Love and Addiction

By Archie Brodsky, Stanton Peele, Peele Stanton

Book Overview

In Love and Addiction, published 40 years ago and sold as a mass-market paperback on love, Stanton Peele and Archie Brodsky laid out every major issue confronting the addiction field today. This pioneering classic, which was excerpted in Cosmopolitan and spawned the codependence movement, is the first-and still the definitive-book on addictive love. But it is much more than that; it is the book that explains why addiction is not what we think it is. Love and Addiction focuses on dependent love relationships to explore what both love and addiction really are-psychologically, socially, and culturally. Addiction is an overgrown, dependent, destructive relationship. Love is the opposite, a sharing, growth-inspiring one. The authors' analysis makes clear that an addiction is an experience that takes on meaning and power in light of a person's needs, desires, beliefs, expectations, and fears. By showing how addiction grows out of ordinary human experience, Peele and Brodsky offer a liberating understanding of all addictions-to alcohol, drugs, tobacco, food, gambling, shopping, electronic media, sex, or love. In 1975, Love and Addiction boldly proposed ideas whose truth is only now being recognized: Addiction is not limited to drugs, and drugs are not necessarily addictive.AA's 12 steps are not the last word in addiction treatment. On the contrary, practically oriented addiction treatments are more effective. The goal of addiction treatment and recovery is not abstinence to the exclusion of all else, but to build a life that rules out addiction. Love is the opposite of the self-protective constriction of addiction; it is the expansion of your spirit with another human being. Remarkably, all of these issues-the widespread application of the addiction diagnosis, the limited value of AA and its disease theory, the possibility that people can continue using but still eliminate addiction (harm reduction)-are as hotly debated today as when Peele and Brodsky first analyzed addiction forty years ago. Most remarkably of all, the answers Peele and Brodsky arrived at in Love and Addiction are only now being embraced by progressive thinkers in the field. "Destined to become a classic " Psychology Today proclaimed in 1975. Rereading Love and Addiction 35 years later, addiction researcher Rowdy Yates wrote that the book "still reads absolutely true as an understanding of addictive behavior."Reading today this clairvoyant analysis of the most challenging issues we face in the twenty-first century-the meaning of love and the cure for addiction-you will recognize both the current relevance and enduring value of Love and Addiction, now reissued with a new (2015) Authors' Preface, the Authors' Preface written for the 1991 paperback reissue, and a brief new introduction to each chapter. Otherwise, nothing has been changed in the original book.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 098538722X
• ISBN13: 9780985387228
• Release Date: April 2015
• Publisher: Broadrow Publications
• Length: 326 Pages
• Weight: 1.15 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.7" x 6.0" x 9.0"

Customer Reviews

Very interesting

Once I realised my problem was relationship addiction, I read everything i could get my hands on about this phenomenon. His treatise on the entire nature of addiction was very interesting but it wasn't an easy read - I had to be quite determined to finish the book. The prose is pretty dense and he takes you through the whole nature of alcoholism to create the model for addiction that he then compares to relationship addiction. The information is great, just not very easy to access.

What's Love Got To Do With It?

This book should be called "Sex Crazed Guys Who Get Upset When Their Girlfriends Leave Them". The author stetches the reader's imagination to the limits as he tries to make a correlation between Drug Withdrawal and the Loss of A Loved One. It becomes obvious that the author of this trash has never heard of the concept of TRUE LOVE and the Process of Grief.I give this book 5 stars because every person who is promiscuous now has a "valid" reason to justify their actions by saying they have a "Sex Addiction" so no doubt this book will have a resurgence in sales.

The best book of its kind - and i've read them all.

This book goes against the grain on much of what we have learned about addiction (whatever your poison may be). You will soon see why. It offers many real-life case samples, offers insight and solutions. It is written with fierce intelligence. This is not "bathroom reading", like i consider so many self-help books to me. This is a "thinking persons" book, utterly haunting, yet equally helpful. If you have unhealthy, addictive relationships, you MUST read this book.

A disturbing, provocative, and archtypal self help book

I had the luck of finding this presently out of print book in a used book and clothing store in the mid-West. Peele's LOVE AND ADDICTION is about the most concise, eye-opening and, in light of how the problems he documents in American society have only been geometrically exacerbated in the twenty-five years since it was published (now inlcuding an addiction to guns), the most disturbing of the self-help books I have ever read. With the exception of Nancy Friday's JEALOUSY, not since Bradshaw's HOMECOMING, published in 1991, has a book with a psychological theme sent such powerful vibrations through me, forcing me to look again at my life. It effectively removes the veil covering the sad connection between diametrically opposed (and mutually ineffective) views on politics, religion, sex and sexual freedoms, romance, family, marriage, relationships, crimes of all kinds and the spectre/epidemic of drug addiction in the U.S.- as well as the international history of it all. Many have said with wisdom- often quoting Martin Luther King or a Buddhist philosopher- that we are all joined together in one unified life, like threads in the fabric of society, and until we are all free, no one or group of us truly are. LOVE AND ADDICTION proves such poetic wisdom scientifically for the western mind, and its increasingly growing more fragile soul. Dr. Peele begins to show us the paradox of American society that is crippling us: how we are being psychologically crushed under the weight of our own technological innovations and tremendous freedoms, and how that affects ever single one of us, in all of our relationships, with everyone and everything.You will learn more about your world- including that of present day self-help book writers with the same problems he delineates- than you may ever have wanted to know. Because he says what you think you already know in a way that makes it all but impossible to ignore. This book needs to be reprinted, and made available to the general public, now. Twenty-five years later, its prophetic visions and common sense approach have yet to be surpassed.