The Captive Imagination

Addiction, Reality and Our Search for Meaning

By: Elias Dakwar

Narrated by: Gary Tiedemann

Brought to you by Penguin.

What causes addiction, and how should we treat it? Today it is understood primarily as a brain disease, yet in this bold reimagining of addiction, pioneering psychiatrist Elias Dakwar argues that this is false. It fails to explain, among other things, why many people can enjoy drugs without developing a dependency on them. Despite decades of neuroscientific research, we aren’t much closer to truly understanding the nature of addiction, nor to addressing it effectively.

In The Captive Imagination, Dakwar argues that addiction is an existential challenge, requiring a more philosophical and multidisciplinary approach, as well as a lens through which we can better understand ourselves. Addiction stems from our desire for happiness: whether addicts or not, we all struggle against meaninglessness, and resort to false solutions to our despair. Dakwar also shows how our individual capacity for self-delusion relates to our collective self-inflicted crises, from environmental destruction to social injustice.

Drawing on vivid stories of his own patients, path-breaking research, and decades of clinical experience, The Captive Imagination offers a novel framework for understanding and overcoming addiction, as well as human suffering more generally.

©2024 Elias Dakwar (P)2024 Penguin Audio

Critic reviews

In rich and arresting prose, and with radical originality, Dakwar expands initial, pragmatic insights about addiction into a far-reaching examination of authenticity, exploring how we define a happy life, a good life, a valid life (Andrew Solomon, author of THE NOONDAY DEMON)

A riveting, compassionate meditation that navigates philosophy, psychedelics, religion, biomedicine, neuroscience, critical theory, and contemporary culture with brilliant and understated insight, shedding new light on the role of fiction in addiction as well as in our existence more fundamentally. Incredibly erudite and informed, this book forces us to reconsider the nature of desire and of our capacity to undermine our own fulfillment – while also offering a means of restoration (Patricia Dailey, author of PROMISED BODIES)

This book is a much-needed stabilizing force in the fraught public discourse on addiction, which relies heavily on tropes that dehumanize. Dakwar, an admirably unique psychiatrist who is before all else human, places the suffering of those afflicted with addiction in the larger context of human suffering. For that reason alone, this book is a must read (Carl Hart, author of DRUG USE FOR GROWNUPS)

This seductively written, likely landmark book about addiction and its treatments asks important and haunting questions about what Coleridge (addicted to opium yet never in doubt of his creative freedom) called “the shaping spirit” of a strong imagination. Is even great art a condition of our endemic hunger for self-delusion? How to shape the world into our truest likeness? Dakwar offers brilliant insight, with a scientist’s originality, a physician’s profound experience (Joseph McElroy, author of WOMEN AND MEN)