A Guardian article reviews Olivier Amiesen’s claim to have found a cure for alcoholism and other addictions:

It’s not extraordinary that, despite all his efforts and his obvious
intelligence and commitment, Dr Ameisen failed to overcome his
addiction. What is extraordinary is that he eventually discovered a drug
he claims has cured him of alcoholism and that he claims can cure all
addictions, including cocaine, heroin, smoking, bulimia and anorexia,
compulsive shopping and gambling. Because that is, according to all
other schools of thought, simply impossible.

I’m coming to this against a backdrop of other reading and browsing at the moment, namely Coleridge’s struggles with opium and his meditations on thought and action, and David Milch’s lectures on thinking and action. I can’t put my finger on it at the moment, but there’s a strain of ‘fallen’ reflection here, (that I also think I recognise in Thomas Lynch’s writing). I’m not saying their troubled experiences are good for them, but they all seem to have extracted some sort of wisdom from the experience. And it’s something that I think Ricoeur deals with from his viewpoint of man’s fallen state and the movements through living that bring us new truths about ourselves. I’m not Catholic myself (and neither was Coleridge, and I can’t speak for the others), but there’s something about this acceptance of one’s fallibility — to the extent that we manage that — which seems valuable, even though it’s the same wellspring that guilt and shame about oneself spring from. Maybe the wisdom here is in the transformation of that guilt into forgiveness.