictive substances.

Given that there is a general relationship between accessibility and addiction, it shouldn’t be a surprise if a higher proportion of celebrities succumbs to addictive behaviours compared with a member of the general public. The ‘availability hypothesis’ may also hold true for various behavioural addictions that celebrities have admitted having – most notably addictions to gambling and/or sex. It could perhaps be argued that high profile celebrities are richer than most of us (and could therefore afford to gamble more than you or I) or they have greater access to sexual partners because they are seen as more desirable (because of their perceived wealth and/or notoriety).

Firstly, when I think about celebrities that have ‘gone off the rails’ and admitted to having addiction problems (Charlie Sheen, Robert Downey Jr, Alec Baldwin) and those that have died from their addiction (Whitney Houston, Jim Morrison, Amy Winehouse) I would argue that these types of high profile celebrity have the financial means to afford a drug habit like cocaine or heroin. For many in the entertainment business such as being the lead singer in a famous rock band, taking drugs may also be viewed as one of the defining behaviours of the stereotypical ‘rock ‘n’ roll’ lifestyle. In short, it’s almost expected. In an interview with an online magazine The Fix, Dr. Scott Teitelbaum, an American psychiatrist based at the University of Florida:

“Some people who become famous and get put on a pedestal begin to think of themselves differently and lose their sense of humility. And this is something you can see with addicts, too. Famous or not, people in the midst of their addiction will behave in a narcissistic, selfish way: they’ll be anti-social and have a disregard for rules and regulations. But that is part of who they as an addict – not necessarily who they would be as a sober person. Then there are some people who are narcissists outside of their disease, who don’t need a drug or alcohol addiction to make them feel like the rules don’t apply to them – and yes, I have seen in this in many athletes and actors. Of course, you also have non-famous people who struggle with both…People with addiction and people with narcissism share a similar emptiness inside. Those who are famous might fill it with achievement or with drugs and alcohol. That’s certainly not the case for everyone. But when you see people who are both famous and narcisstic – people who struggle with staying right-sized or they don’t have a real sense of who they are without the fame – you know that they’re in trouble… People with addiction and people with narcissism both seek outside sources for inside happiness. And ultimately neither the fame nor the drugs nor the drinking will work”.

The same article also pointed out that there is an increase in the number of people who (usually through reality television) are becoming (in)famous but have no discernable talent whatsoever. In my own writings on the psychology of fame, I have made the point that (historically) fame was a by-product of a particular role (e.g., country president, news anchorman) or talent (e.g., captain of the national sports team, a great actor). While the Andy Warhol maxim that everyone will be famous for 15 minutes will never be truly fulfilled, the large increase in the number of media outlets and number of reality television shows suggests that more people than ever are getting their 15 minutes of fame. In short, the intersection between fame and addiction is on the increase. US psychiatrist Dr. Dale Archer was also interviewed for The Fix article and was quoted as saying:

“Fame and addiction are definitely related. Those who are prone to addiction get a much higher high from things – whether it’s food, shopping, gambling or fame – which means it  [the behavior or situation] will trigger cravings. When we get an addictive rush, we are getting a dopamine spike. If you talk to anyone who performs at all, they will talk about the ‘high’ of performing. And many people who experience that high report that when they’re not performing, they don’t feel as well. All of which is a good setup for addiction. People also get high from all the trappings that come with fame. The special treatment, the publicity, the ego. Fame has the potential to be incredibly addicting”.

I argued some of these same points in a previous blog on whether fame can be addictive in and of itself. Another related factor I am asked about is the effect of having fame from an early age and whether this can be a pre-cursor or risk factor for later addiction. Dr. Archer was also asked about this and claimed:

 “The younger you are when you get famous, the greater the likelihood that you’re going to suffer consequences down the road. If you grow up as a child star, you realize that you can get away with things other people can’t. There is a loss of self and a loss of emotional growth and a loss of thinking that you need to work in relationship with other people”.

I’m broadly in agreement with this although my guess is that this only applies to a minority of child stars rather than being a general truism. However, trying to carry out scientific research examining early childhood experiences of fame amongst people that are now adult is difficult (to say the least). There also seems to be a lot of children and teenagers who’s only desire when young is “to be famous” when they are older. As most who have this aim will ultimately fail, there is always the concern that to cope with this failure, they will turn to addictive substances and/or behaviours.

Dr Mark Griffiths, Professor of Gambling Studies, International Gaming Research Unit, Nottingham Trent University, Nottingham, UK

Further reading

Griffiths, M.D. & Joinson, A. (1998). Max-imum impact: The psychology of fame. Psychology Post, 6, 8-9.

Halpern, J. (2007). Fame Junkies. New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

McGuinness, K. (2012). Are Celebrities More Prone to Addiction? The Fix, January, 18. Located at: http://www.thefix.com/content/fame-and-drug-addiction-celebrity-addicts100001

Rockwell, D. & Giles, D.C. (2009). Being a celebrity: A phenomenology of fame. Journal of Phenomenological Psychology, 40, 178-210.

Banned aid? A brief guide to compulsive helping

Back in the early 2000s, I (and one of my colleagues, Dr. Michael Larkin) carried out some research at the Promis addiction clinic down in Kent. We were researching people’s phenomenological experiences of addiction, and our interviews with the addicts receiving treatment were really helpful in the writing of what I personally thought were some really interesting papers (see ‘Further reading’ below). However, what interested me even more were the conversations I had with the clinic’s Director, Dr, Robert Lefever who told me of his interest and research into ‘compulsive helping’. Dr. Lefever has written a number of articles online about compulsive helping. In one of them he began by stating:

“Of all the addictive behaviours those surrounding relationships like sex and love addiction, relationship addiction or compulsive helping can be the most difficult to understand. This is further hindered by the confusing terminology used to describe it. Just as addiction means as many different things to as many people so do terms like co-dependency. We have tried to help clarify the situation by using different terms for different behaviours. Where people are addicted to someone they have a relationship with we call it relationship addiction, where people are addicted to helping others with their problems we call it compulsive helping”.

Dr. Lefever says that by giving these behaviours descriptive titles (like ‘compulsive helping’ and ‘relationship addiction’) help the affected person to identify the specific behaviour that they are actually addicted to. He also argues that such labels help the affected person relaise that the person responsible for the addictive behaviour is the individual and not someone or something else. However, Dr. Lefever is the first to admit that “the concept of compulsive helping can be particularly difficult to get one’s head around”.

Obviously not all helping is harmful but Lefever distinguishes between ‘caring’ (which he views as healthy) and caretaking (which he views as unhealthy). Compulsive helping occurs when the ‘caretaker’ (rather than a carer) continually takes on the responsibilities of someone else (very often a person who they love), and in essence runs that person’s life for them. Compulsive helpers often help other people that have an addiction (such as an alcoholic or a gambling addict) but Lefever claims that compulsive helpers can also end up compulsively helping people that doesn’t have problems themselves. (However, those without a problem are far more likely to notice compulsive helping behaviour in other people if they feel it is significantly and continually interfering in their day-to-day life and business). More specifically:

“Caring is lovely and healthy. I would never wish to change that characteristic in anyone. Caretaking however, is over-caring for someone, taking on the other person’s responsibilities for themselves and not allowing the other person to have the consequences of his or her behaviour…Helping is loving. Compulsive helping is destructive of both self and the other person. It is destructive of my own life and destructive of the person whom I am trying to compulsively help. That is not what I would call a loving action”.

Another short article on ‘compulsive helping’ by Rochelle Craig on her Piece By Piece Recovery website has a slightly different take and notes that:

“Compulsive Helping is when the individual finds it impossible to say no each and every time they are asked. A compulsive helper will always help regardless of what the situation is whether it is convenient for them or not. This can result in the compulsive helper building up resentment against the other person or persons and feeling like a doormat. When this happens the compulsive helper begins to resent being asked”

Like Dr. Lefever, Rochelle Craig believes that compulsive helpers take on too much responsibility, and therefore take away responsibility away from other people. Craig is adamant that people should examine their motivation for their helping behaviour to assess the extent to which it is helpful. If the act of helping others is a continual source of gaining self-worth, it may be indicative of compulsive helping. Other signs of compulsive helping is carrying on helping even if it is putting one’s own health, job, and/or other relationships at risk, Craig asserts that:

“It is important to remember that we are talking about addictive behaviour, we are talking about extremes, and we are talking about situations where the compulsive helper is so absorbed with helping others that they lose their own identity. Recovery is about self-discovery, self-improvement and building on self-esteem without relying on constantly helping others. It is about self-care first and everyone else second! Recovery is about recognising the difference between compulsive helping and genuine acts of kindness and most importantly it is learning to say no!”

In another (different) article on compulsive helping, Dr. Lefever refers to ‘compulsive helping’ as ‘co-dependency’ and claims that compulsive helping “is the most perverse, widespread and destructive of all addictive or compulsive behaviours” and the ‘need to be needed’. In fact Dr. Lefever claims that:

“Behind any addict of any kind will be a compulsive helper, or a bunch of them, taking responsibility for them. The compulsive helpers try to solve problems and ferret out information on causes and treatments. They give incessant advice and generally get in the way of addicts having any chance of learning or doing things for themselves – which, ultimately, are the only things that are going to help. Those of us who are afflicted by it go out of our way to give uninvited help. We want to feel useful and constructively helpful. These are admirable characteristics. But they can be very destructive when they are applied without thought to the consequences…When people have too much done for them, they fail to develop their own skills. They become part of the dependency culture”.

Dr. Lefever and psychologists at the University of Kent have published a number of empirical studies on addiction including compulsive helping. In a study led by Professor Geoffrey Stephenson and published in a 1995 issue of the journal Addiction Research, the researchers evaluated addiction in 16 behavioural areas on 471 patients (using 191 male addicts and 281 female admitted to Lefever’s Promis Recovery Centre). The addicted patients’ questionnaires were subjected to a factor analysis and results showed there to be two fundamentally different types of addiction labeled as ‘nurturance’ and ‘hedonism’. ‘Nurturance’ included caffeine, work, exploitative relationships (submissive), shopping, exercise, food bingeing, food starving and compulsive helping. ‘Hedonism’ included alcohol, nicotine, recreational drugs, gambling, exploitative relationships (dominant), sex, and prescription drugs.

A follow-up study published in 2004 by Stephenson and Lefever in the journal Addictive Behaviors, confirmed these earlier results but also suggested that ‘hedonism’ could further be divided into a ‘drug use’ factor and an ‘interpersonal dominance’ factor. The nurturance addictions comprised of both ‘self-regarding’ and ‘other-regarding’ factors. A more recent study in a 2010 issue of Addictive Behaviors by Dr. Vance MacLaren and Dr. Lisa Best confirmed the results among a student population (n=938). Despite this empirical research, it should be remembered that all of the data on compulsive helping has been done using the instrument that Lefever and his colleagues developed. There’s certainly a need for research to be carried out with instruments that weren’t developed and/or carried out by the people who have a vested interest in the ‘compulsive helping’ construct.

Dr Mark Griffiths, Professor of Gambling Studies, International Gaming Research Unit, Nottingham Trent University, Nottingham, UK

Further reading

Craig, R. (2012). Compulsive helping. Located at: http://www.piecebypiecerecovery.co.uk/index.php?pageid=8

Griffiths, M.D. & Larkin, M. (2004). Conceptualizing addiction: The case for a ‘complex systems’ account. Addiction Research and Theory, 12, 99-102.

Haylett, S., Stephenson, G.M. & Haylett, S. (2004). Covariation in addictive behaviours: A study of addictive orientations using the Shorter PROMIS Questionnaire. Addictive Behaviors, 29, 61-71.

Larkin, M. & Griffiths, M.D. (2002).  Experiences of addiction and recovery: The case for subjective accounts. Addiction Research and Theory, 10, 281-311.

Larkin, M. & Griffiths, M.D. (2004). Dangerous sports and recreational drug-use: Rationalising and contextualising risk. Journal of Community and Applied Social Psychology, 14, 215-232.

Larkin, M., Wood, R.T.A. & Griffiths, M.D. (2006). Towards addiction as relationship. Addiction Research and Theory, 14, 207-215.

Lefever, R. (2012). Compulsive helping. Located at: http://promis.co.uk/addiction-info/addiction/compulsive-behaviours/

Lefever, R. (2012). Compulsive helping. Located at: http://www.doctor-robert.com/compulsive-helping/

Maclaren, V.V. & Best, L.A. (2010). Multiple addictive behaviors in young adults: Student norms for the Shorter PROMIS Questionnaire. Addictive Behaviors, 35, 252-255.

Stephenson, G.M., Maggi, P., Lefever, R.M.H. & Morojele, N.K. (1995). Excessive Behaviours: An Archival Study of Behavioural Tendencies reported by 471 patients admitted to an addiction treatment centre. Addiction Research, 3, 245-265.

The need in deed: Is ‘loss of control’ always a consequence of addiction?

I recently published a potentially controversial paper in the journal Frontiers in Psychiatry arguing that loss of control may not always be a natural consequence of addiction. Research into addiction has a long history although there has always been much debate as to what the key components of addiction are. Irrespective of the theory and model of addiction, most theorizing on addiction tends to assume (implicitly or explicitly) that ‘loss of control’ is central (if not fundamental) to addiction. My paper challenges such notions by arguing that there are a minority of individuals who appear to be addicted to a behaviour (i.e., work) but do not necessarily appear to display any loss of control.

Research into many different types of addiction has shown that addicts are not a homogeneous group, and this may also have implications surrounding control and loss of control. Many years ago, in my 1995 book Adolescent Gambling, I argued that in relation to problem gambling there appear to be at least two sub-types of addiction – primary addictions and secondary addictions. I defined primary addictions as those in which a person is addicted to the activity itself, and that individuals love engaging in the activity whether it is gambling, sex or playing video games. Here, the behaviour is primarily engaged in to get aroused, excited, and/or to get a ‘buzz’ or ‘high’. I defined secondary addictions as those in which the person engages in the behaviour as a way of dealing with other underlying problems (i.e., the addiction is symptomatic of other underlying problems). Here the behaviour is primarily engaged in to escape, to numb, to de-stress, and/or to relax.

Therapeutically, I argued that it is easier to treat secondary addictions. My argument was that if the underlying problem is addressed (e.g., depression), the addictive behaviour should diminish and/or disappear. Primary addicts appear to be more resistant to treatment because they genuinely love the behaviour (even though it may be causing major problems in their life). Furthermore, the very existence of primary addictions challenges the idea that loss of control is fundamental to definitions and concepts of addiction. Clearly, people with primary addictions have almost no desire to stop or cut down their behaviour of choice because it is something they believe is life affirming and central to the identity of who they are. But does lack of a desire to stop the behaviour they love prevent ‘loss of control’ from occurring? Arguably it does, particularly when examining the research on workaholism.

I have popularized the ‘addiction components model’, particularly in relation to behavioural addiction (i.e., non-chemical addictions that do not involve the ingestion of a psychoactive substance). The addiction components model operationally defines addictive activity as any behaviour that features what I believe are the six core components of addiction (i.e., salience, mood modification, tolerance, withdrawal symptoms, conflict and relapse, and which I outlined in my very first blog on this site)

One of the observations that can be made by examining these six criteria is that ‘loss of control’ is not one of the necessary components for an individual to be defined as addicted to an activity. Although I acknowledge that ‘loss of control’ can occur in many (if not most) addicts, loss of control is subsumed within the ‘conflict’ component rather than a core component in and of itself. The main reason for this is because I believe that there are some addictions – particularly behavioural addictions such as workaholism – where the person may be addicted without necessarily losing control. However, such a claim depends on how ‘loss of control’ is defined and the highlights the ambiguity in our standard understanding of addiction (i.e., the ambiguity of control as ability/means versus control as goal/end).

When theorists define and conceptualise ‘loss of control’ as applied to addictive behaviour, it typically refers to (i) the loss of the ability to regulate and control the behaviour, (ii) the loss of ability to choose between a range of behavioural options, and/or (iii) the lack of resistance to prevent engagement in the behaviour. In some behaviours such as workaholism and anorexia, the person arguably tries to achieve control in some way (i.e., over their work in the case of a workaholic, or over food in the case of an anorexic). However, this in itself is not a counter-example to the idea that addiction is a ‘loss of control’ if workaholics and anorexics have lost the ability to control other aspects of their day-to-day lives in their pursuit of control over work or food (i.e., there is a difference between control as the goal/end of behaviour, and control as an ability/means.

There is an abundance of research indicating that one of the key indicators of workaholism (alongside such behaviours as high performance standards, long working hours, working outside of work hours, and personal identification with the job) is that of control of work activities. In a recent paper I wrote with my colleague Dr. Maria Karanika-Murray in the Journal of Behavioral Addictions, we also noted that the need for control is high among workaholics, and as a consequence they have difficulty in disengaging from work leading to many other negative detrimental effects on their life such as relationship breakdowns. Even some of the instruments developed to assess workaholism utilize questions concerning the need to be in control.

There are also other studies that suggest some workaholics do not experience a ‘loss of control’ in the traditional sense that is used elsewhere in the addiction literature. For instance, in a 2004 issue of the Journal of Organizational Change Management, Dr. Peter Mudrack reported that two particular aspects of obsessive-compulsive personality (i.e., being stubborn and highly responsible) were predictive of workaholism. A very recent paper by Dr. Ayesha Tabassum and Dr. Tasnuva Rahman in the International Journal of Research Studies in Psychology noted that perfectionist workaholics experience an overbearing need for control and are very scrupulous and detail-oriented about their work. Unusually among addictions, workaholics usually have no desire to reduce or regulate their work behaviour (i.e., there is no ambivalence or conflicting desire for them). In this instance, there is no evidence of ‘loss of control’ as traditionally understood, because if they had ambivalent or conflicting desires, they would change their behaviour (i.e., reduce the amount of time they spend working). Although not an exhaustive list of studies, those mentioned here appear to indicate that some workaholics appear to be more in control than not in control.

When the addiction is primary, the goal/end of the behaviour is desired and/or endorsed without ambivalence by the addict. In these situations (as in some cases of workaholism), there is no evidence for loss of control, because no (failed) attempts are made by the addict to alter their behaviour. However, this could arguably still be compatible with the claim that there is loss of control in the sense of ability and/or means, because, if the workaholic tried to work less (or work in a less controlling way) because they started to recognize ill effects the addictive behaviour was having on their personal life, then they may fail to do so. Therefore, the lack of evidence is indicative rather than conclusive.

However, one of the reasons that workaholism raises interesting theoretical and conceptual issues concerning the loss of control is that it is an example of an addiction where the goal/end is itself a form of control (i.e., control over their productivity/outputs, control over others, control over time-keeping, etc.). Unlike many other addictions, such behaviour is not impulsive and/or chaotic but carefully planned and executed. So this raises the question, in what sense is workaholism a loss of control, understood in the typical way, as ability/means to the behaviour’s goal/end? In some cases of workaholism, there is no evidence that the workaholic lacks control over this goal/end, as they do not try to change their behaviour (and thus cannot fail to do so).

It could be argued – and this is admittedly speculative – that ‘loss of control’ as is traditionally understood appears to have a greater association with secondary addiction (i.e., where an individual’s addiction is symptomatic of other underlying problems) than primary (or ‘happy’ or ‘positive’) addiction (i.e., where an individual feels totally rewarded by the activity despite the negative consequences). Such a speculation has good face validity but needs empirical testing. However, a complicating factor is the fact that my studies on adolescent gambling addicts have demonstrated that some individuals start out as primary addicts but became secondary addicts over time. Again, this suggests that control (and loss of it) may be something that changes its nature over time.

In essence, workaholics appear to make poor choices and/or decisions that have wide-reaching detrimental consequences in their lives. However, at present we lack evidence that (should they decide otherwise) they would be unable to work in a more healthy way. Furthermore, and equally as important, the nature of workaholic behaviour is not impulsive and chaotic, but carefully planned and executed. This is particularly striking among some workaholics, because as I have noted, it is an addiction that for some individuals they continue to work happily despite objectively negative consequences (e.g., relationship breakdowns, neglect of parental duties, etc.). What the empirical research on workaholism suggests is that it is an example of an addiction in which the problem is better characterized as loss of prudence rather than loss of control, as traditionally understood.

Dr Mark Griffiths, Professor of Gambling Studies, International Gaming Research Unit, Nottingham Trent University, Nottingham, UK

Further reading

Andreassen, C.S., Griffiths, M.D., Hetland, J. & Pallesen, S. (2012). Development of a Work Addiction Scale. Scandinavian Journal of Psychology, 53, 265-272.

Andreassen, C. S., Torsheim, T., Brunborg, G. S., & Pallesen, S. (2012) Development of a Facebook addiction scale. Psychological Reports, 110, 501-517.

Griffiths, M.D. (1995). Adolescent Gambling. London: Routledge.

Griffiths, M.D.  (2005). A ‘components’ model of addiction within a biopsychosocial framework. Journal of Substance Use, 10, 191-197.

Griffiths, M.D. (2011). Workaholism: A 21^st century addiction. The Psychologist: Bulletin of the British Psychological Society, 24, 740-744.

Griffiths, M.D. & Karanika-Murray, M. (2012). Contextualising over-engagement in work: Towards a more global understanding of workaholism as an addiction. Journal of Behavioral Addictions, 1(3), 87-95.

Mudrack, P.E. (2004). Job involvement, obsessive-compulsive personality traits, and workaholic behavioral tendencies. Journal of Organizational Change Management, 17, 490-508.

Mudrack, P.E. & Naughton, T.J. (2001) The assessment of workaholism as behavioral tendencies: Scale development and preliminary empirical testing. International Journal of Stress Management, 8, 93-111.

Tabassum, A. & Rahman, T. (2012). Gaining the insight of workaholism, its nature and its outcome: A literature review. International Journal of Research Studies in Psychology, 2, 81-92.

Sex starved: A beginner’s guide to sexual anorexia

In previous blogs I have looked at anorexia nervosa in the context of addictive eating disorders, ‘tanorexia’ (excessive tanning) and ‘fanorexia’ (excessive following of a celebrity or sports team). Today’s blog takes a brief look at ‘sexual anorexia’ that according to Dr. Douglas Weiss in his 1998 book Sexual Anorexia, Beyond Sexual, Emotional and Spiritual Withholding, typically refers to “the active, almost compulsive withholding of emotional, spiritual and sexual intimacy from the primary partner”. The 12-Step group Sex and Love Addicts Anonymous offers this definition and analogy:

“As an eating disorder, anorexia is defined as the compulsive avoidance of food. In the area of sex and love, anorexia has a similar definition: Anorexia is the compulsive avoidance of giving or receiving social, sexual, or emotional nourishment”

A paper by Dr. Randy Hardman and Dr. David Gardner in a 1986 issue of the Journal of Sex Education and Therapy compared anorexia nervosa and sexual anorexia. They highlighted the four most significant characteristic similarities of these self-perpetuating disorders from both an intrapsychic and interpersonal level. These were (i) control (i.e., overt personal control and covert relationship power), (ii) fear (i.e., fear of losing control and fear of personal sexuality), (iii) anger (i.e., passive and active expressions of anger based on devaluation), and (iv) justification (i.e., an elaborate system of denial, delusion, and misperception).

Along with Dr. Weiss, most of the key writings on the topic have been written by Dr. Patrick Carnes (the author of many articles and books on sex addiction). Dr. Carnes defines sexual anorexia as: “an obsessive state in which the physical, mental and emotional task of avoiding sex dominates one’s life. Like self-starvation with food, deprivation with sex can make one feel powerful and defended against all hurts.” In a 1998 paper in the journal Sexual Addiction and Compulsivity, he also notes that: “the term “sexual anorexia” has been used to describe sexual aversion disorder [in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders], a state in which the patient has a profound disgust and horror at anything sexual in themselves and others”.

According to the Wikipedia entry on sexual anorexia, the term ‘sexual anorexia’ has been around for over 35 years, and the first use it the term is generally attributed to psychologist Nathan Hare, a psychologist who coined the term in his 1975 PhD thesis. (However, I have failed to track this down, and none of the academic papers I have read on sexual anorexia ever mention Hare).

Dr. Carnes claims to have identified three causative factors in the formation of sexual anorexia. These are (i) a probable history of sexual exploitation or severely traumatic sexual rejection, (ii) family history of extremes in thought or behavior (often very repressive/religious or it’s polar opposite of “anything-goes” permissiveness), and (iii) cultural, social or religious influences that view sex negatively and supports sexual oppression and repression. Dr. Weiss adds that there are three key criteria in the formation of anorexia: (i) sexual abuse, (ii) attachment disorder with the opposite sex parent and (iii) sex addiction.

In his 1997 book Sexual Anorexia: Overcoming Sexual Self-Hatred, Dr. Carnes views the symptom cluster of the sexual anorexic as primarily sexual and includes: (i) a dread of sexual pleasure, (ii) a morbid and persistent fear of sexual contact, (iii) obsession and hyper-vigilance around sexual matters, (iv) avoidance of anything connected with sex, (v) preoccupation with others being sexual, (vi) distortions of body appearance, (vii) extreme loathing of body functions, (viii) obsessional self-doubt about sexual adequacy, (ix) rigid, judgmental attitudes about sexual behaviour, (x) excessive fear and preoccupation with sexually transmitted diseases, (xi) obsessive concern or worry about the sexual intentions of others, (xii) shame and self-loathing over sexual experiences, (xiii) depression about sexual adequacy and functioning, (xiv) intimacy avoidance because of sexual fear, and (xv) self-destructive behavior to limit, stop, or avoid sex.

The 1998 paper published in the journal Sexual Addiction and Compulsivity by Dr. Carnes is one of the very few in the literature to collect empirical data. The data were collected from 144 patients at his treatment clinic that were diagnosed with sexual anorexia. Of these, 41% were male and 59% female aged between 19 and 58 years (all of whom were Caucasian). The main findings were that:

• 67% reported a history of sexual abuse
• 41% reported a history of physical abuse
• 86% reported a history of emotional abuse
• 65% reported members of the immediate family as some type of addict
• 40% reported having a sex addict in the immediate family
• 60% described their family as “rigid”
• 67% described their family as “disengaged”

Carnes also reported that over two-thirds of the sexually anorexic population claimed to have other compulsive and/or addictive problems including alcoholism (33%), substance abuse (25%), compulsive eating (25%), caffeine abuse (26%), nicotine addiction (23%), compulsive spending (22%), and/or bulimia/anorexia with food (19%). Of most interest was the fact that Carnes compared his group of sexual anorexics with a group of sex addicts (also from his treatment centre). Carnes concluded that:

“By contrasting that profile with data from sex addicts who were in the same patient pool, some important contrasts can be made. The data for sex addicts and sexual anorexics were very parallel in terms of family system, abuse history, and related patterns of addiction, compulsion, and deprivation. Even the criteria for sex addiction and sexual anorexia have important parallels in terms of powerlessness, obsession, consequences, and distress…Such comparisons tend to confirm the proposition that extreme sexual disorders stem from many of the same factors and are variations of the same illness. Of equal importance is the possibility that extreme behaviors in various disorders (food, chemical, sexual, financial) whether in excess or in deprivation are for many patients interchangeable parts representing much deeper patterns of distress”

Finally, if you would like to know if you are sexually anorexic, you can take this simple test that I found at the Freedom In Grace website (and appears to be based on the world of Weiss and Carnes). If you endorse five or more of the following nine statements “you or your partner are currently struggling with sexual anorexia”.

• Withholding love from partner
• Withholding praise or appreciation from partner
• Controlling by silence or anger
• Ongoing or ungrounded criticism causing isolation
• Withholding sex from your partner
• Unwillingness or inability to discuss feelings with partner
• Staying so busy that they have no relational time for the partner
• Making the problems or issues about your partner instead of owning their own issues
• Controlling or shaming partner with money issues

Dr Mark Griffiths, Professor of Gambling Studies, International Gaming Research Unit, Nottingham Trent University, Nottingham, UK

Further reading

Carnes, P. (1997). Sexual Anorexia: Overcoming Sexual Self-Hatred. Center City, MN: Hazelden.

Carnes, P. (1998). The case for sexual anorexia: An interim report on 144 patients with sexual disorders. Sexual Addiction and Compulsivity, 5, 293–309.

Hardman, R.K. & Gardner, D.J. (1986). Sexual anorexia: A look at inhibited sexual desire. Journal of Sex Education and Therapy, 12, 55-59.

Nelson, Laura (2003). Sexual addiction versus sexual anorexia and the church’s impact. Sexual Addiction and Compulsivity, 10, 179–191.

Sex and Love Addicts Anonymous (undated). Sexual anorexia. Located at: http://www.slaauk.org/files/anorexia.pdf

Weiss, D. (1998). Sexual Anorexia, Beyond Sexual, Emotional and Spiritual Withholding. Fort Worth, TX: Discovery

Weiss, D. (2005). Sexual anorexia: A new paradigm for hyposexual desire disorder. Located at: http://www.sexaddict.com/eBooks/SAeBk.pdf

Wikipedia (2012). Sexual anorexia. Located at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sexual_anorexia

Fuddy study: A brief overview of Brain Fag Syndrome

Over the last year I have examined a number of culture-bound syndromes that comprise a combination of psychiatric and/or somatic symptoms viewed as a recognizable disease within specific cultures or societies. One of the more interesting types is Brain Fag Syndrome (BFS). The first cases of BFS were described in 1960 by Dr. Raymond Prince in the British Journal of Psychiatry. He reported on a “very common psychoneurotic syndrome occurring among the students of southern Nigeria” that is typically initiated after intensive periods of intellectual activity. More specifically he wrote that:

“The symptoms are such as to prevent the student from carrying on with his work and include various unpleasant head symptoms accompanied by inability to grasp what he reads or what he hears in a lecture, memory loss, visual difficulties, inability to concentrate, inability to write, etc.”

Other researchers (such as a team led by Dr. Bolanie Ola – writing in a 2009 issue of the African Journal of Psychiatry) have noted that BFS comprises a wide range of somatic complaints (as noted by Dr. Prince) but can also include cognitive and sleep-related impairments, as well as localized pain in the head and neck. BFS is seen as an interesting phenomenon in the field of transcultural psychiatry. For some researchers, BFS was controversially included (for the first time) in the fourth edition of American Psychiatric Association’s 1994 Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-IV), and included as a culture bound syndrome such as the Koro (the genital retraction syndrome that I reviewed in two previous blogs examining male Koro and female Koro).

Since the publication of Prince’s seminal paper over 50 years ago, BFS has been documented among non-Caucasians in various African countries (Ethiopia, Liberia, Ivory Coast, South Africa, and Uganda), and a few countries outside of Africa (Brazil, India, Malaysia, China). However, the number of cases from those countries outside of Africa are exceedingly rare. There also appear to be similar syndromes such as the Trinidadian illness ‘studiation madness’ that has similar symptoms to BFS.

The term ‘brain fag’ was the name of the disorder that the students themselves called it (and appears to be a shortened version of ‘brain fatigue’). Based in his early research, Dr. Prince believed that BFS was not caused and/or associated to genetic predisposition, general intelligence, parental literacy, study habits or family responsibilities. He believed that BFS was related to:

“The imposition of European learning techniques upon the Nigerian personality [and that] European learning techniques emphasize isolated endeavour, individual responsibility and orderliness – activities and traits which are foreign to the Nigerian by reason of the collectivistic society from which he derives, with its heightened ‘orality’ and permissiveness”.

Dr. Ola and his colleagues questioned the extent to which BFS is an objective or subjective phenomenon. They asked a number of pertinent questions: Is BFS one phenomenon or a variant of other known disorders? Is BFS a mental illness? Ola and colleagues described the case of a young male student from Yoruba. 

“When studying for an exam [he] began to have sharp pains in his head and could not grasp what he was reading. He slept more than usual, and had difficulty forcing himself to go to school in the morning. When writing the examinations, he felt he knew the answers, but was unable to recall them; his mind was blank. His right hand was weak and shook so that he couldn’t write. Because of these symptoms, he was forced to postpone the writing examinations for several years. His symptoms improved greatly with Largactil (an antipsychotic medication) and reassurance”.

Much like the early findings of Prince, Ola and his colleagues suggest that BFS may in sufferers be “the somatic manifestation of the rather sudden Westernization of African education”. The authors also claimed that between 6% and 54% of Nigerian university students may experience brain fag symptoms although those with the “full-blown syndrome” appear to be significantly lower. However, a more recent paper in the ASEAN Journal of Psychology claimed that among secondary school students, BFS is prevalent in 20-40% of students.

A more recent paper by Bolanie Ola and David Igbokwe in a 2011 issue of Africa Health Sciences, cites some work carried out on the etiology of BFS by Guinness in 1992 (although no reference is provided for the study itself). Guinness reported five independent factors associated with the syndrome: (a) the financial implications of education which represented the change from subsistence to cash economy; (b) fear of envy and bewitchment which represented the intense cultural response to education; (c) parenting in the pre-school years which was the independent family variable; (d) academic ability; (e) attributes of the school.

In a paper examining the factorial validation and reliability analysis of the Brain Fag Syndrome Scale (BFSS) by Ola and Igbokwe, it was argued by the authors that there was a lack of consistent findings relating to the etiology, pathophysiology and risk factors of BFS. This, they argued, reflected the “lack of standardized reproducible diagnostic criteria” for the syndrome. In short, they asserted that different studies had used different instruments to assess BFS and that only a few followed the description first formulated by Prince. They claimed that 60% of the BFS studies they reviewed simply reported the rates of BF symptoms rather than BFS. Following psychometric evaluation on 234 participants (aged 11- to 20-years), Ola and Igbokwe claimed that the BFSS is a valid and reliable two-dimensional instrument to assess BFS and can therefore be used in future studies. At least there is now an instrument that can be used to carry out empirical research more systematically.

Dr Mark Griffiths, Professor of Gambling Studies, International Gaming Research Unit, Nottingham Trent University, Nottingham, UK

Further reading

Fatoye, F.O. (2004). Brain fag syndrome among Nigerian undergraduates: present status and association with personality and psychosocial factors. Ife Psychologia, 12, 74-85.

Fatoye, F.O. & Morakinyo, O. (2003). Study difficulty and the ‘Brain Fag’ syndrome in south western Nigeria. Journal of Psychology in Africa, 13, 70-80.

Igbokwe, D.O. & Ola, B.A. (2011). Development and validation of the Brain Fag Propensity Scale. ASEAN Journal of Psychiatry, 12, 1-13.

Morakinyo, O. (1980). Psychophysiological theory of a psychiatric illness (the Brain Fag syndrome) associated with study among Africans. Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease, 168, 84-89.

Morakinyo, O. & Peltzer, K. (2002). Brain Fag symptoms in apprentices in Nigeria. Psychopathology, 35, 362-366.

Ola, B.A. & Igbokwe, D.O. (2011). Factorial validation and reliability analysis of the brain fag syndrome scale. African Health Sciences, 11, 334-339.

Ola, B.A., Morakinyo, O. & Adewuya, O. (2009). Brain Fag Syndrome – a myth or a reality. African Journal of Psychiatry, 12,135-43.

Peltzer, K. & Woldu, S. (1990). The brain fag syndrome in female Nigerian students: intercultural analysis and intervention of gender change. Curare, 13, 141-146.

Prince, Raymond (1960). The “Brain Fag” Syndrome in Nigerian students. British Journal of Psychiatry, 106, 559-570.

Wikipedia (2012). Brain fag. Located at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brain_fag

Art in the right place: Salvador Dali, surrealism and psychology

For as long as I can remember, I have always been fascinated with the eccentric Salvador Dali and his art. Luckily, I have managed to see many of his original paintings at art galleries all around the world. I’ve even had a few articles published about him. Dali was the last and most famous exponent of surrealism, an art form that reached its peak in the 1920s and 1930s, and was the forum where he displayed his originality, uniqueness and individuality. One measure of his greatness was that he influenced so many people in so many ways (e.g., through art, film, opera, ballet, fashion, design, etc.). Dali himself was influenced by psychology – particularly psychoanalysis – and Dali to some extent has had (and could still have) an influence upon present day psychology.

Dali was born on May 11, 1904 in the Spanish town of Figueras. After the death of his mother in 1921, Dali moved to Madrid where he studied at the Principal Academy of Fine Arts. It was there that his artistic brilliance and eccentricity began to appear. In 1929, three events occurred which had a significant impact upon Dali’s life. Firstly, he met his future Russian wife (Gala) who was at the time married to the Surrealist poet Paul Éluard. Secondly, he was welcomed into the Surrealist movement by André Breton after impressing him with a film he had made with surrealist filmmaker Louis Buñuel (the now notorious Un Chien Andalou). Finally, it was the year that Dali’s father – outraged by an irreverent Surrealistic boast – placed a curse on Dali that he would die poor and alone. Dali took the curse seriously, consulted the tarot cards daily and noticeably changed his attitude towards money.

As his reputation increased, reports began to appear that he was slowly turning mad. Dali suffered from many phobias including the fear of grasshoppers, telephones and the physical touch of other human beings. He was sexually confused and it was highly unlikely that with Gala he overcame his aversion to sexual contact. Sexual failure was symbolised as impotence in many of his most famous paintings that depicted limp watches, melted cheeses and sagging flesh. It is interesting to note that (according to Anthony Storr) Sigmund Freud believed that the sublimation of an unsatisfied libido produced great works of art through the discharging of infantile sexuality into non-instinctual forms. It has been suggested that if Dali not conquered his phobias on canvas he would have ended up in a lunatic asylum.

In 1948, Dali was expelled (by Breton) from the Surrealist movement for his anti-Lenin, pro-Hitler stance (Dali had declared Hitler’s personality a surrealist object), and for his increasingly materialistic lifestyle stemming from his father’s curse. As The Independent’s obituary on Dali noted, he was “fully aware of the Freudian unconscious identification of money and excrement (and) would have regarded being filthy rich as a necessary component of Dalinean identity”.

A number of authors have noted that Sigmund Freud was a major inspiration to Dali, especially his book The Interpretation of Dreams. This was described by Dali as “one of the capital discoveries of my life”. To surrealists like Dali, dreams were superior facts, thus surrealism applied Freud’s theories to art. In his pre-1940 paintings, Dali’s hysteria and hallucinations produced surreal dreamlike imagery, subverting the viewer’s sense of reality in a series of bizarre psychosexual landscapes. Shortly before Freud’s death, Dali was introduced to him by the writer Stefan Zweig and even made a sketch of Freud there and then at their one-and-only meeting. The next day, Freud wrote to Zweig and said:

“I really owe you thanks for bringing yesterday’s visitor. For until now I have been inclined to regard the surrealists, who have apparently adopted me as their patron saint, as complete fools…That Spaniard, with his candid fanatical eyes and his undeniable technical mastery, has changed my estimate. It would indeed be very interesting to investigate analytically how he came to create that picture”.

This particular meeting was dramatised in Terry Johnson’s play Hysteria about the life of Freud. Jacques Lacan, the French psychoanalyst who attempted to link psychoanalysis and linguistics, was also an influence on Dali. In turn, it also transpired that Lacan was greatly influenced by the surrealist movement and even wrote articles for their magazine Minotaure. It is clear that Lacan’s eccentricity, his talent for abuse and his anti-establishment attitude owed much to the surrealists. The one area of mutual interest for both Dali and Lacan was that of paranoia. In the creation of his paintings, Dali used what he termed the “paranoid critical method” and described by Dali as “the interpretation of delirium”. Other more verbose descriptions of this concept (outlined in many of Dali’s obituaries immediately after his death) have described it as “a spontaneous method of irrational knowledge based on critical and systematic objectification of delirious associations and interpretations”, the use of “the most academic and traditional of painting techniques to illustate the most way out of human imaginings”, or simply “looking at one thing and seeing another”.

Dali’s influence on psychology is much less talked about yet it is these potential influences that (for me at least) make him one of my heroes. His most direct contribution has been in the field of perception where his paintings have been used in psychology undergraduate textbooks to demonstrate figure-ground illusions (Slave Market with Disappearing Bust of Voltaire, 1940), perceptual reconstruction (Metamorphosis of Narcissus, 1934) and surrealistic images (The Persistence of Time, 1933). In many of his early paintings, Dali used what he called “tricks of fooling” to invoke “sublime hierarchies of thought”.

On a more individual level, Dali would make an excellent case study of someone with an outrageous and eccentric personality. It could be argued that Dali’s paintings said more about Dali than any personality test ever could. He has also been described as the “embarrassing genius”. The word ‘genius’ is often used synonymously with ‘high intelligence’. However, this may not be the case with Dali. It is through people like Dali that psychology’s understanding and limited concept of (academic) intelligence could be broadened.

Finally, Dali’s eccentricity can teach psychology about advertising, publicity, and self-promotion (something that some of my peers say that I am no stranger to). Many commentators have followed surrealism from the transformation of the artists revolt to standard television material. As The Independent obituary pointed out:

“There can be no doubt that Dali willingly collaborated with commercialism in compromising his gift by repetitive exploitation of the more luridly sensational products of the imagination”.

His stuntmanship and exhibitionism have assured him fame and has thus been labelled the ‘Old Master of Hype’. Dali’s gift of ‘reaching the masses’ with apparently little effort could be studied and utilized by various campaigners – especially those who need to get their message across to a wider audience. As Dali (and others like John Lennon) constantly demonstrated, like talent, a carefully calculated stunt can make a little go a long way. It is this coupled with his influence across so many different disciplines that made Dali such a pervasive and heroic type figure, not only for me but for many others as well.

Dr Mark Griffiths, Professor of Gambling Studies, International Gaming Research Unit, Nottingham Trent University, Nottingham, UK

Further reading

Benvenuto, B. & Kennedy, R. (1986). The Works of Jacques Lacan: An Introduction. London: Free Association Books.

The Economist (1989). Headstones for a revolution. January 18, p.94.

Fallon, B. (1989). Surrealist stuntman, the Old Master of hype. Irish Times, January 24, p.10

Fuller, P. (1989). Dali’s vain glory. Sunday Telegraph (7 Days Magazine), January 29, p.6.

Gascoyne, D. (1989). Salvador Dali: Obituary. The Independent, January 24, p.11.

Griffiths, M.D. (1989). Salvador Dali and psychology. BPS History and Philosophy Newsletter, 9, 14-17.

Griffiths, M.D. (1994). Heroes: Salvador Dali. The Psychologist: Bulletin of the British Psychological Society, 7, 240.

Hughes, R. (1989). The embarrassing genius. Time, February 6, p.42.

Jones, E. (1953). The Life and Works of Sigmund Freud. London : Penguin.

McGirk, T. (1989a). Salvador Dali: Obituary. The Independent, January 24, p.11.

McGirk, T. (1989b). Dali – A life shadowed by a father’s curse. Irish Times, January 24, p.10.

Storr, A. (1989). Freud. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

You can also check out the following website: https://www.angelalatchkey.com/blog/the-super-huge-art-lovers-guide-to-surrealism/

 

Stats entertainment: A review of my 2012 blogs

My last blog of 2012 was not written by me but was prepared by the WordPress.com stats helper. I thought a few of you might be interested in the kind of person that reads my blogs. I also wanted to wish all my readers a happy new year and thank you for taking the time to read my posts.

Here’s an excerpt:

About 55,000 tourists visit Liechtenstein every year. This blog was viewed about 180,000 times in 2012. If it were Liechtenstein, it would take about 3 years for that many people to see it. Your blog had more visits than a small country in Europe!

Click here to see the complete report.

The write stuff: A brief overview of typomania and graphomania

“Life is a series of addictions and without them we die”

This opening quote is one of my favourite quotes from the addiction literature and was made by Professor Isaac Marks in a 1990 issue of the British Journal of Addiction. Whether the statement is true or not depends upon what the definition of addiction is. It’s also a quote that makes me think about my own life and to what extent I have any addictions. Most people that know me well would say that my passion for listening to music borders on the obsessive. Others have called me a ‘workaholic’ (which again depends on the definition of workaholism). Personally, I don’t think I’m addicted to either work or music (and no, I’m not in denial), but I did come across a condition called ‘typomania’ that I can’t so easily deny.

Most definitions of typomania are similar but have slight subtle differences in emphasis. For instance, I have come across six definitions indicating that it is either (i) a craze for seeing one’s writings or name in print, (ii) a mania for writing for publication, (iii) an obsession with the expectation of publication, (iv) an obsession with the business of printing or publishing, (v) an unhealthy passion to write, (vi) an obsessive impulse to write, and (vii) an addiction to writing (where people write for the sake of writing without caring about the quality of the written word).

These latter definitional variations (i.e., obsessive impulse or unhealthy passion to write) has been observed in the psychiatric community as in addition to typomania, has also been termed ‘graphomania’ and ‘scribomania’ (although some of these other definitions claim that the condition concerns the obsession to write books). The term ‘graphomania’ has been used since the early 19th century by both French psychiatrist Dr. Jean-Étienne Esquirol and Swiss psychiatrist Dr. Eugen Bleuler (the man who first coined the term ‘schizophrenia’). A number of independent sources (such as Svetlana Boym in her 1995 book Common Places. Mythologies in Everyday Life in Russia) also claim that the term ‘graphomania’ is a well established concept in Russian culture.

In a 2004 issue of the journal Neurocase, two French academics (I. Barrière and M. Lorch) wrote a paper called “Premature thoughts on writing disorders”. They noted (based on some earlier work by Artières) that writing disorders were one of the “hallmarks” of the 19th century medical world. The paper reported:

 “The identification of a disease contracted by children whose sight and general health were thought to be affected by too much writing labelled “graphomania”. More importantly for the topic under investigation, writing was perceived by clinicians as the privileged means to gain access to the mental states of atypical individuals, including geniuses (see for instance the study on the handwriting of Leonardo de Vinci), criminals, and those affected by a medical condition. This led to numerous studies on the writing of patients affected by various pathologies including dementia, epilepsy and Parkinson”

One of the first uses of the word ‘graphomania’ in a wider public context, was in the New York Times (September 27, 1896) in an article about US Democratic presidential candidate William Jennings Bryan (under the title ‘Bryan’s Mental Condition’). The article noted that:

“The habit of excessive writing, of explaining, amplifying, and reiterating, of letter making and pamphleteering, forms a morbid symptom of known as ‘graphomania’. Some men may overload their natural tendency to write, but a certain class of lunatics use nearly all their mental activities in this occupation, to the endless annoyance of their friends, relatives and physicians”.

In a psychiatric context, graphomania refers to a morbid mental condition that manifests itself in written ramblings and confused statements. Much of the written content is meaningless nonsense and is also referred to as graphorrhea. Graphomania in a non-psychiatric context concerns the urge or need to write to excess (and not necessarily in a professional context). This is certainly something I can relate to.

In his 1979 Book of Laughter and Forgetting, the Czech novelist Milan Kundera noted that:

“Graphomania (an obsession with writing books) takes on the proportions of a mass epidemic whenever society develops to the point where it can provide three basic conditions: (1) a high enough degree of general wellbeing to enable people to devote their energies to useless activities; (2) an advanced state of social atomisation and the resultant general feeling of the isolation of the individual; (3) a radical absence of significant social change in the internal development of the nation. (In this connection, I find it symptomatic that in France, a country where nothing really happens, the percentage of writers is twenty one times higher than in Israel)…The irresisitable proliferation of graphomania among politicians, taxi drivers, childbearers, lovers, murderers, thieves, prostitutes, officials, doctors, and patients shows me that everyone without exception bears a potential writer within him, so that the entire human species has good reason to go down the streets and shout: ‘We are all writers!'”

There doesn’t appear to be much academic or clinical research on graphomania although papers dating back to the early twentieth century exist. For instance, in 1921, Dr. F.T. Hunter wrote about graphomania when reviewing the 1920 French book La Graphomanie (Essai de Psychologie Morbide) by Ossip-Lourie. Graphomania was described as a “psychopathic tendency to write”. To differentiate between whether writing was normal or abnormal, it was observed that:

“All writings which do not convey a positive fact, the result of observation or of experience, which do not bring forth an idea, which do not materialize an image – a personal artistic product – which do not reflect the interior life and the personality of the author, are in the domain of graphomania”.

Graphomania was believed to be “psychosocially acquired” and was acquired as a consequence of the educational methods of the time that taught children to copy rather than to write creatively. Dr. Hunter said that psychiatrists wouldn’t take Ossip-Lourie’s book seriously. More recently, a 1988 paper in a French neurology journal, Dr, J. Cambler and his colleagues described the case of “compulsive graphic activity” as a consequence of fronto-callosal glioma (a kind of brain tumour). They reported that spontaneous and graphomanic writing “were abundant and incoercible”. They noted that the behaviour was comparable with that of the compulsive activity that may result from other types of brain lesion (e.g., pallidal lesions or bilateral frontal lesions).

So, do I suffer from typomania and/or graphomania? Based on what I have read, absolutely not. Life may well be a series of addictions, but – as yet – I don’t think I have any.

Dr Mark Griffiths, Professor of Gambling Studies, International Gaming Research Unit, Nottingham Trent University, Nottingham, UK

Further reading

Artières, P. (1998). Clinique de l’écriture: une histoire du regard médical sur l’écriture. Institut Synthélabo pour le progrès de la connaissance. Le Plessis-Robinson.

Barrière, I. & Lorch, M. (2004). Premature thoughts on writing disorders. Neurocase, 10, 91-108.

Boym, S. (1995), Common Places. Mythologies in Everyday Life in Russia. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard Univ. Press.

Cambler, J., Masson, C., Benammou, S. & Robine, B. (1988). [Graphomania. Compulsive graphic activity as a manifestation of fronto-callosal glioma]. Revue Neurol, 144, 158-164.

Hellweg, P. (1986). Manifestly manifolded manias. Journal of Recreational Linguistics, 19(2), 100-108.

History Matters (undated). “Bryan’s Mental Condition:” One Psychiatrist’s View.Located at: http://historymatters.gmu.edu/d/5353/

Hunter, F.T. (1921). Review of La graphomanie (Essai de psychologie morbide). Journal of Abnormal Psychology and Social Psychology, 16, 279-280.

Marks, I. (1990). Behaviour (non-chemical) addictions. British Journal of Addiction, 85, 1389-1394.

Wayne R. LaFave (2003). Rotunda: Il professore prolifico ma piccolo. University of Illinois Law Review, 5, 1161-1168.

Wikipedia (2012). Graphomania. Located at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graphomania