To Crave is Like to Be in Love

Passion: Journal of the European Philosophical Society for the Study of Emotion 2 (1):30-47 (2024)
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Abstract

In this article, I show that the experience of addictive desires, which I also refer to as cravings, is similar to the experience of the state of being in love or of limerence. In other words, I argue that some part of the experience of addiction resembles some part of the experience of romantic love. Many in the literature have tried to show that one can be addicted to love in the way that love constitutes an addiction. Yet, none seem to have taken the opposite route, which takes love not as an object of addiction, nor as something that can be reduced to it, but rather as a model from which we can understand addiction. This is odd, as such a perspective is warranted by first-person accounts of addiction. Therefore, in my view, addiction is like love, and not the other way around. Nevertheless, it is not addiction as a whole that is similar to love; love in itself cannot be compared to addiction: it is precisely the experience of addictive cravings in addiction that is like limerence. In order to put forward the similarities between experiences of cravings and experiences of limerence, I go through the basic components of limerence as described by Dorothy Tennov (1979), and prove that they are found in the experience of cravings. This comparison between the two phenomena allows me to introduce the notion of reciprocation in the addiction literature.

Author's Profile

Rachel Frenette
University of Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne

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