The Root Cause of Addiction and a Path Forward

If you’ve ever wondered why we have such a problem with addiction, crime and delinquency, here is where psychiatrist Daniel Casriel believes it begins.

“There is so much more to see in a drop of water than can be seen by the naked eye. The heavens above have an immensity that cannot even be comprehended by the naked eye. There is so much more to emotions than can be expressed by words alone.”

I have been a psychoanalytic trained psychiatrist for over 30 years. For the first 10 years of my practice, most of my patients talked to me lying on a couch. After 10 years of listening to them speak, I found out what they were talking about. They were talking about their emotions. So, in 1963, I started to develop new techniques to get them to express their emotions directly with full bodied emotional expression. After 10 years of listening to them screaming, I found out what they were screaming about. They were screaming about their loneliness, their feeling of emptiness, of feeling alone, of feeling unfulfilled, of needing something, somebody, to make them feel fulfilled. They were screaming that they did not feel good enough or lovable. They were screaming about what they called the need for “love,” what I recognized by 1968 as a need for “bonding.”

My emotional expressive screaming process worked fantastically, efficiently, and effectively. My book about this therapeutic group process, “A Scream Away from Happiness” was published by Grosset and Dunlap in 1972. However, by the time the book was published, I really knew, bottom line, what my group members were screaming about. Their full-bodied emotional expression, frequently without words, was a technique which functioned like a huge newly found microscope and telescope. With their deep non-verbal emotional expressions, I could understand and experience for myself things what other therapists never knew existed, that I did not know existed when I was a practicing psychoanalyst. There is so much more to see in a drop of water than can be seen by the naked eye. The heavens above have an immensity that cannot even be comprehended by the naked eye. There is so much more to emotions than can be expressed by words alone.

Continue at danielcasriel.com.

Daniel Casriel, MD

Daniel Harold Casriel, M.D. (1924-1983) was an American psychiatrist, psychoanalyst and writer. He was a past president of the American Society of Psychoanalytic Physicians and founded the Daytop treatment centers. Learn more at danielcasriel.com.

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