While the United States is sounding the alarm about fentanyl, in Italy too, the spread of drugs among adolescents, from cannabis to psychotropic drugs used to get high, is triggering an epidemic of addiction. There have never been so many patients suffering from drug-related disorders as in recent years, and the age at which the first pathologies develop is now as low as pre-adolescence. Falling into the vicious circle of satisfaction-abstinence-craving is a dangerous and paradoxical game that pushes us to crave what is harmful to us.
Yet antidotes exist, and one of the most powerful is the feeling of life that is transmitted to the child in its very first months, but which can be lost or undermined during pre-adolescence. In the absence of this transmission, desire struggles to emerge and plans fail to take off. This disorientation exposes us to the absolute offered by drugs, alcohol, psychotropic drugs, food, the internet, obsessive sports...
Enjoyment without desire is the hallmark of a drug-addicted society. For desire to arise, children need to experience frustration and limitations that can transform the numbing emptiness into a lack that rekindles desire.

Laura Pigozzi shows a new way to understand and defuse addictions, combining psychoanalysis with the findings of neuroscience on the malfunctioning of the reward system and those of epigenetics on the plastic capacity of the brain, which benefits from positive relationships and experiences. It is the lives of each of us, the words we exchange, as well as the words that have shaped us, made us feel loved or hurt, and those exchanged in therapy, that modify the functioning of the brain. It is in fact in personal and social relationships that we find the way out of the inhuman condition of mental suffering, since effective treatment cannot ignore the collective that protects, the emotional network that supports, and the humanism of words that give dignity.