The Allegory of Addiction

The Allegory of Addiction

Plato's Republic can help you

            When I first heard about the "Allegory of the Cave" from Plato's Republic, it was from one of my bat-shit crazy, ranting, lived-in-his-own-world high school teachers. Without a doubt, I look back on the memory of that class fondly, and always thought of the allegory of the cave as a legitimate philosophical work that I would most likely one day read, but for the time being made absolutely no sense to me (having only experienced second-hand, and that second-hand coming from what I considered to be an extremely mentally unstable individual) and was virtually just a meaningless title that I vaguely heard while attempting to slyly do my homework for my next class.

            Prefacing my interpretation of this reading with that experience, I read the allegory attentively, trying with all my might to erase the memory of my teacher’s crazy-eyes, looking for my own, unbiased interpretation of this work. I ended up liking the allegory actually quite a lot, and so spent some time looking for more information on it.

When researching other interpretations and comments about Plato’s Republic and specifically the "Allegory of the Cave", I came across an article that intrigued me especially, because it incorporated philosophy, Plato, and the Allegory, and psychology, which is my major and most prominent academic interest (I’m a Freud nerd and a Phillip Zimbardo groupie….don’t laugh). Last year, I wrote an extensive research paper about addiction, and have talked to professionals and addicts about their experiences with becoming sober and treating patients, so I was very interested to see a new perspective on addiction, and how someone could incorporate Plato and the "Allegory of the Cave" into their work on this problem. The author of this article, Peg O’Connor, actually implemented the use of the "Allegory of the Cave" in order to fight her addiction, which provides immediate credibility for the ideas presented in this article, and of course increased my intrigue into this psychological enigma.

            The basic idea behind the cognitive process of applying the "Allegory of the Cave" to addiction is this: addicts are the prisoners, and their false and deluded world (the cave and its shadows) is the one in which they ignore their addiction and the problems that come with it. When talking to mental health professionals about alcoholism and drug addiction, they informed me of the patterns that addicts go through. In the mind of an addict, there is nothing wrong with what they are doing; they are not addicted to anything. In their minds, they can justify almost anything they do, such as stealing or lying, because the drugs or alcohol have caused them to use the defense mechanism of rationalizing to avoid guilt or responsibility. This, to me, accurately describes someone who would be in the cave, because they are avoiding reality in order to keep doing what they are doing.

            The allegory then also describes relapse, a huge part of most addict’s recovery process, because when the prisoners are taken out into the light, it blinds them and they retreat into the cave because it is familiar and comfortable, which is what happens more often than not when addicts face the harsh road of recovery. This aspect of the article also struck me as incredibly ingenious, because when I was researching addiction, I was told that most addicts go through at least one relapse, and people who treat addiction are so used to its occurrence that they inform people in treatment that the important thing to note is that if this happens, they should never give up or feel too guilty to admit it, but instead seek help from their counselor as soon as they can. O’Connor also mentions that like in the "Allegory of the Cave", it is rare that people should make it out of the cave on their first try and stay there. This comparison seemed uncanny – I was thrown by the extreme accuracy in what I expected to be a perhaps convoluted philosophical experiment.

            This article enlightened me to the flexibility and applicability of Plato’s Allegory and other philosophical works, because ideas and concepts are often only taken at face value and looked at through the lens of what they were originally intended for (which is a human tendency, for the psychology term see functional fixedness), which is a habit that inhibits genius. Inter-disciplinary thinking is always a positive, in my mind, and this article and reading the "Allegory of the Cave" have inspired me to attempt to do this more on a regular basis, at least consciously, because I look at a lot of things through a psychological lens anyway, without really thinking about what it means or how it can be useful, like O’Connor clearly did.