In the introduction to The Pastoral Clinic, Angela Garcia writes, “A central theme in this book is how loss and mourning provide more than a metaphor for heroin addiction: they trace a kind of chronology, a temporality of it. They even provide a constitutive power for it (Garcia 2010:7)… Ultimately, my goal is to show how a desire for escape and its local forms (getting high, overdose, even suicide) delineate a set of vulnerabilities that are common and shared… (Garcia 2010:21).
What are the kinds of losses Garcia refers to in the quote above? How does she use Freud and his article, “Mourning and Melancholia,” to support her argument about addiction in the Espanola Valley and to explain the need to forget or to escape? Do you consider Garcia’s book a work of hauntology, and if so, why?
The Pastoral Clinic is a critique of a narrowly conceptualized medical model of addiction. Do you find the critique convincing? Why or why not?
