Addiction and freedom — watching the same film every night
Philippe Jacquet does not argue with the principle. He asks a question instead.
People with addiction are often the first to invoke freedom. It is my right. I am only hurting myself. What I do in my own home is my business.
Philippe Jacquet does not argue with the principle. He asks a question instead.
Would you go to the cinema and watch the same film every night for ten years?
Almost everyone says no. Of course not. What would be the point?
And yet this is precisely what addiction is. The same film, every evening. The same ritual, the same substance, the same sequence of events, the same feeling — or absence of feeling — at the end. Night after night. Year after year.
With one difference: each time, somewhere underneath the compulsion, there is the hope that tonight it will end differently.
It will not end differently. The film does not change. That is the nature of addiction — not a free choice freely repeated, but a compulsion that has dressed itself in the language of freedom. The person is not choosing the cinema every night. They are locked inside it.
The difference between freedom and compulsion
Genuine freedom includes the freedom to stop. To choose something different tonight. To leave the cinema.
The person with addiction cannot do this — not through willpower, not through wanting it badly enough, not through moral effort alone. The film is running. The projector is on. The exit is there, but something more than intention is required to walk through it.
This is not a failure of character. It is the nature of addiction. And naming it clearly — without shame, without the false comfort of calling compulsion a choice — is the first step towards something actually different.
“They talk to me about freedom — their right to drink, their right to use. And I say: would you go to the cinema and watch the same film every night for ten years? That is what they are doing. Addiction is watching the same film every night and hoping for a different ending. The ending never changes. The film does not change. Only the person can change — if they choose to.” — Philippe Jacquet
Book a consultation with Philippe Jacquet — psychotherapist and Jungian analyst, London.