What Should the Treatment of the Soul Be? Exploring Addiction, Alcoholism, and Overeating
“What good will it be for someone if they gain the whole world, yet forfeit their soul? Or what can anyone give in exchange for their soul?”
— Matthew 16:26
What does it mean to “damage the soul,” and what might it mean to restore it?
These questions have accompanied humanity for centuries. Yet in contemporary approaches to addiction and mental health, the concept of the soul is often replaced by narrower psychological, neurological, or behavioural models. These models are valuable, but they may not fully address the deeper question: what happens to a person’s sense of meaning, identity, values, and relationship with life when addiction takes hold?
From a philosophical perspective, the soul can be understood not simply as a collection of psychological traits, but as an integrated structure in which consciousness, emotions, instincts, drives, values, and experience interact. When these elements become profoundly disconnected or contradictory, a person may experience a loss of coherence: they may know intellectually what they want to do, yet repeatedly behave in ways that contradict their values and long-term interests.
This is particularly evident in addiction.
Telling a person simply to “stop drinking,” “stop using,” or “stop overeating” rarely addresses the complexity of the problem. Behavioural control may be achieved temporarily, but sustainable recovery usually requires something deeper: an understanding of why the behaviour has become necessary, what function it serves, and what has happened to the person’s relationship with themselves and the world around them.
Psychotherapy, therefore, can be understood as more than the removal of unwanted thoughts or behaviours. It can become a process of educating and reorganising the person’s inner world—helping them examine their assumptions, values, patterns of thinking, emotional responses, and ways of relating to reality.
This brings us to one of the oldest philosophical principles: know yourself.
The therapeutic process requires the individual to observe themselves in different psychological states: during temptation, emotional activation, fear, insight, conflict, and moments of genuine connection. Through this process, previously automatic patterns can become conscious and therefore available for reflection and change.
For a person with addiction, one of the most important questions is not simply, “How do I stop?” but “What kind of life am I trying to return to?”
Recovery involves a revaluation of values. What previously appeared important may lose its significance, while neglected areas of life—relationships, health, creativity, responsibility, meaning, or contribution—may become central again.
The ancient Greeks used the concept of Kairos to describe the right or opportune moment. In recovery, timing can also be significant. A person may hear the same therapeutic message many times before they are psychologically ready to understand and act upon it. The task of the therapist is not to impose that moment, but to help create the conditions in which meaningful change becomes possible.
This is why sustainable recovery cannot be reduced to suggestion or instruction.
A therapist can provide information, structure, therapeutic interventions, challenge, support, and an alternative perspective. However, the decision to change ultimately has to become personally meaningful to the individual. It needs to be more than an intellectual agreement; it needs to become integrated into the person’s understanding of themselves and their future.
The Theory of Tendencies
One way of exploring this process is through the Theory of Tendencies, a framework concerned with the formation of worldview and with the ways in which different tendencies influence perception, thought, emotion, and behaviour. Developed by Alexander Saez, author of Memoirs of a Psychoanalyst (Homo-Cynicus), the method offers a way of examining the underlying patterns through which an individual interprets reality and organises their inner and outer life. Rather than focusing solely on observable symptoms or behaviours, the Theory of Tendencies seeks to understand the deeper structures of perception, values, emotional responses, and habitual ways of relating to the world. From this perspective, meaningful recovery involves not only changing behaviour but also developing greater awareness of the worldview and psychological tendencies that have shaped it.
From this perspective, addiction can involve a profound disturbance in the relationship between the individual and reality. The person may become increasingly organised around excess, immediate gratification, avoidance, or the relief of internal tension. Alcohol, drugs, food, or other behaviours can become ways of regulating experiences that the individual has difficulty recognising, tolerating, or expressing directly.
Importantly, the destructive tendency is not treated in isolation.
A therapeutic approach can instead identify psychological capacities that may provide an alternative direction. One such approach can be described as a “zigzag”: rather than confronting a destructive pattern only through direct resistance, therapy strengthens other capacities that are positioned outside the immediate pattern.
These may include moderation, purposeful action, curiosity, learning, creativity, responsibility, and the capacity to tolerate uncertainty.
For example, an individual whose life has become organised around impulsive gratification may benefit from developing the capacity for delayed gratification and purposeful goal-setting. Someone whose substance use is closely associated with social belonging may need to develop alternative forms of connection and identity. Someone who uses substances to escape difficult emotional states may need to develop greater emotional awareness and alternative methods of regulation.
Addiction can also become reinforced by social and relational dynamics. People may find themselves influenced by the expectations of their social environment, by identification with particular groups or authority figures, or by an internalised “social mask”—the Persona described by Carl Jung.
Cravings themselves can also become psychologically powerful. A person may begin to experience vivid anticipatory images or expectations associated with substance use, sometimes before consciously deciding to use. Understanding these processes can help transform an apparently inexplicable behaviour into something that can be observed, understood, and therapeutically addressed.
Building Psychological Resources
Effective therapy is not simply about removing symptoms. It is also about strengthening psychological resources.
Several processes may be particularly relevant:
- Dissociation — helping the individual recognise and differentiate thoughts, emotions, bodily sensations, and impulses rather than experiencing them as one overwhelming state.
- Positive introjection — developing healthier internal representations of safety, support, self-worth, and constructive relationships.
- Analytical differentiation — learning to distinguish between internal beliefs, external expectations, emotional reactions, and personal values.
- Positive sublimation — directing psychological energy and internal tension into creativity, learning, purposeful activity, relationships, and other constructive forms of expression.
The goal is not to eliminate every difficult emotion or impulse. Human psychological life is inherently complex. The therapeutic task is to develop greater integration and flexibility, so that difficult experiences no longer automatically dictate behaviour.
This is particularly important when working with people who have strong creative or intellectual capacities. The same psychological intensity that can contribute to artistic, professional, or intellectual achievement may, under different circumstances, become connected to destructive patterns. Therapy therefore needs to understand the whole person rather than attempting to remove one isolated symptom.
Beyond Abstinence
Addiction treatment ultimately requires more than abstinence.
It requires an understanding of the individual, their history, relationships, environment, values, psychological tendencies, physical health, and capacity for meaning-making. Medical assessment, evidence-based psychological interventions, appropriate nutrition, sleep, physical activity, social connection, and continuing recovery support can all contribute to the process.
No two people arrive at addiction through exactly the same pathway, and no single therapeutic method can address every individual in the same way.
Perhaps this is where the treatment of the “soul” becomes relevant to contemporary addictology. Recovery is not simply the removal of a substance or behaviour. It is the gradual reconstruction of a life in which the individual can once again experience coherence between what they think, what they value, what they feel, and how they live.
The central question is therefore not only:
“How do we stop the addictive behaviour?”
It is also:
“What kind of person, and what kind of life, can emerge when the individual is no longer organised around it?”
That question places the person—not the addiction—at the centre of treatment.
