Article: Your Porn Addiction Isn’t Real
http://thebea.st/1dkmiHf

Having just read “Your Porn Addiction Isn’t Real”, my own response is that if our (multi-faceted) definitions of addiction can only be granted legitimacy by scientistic, evidence-based dogma, then reductionism eclipses holism; the ideological equivalent of dissociative fragmentation.

The very myopic, unchallenged assumption of the article is that addiction is evidenced by heightened LLP brain activity patterns when the subject is exposed to images related to their drug of choice e.g. “cocaine-related pictures”. The methodological flaw in this research is that sexually explicit pictures are not “porn-related pictures”—especially not to the person with an addiction to porn consumption. These pictures are the drug itself, so the study would need to compare the LLP responses of cocaine addicts while they were actually ingesting cocaine rather than viewing cocaine-related imagery… In pornography, the image is the drug, not a suggestion of it. Incomparable kinds of stimulus in my opinion. Where the stimulus is incomparable, so must be the brain responses… So for all the of the endorsement of Science that the study rests upon, the methodological experimental assumptions seem peculiarly unscientific.

Further even where certain phenomena cannot satisfy evidence-based scientism, it does not prove their invalidity. I continue to find Jung’s depth psychology to be profoundly valuable in my work. The very nature of an Archetype is that it transcends scientific rationalism. Crafting scientific evidence to bless the legitimacy of Archetypes, or dismissing them as heresy in the absence of such evidence seems, to me, simply an irrelevant reflection of scientism run amok: the new creed or superstition that all of what is real must ultimately be physically measurable with the very specific and limited instruments that we ourselves have brought forth.

Another oversight of “evidence-based science” is that empirically, the addiction model in the treatment of self-destructive porn consumption has furnished evidence that the model delivers recovery. Not abstinence, recovery.

So as you can see, I tend to be wary of hegemonic, and perhaps also compulsive scientism. I don’t know whether the human psyche (and therefore human behaviors also) will ever be thoroughly mastered through reductionistic analysis alone.