In the frantic course of their lives, some drug addicts will constitute the primary population of Greek prisons. The imprisoned drug addict, already guilty and imprisoned within their own family, socially dramatizes their story, officially placing themselves outside the law. By devaluing themselves, they validate the psychological absence of the Symbolic Law-Father, uniquely seeking it. Beyond the limits and through the maternal functions of substances, they will attempt to annul the trauma of their fragmented psyche and, as a body that acts and deviates, will reach a new womb, the prison. The woman, rising up and towards her social nature, will claim masculinity. Within this coercive framework of bio-power, the rehabilitation treatment will represent the passage to the symbolic Law and freedom, through the Word, Art, and Others.

“The axis of the entire book is the Symbolic Law and its –tragic– absence in the drug addict. This is what they seek through their wanderings in the world of the marginalized, their impulsive actions, their deviance. In this journey of continuous and fruitless searching for the Law, they will encounter the law, transgress it, and find themselves in prison. In this place of confinement and martyrdom, R. Kangelari will meet the dependent girls and boys and will introduce us, as much as possible, to their world. As a psychologist-criminologist with experience in institutions for drug addicts, she possesses the clinical expertise and knowledge that allows her to confidently debunk the dominant social stereotypes about the incurability of drug addiction, the biological nature of the problem, and the continuation of dependence through substitute treatments, among others.”

“Rodi Kangelari's book begins as a journey from the womb to addiction and the symbolic and real functions of the Law. Based on her interactions with dependent individuals, in a penetrating yet vivid manner that makes the reading enjoyable, she describes this journey, shedding light on the significant stations of the journey and on the search for self through or despite the existence of the Other, sometimes as attractive and sometimes as threatening, as the Other can be the self within the journey of self-knowledge, searching, acceptance, or rejection of the self. In this journey, society is threateningly present as a web of conditions that excludes rather than encompasses, that promises only to betray.”