Title : Living in time, living in use: A phenomenological reading of the experience with drugs
Abstract:
This presentation proposes an interpretation of the phenomenon of drug use grounded in the singularity of human temporality, taking as its theoretical foundation the phenomenological-hermeneutic perspective of Martin Heidegger, particularly as developed in Being and Time. It begins from the understanding that the human being is not merely located within chronological time, but rather that constitutes itself temporally—that is, one who understands and projects itself through the dimensions of past, present, and future, inseparable in their structural unity. The presentation will initially offer a concise synthesis of Heidegger’s existential analytic, emphasizing temporality as the constitutive structure of existence. The past (having-been) is not reducible to what is finished or closed; rather, it remains a field of realized and unrealized possibilities that continue to operate in how the subject understands itself. The future (the coming-toward) refers to the horizon of possibilities still open, marked by indeterminacy and the absence of guarantees. The present, in turn, is the domain of decision and the enactment of these possibilities, where fulfillment or frustration takes place. The human being temporalizes itself insofar as it must assume its existence as a task at the moment. From this structural perspective, fundamental attunements (Stimmungen)—anxiety (Angst), guilt, and boredom—will be discussed as privileged modes in which temporality manifests itself. Anxiety discloses the open and indeterminate horizon of the future; guilt expresses the condition of already being in debt to one’s own unassumed possibilities; and boredom reveals a depletion of meaning in the way the present shows itself. On the basis of this theoretical framework, an interpretive approximation will be proposed between the modalities of drug use and the temporal dimensions of existence. Depressant drugs may be understood in relation to the temporality of the past and the attunement of guilt; hallucinogenic or perturbing drugs in relation to the present traversed by boredom; and stimulant drugs in relation to projection toward the future marked by anxiety. This is not intended to establish a linear causality, but rather to offer a hermeneutic key that situates drug use as an existential response to the tensions inherent in human temporality. Finally, clinical implications for the treatment of substance dependence will be discussed, questioning the centrality of abstinence as the exclusive aim of treatment, as upheld by prohibitionist perspectives. The presentation argues for a clinical approach that takes the subject’s temporal experience as fundamental, expanding the field of intervention beyond mere consumption suppression and acknowledging the existential complexity involved in the phenomenon.
