A Psychoanalytic Approach to Smoking Cessation

A Psychoanalytic Approach to Smoking Cessation: The Cigarette as a Transitional Object provides an accessible understanding to the unconscious motive behind smoking addiction using Winnicott’s concept of the transitional object.

The book is divided thematically into six parts. Ko begins by outlining the conscious motives for smoking from a psychological perspective and looks at commercial research conducted by the tobacco industry, before using psychoanalytically informed cross-disciplinary literature to assess the unconscious motives for smoking. She expertly introduces Winnicott’s view on smoking addiction, using his concept of the transitional object, and highlights the power of the Free Association Narrative Interview method in accessing the unconscious and embedded emotional experiences. Using clinical examples, she illustrates the benefits of this method as a tool to elicit free associations from research respondents. She details the parallels between the individual respondents’ smoking experience, as well as their relationship with cigarettes and the seven qualities of transitional objects outlined by Winnicott in his 1953 landmark paper. Ko concludes by emphasising the significance and implications of this thesis to smokers and public health policy, as well as the smoking cessation approach and proposed directions for future research.

This book is an essential resource for psychoanalysts and psychotherapists working in smoking cessation organisations, as well as those working in addiction services.

Author Biography

Fung Ko holds a PhD in Psychoanalytic Studies from the University of Essex, UK. She has 30 years of experience in multinational consumer goods companies marketing ‘pleasure food’. Her psychoanalytic research focuses on Winnicott’s concept of the transitional object to give understanding to tobacco addiction.