Spirituality and the Quest for Meaning vs. Addiction | Dr. Dmitry Leontiev | MC4 L6

Spirituality and the Quest for Meaning vs. Addiction: Self-Regulation Perspective
Dr. Dmitry Leontiev, Ph.D., Dr.Sc., Professor of Psychology, Moscow State University

During the last decades addiction has become a central issue of clinical psychology. Most interesting is that the forms of addictions widely discussed now are no longer limited by alcohol and drug dependencies but include shopaholism, compulsive gambling, internet addiction, cell phone dependency, love and sex addictions, TV addiction, etc. Biochemical explanations one had to take seriously in case of alcohol and drug addiction cannot help much in other cases. It is psychological explanation that is urgently requested and is also needed for alcohol and drug cases. From a phenomenological view, the universal feature of all forms of addiction is highly hierarchical motivational structure that leaves essentially no choice for the person regarding the direction of one’s activity. These irresistible urges may be either biological or cultural. Fanaticism is also a kind of addiction, even though the urge of converting everyone in one’s faith is traditionally considered spiritual. What matters, however, is the structure of motivation and self-regulation rather than the nature of dominant urges. From this viewpoint spirituality appears as the higher-order structure of motivational self-regulation essentially opposed to addiction. In a truly spiritual person there is nothing like a rigid dominance of one value over other ones. The theory of spirituality that gives due to this feature is Maslow’s theory of metamotivation. Maslow (1976) stated that motivation of those who have grown “beyond” self-actualization to the level of Being, rather than Becoming, is no more like a hierarchy of basic needs, but rather a system of ultimate Being-values like Truth, Beauty, Justice, Meaningfulness, Dichotomy-transcendence, Completion etc. These values make the structure of motivation of these individuals, but the most interesting is that they make no hierarchical structure. Craving for positive emotions can account for addiction, but not for spirituality. Indeed, there are no differences between positive emotions coming from different sources. As soon as I start getting enough positive emotions, I stop looking for other sources. The person in search for meaning, on the contrary, can never get satisfied; meanings derived from different sources are also different and one keeps openness to the variety of meaningful values. Hence, the quest for meaning may be buffer against addiction.

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