Setting yourself free: Techniques of recovery

In self-help discourses of addiction the goal is not cure but recovery, an open-ended process which requires both the adoption of certain styles of conduct and the transformation of the self. While defining recovery as a spiritual awakening, popular self-help guides also provide practical techniques of daily living for recovering addicts: from how to attend parties to how to discover one's inner voice. Using Foucault's notion of technologies of the self to examine specific practices of recovery and their constitution of an ideal self defined by health, authenticity and freedom, the article argues that the project of self-formation relies on techniques of habit formation that conflict with self-help discourse's notion of freedom. Refiguring recovery as a matter of habit compromises the transcendental notion of freedom proclaimed by self-help discourse, destabilizing the opposition between addiction and recovery that is supposed to mark improvement.