BRAUNSTEIN, Néstor A.. The addictions: illnesses of the memory.Eduardo Frota. []. , 43, 2, pp.299-320. ISSN 0101-4838.

The author emphasizes two conceptions of memory in the Freudian theories, before and after 1920, and discusses their relationships to pleasure, satisfaction and wish, relationships that are characteristic of the primary psychic processes, which seek the identity of perception. Taking drug dependency as a paradigm of addictions, a problem especially present in contemporariness, the author shows that neuroscience links addiction to dopamine, the hormone of euphoria, and to the memory of the intense pleasure sensations promoted by the drug. The satisfaction promoted by the drug, however, is the only alternative to the phallic jouissance, which is the one that is satisfied in the exercise of speech and that happens inside the social bond.

: jouissance; dependence; addiction; memory.

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