| The general public, the mental health profession, the American judicial system, and criminalized male drug addicts themselves are struck with a social paradigmatic attitude toward criminalized male drug addicts that characterizes them as dirty, rotten, scumbag sewer rats.; This attitude, which others have toward them and which they have about themselves causes a self-fulfilling prophecy of aberrant behavior that keeps them isolated from the general public. As long as their dysfunctional behavior is scrutinized and labeled in this way, most addicts will continue to remain in a marginalized sector of society with little motivation to join the ranks of the general public.; To complicate matters, most criminalized male addicts who do recover retain many of the qualities that have placed them into this category in the first place, and many of those qualities are redemptive if they apply them to the betterment of mankind.; Motivated by spending more than 30 years as a member of this population, I have asked how I might inspire myself and others of my ilk to view themselves not as degenerates, but as worthy and productive people who have been directing the proclivities of the trickster archetype in the wrong direction.; To approach this phenomenon, I have chosen a phenomenological/artistic methodology: phenomenological in that I analyze data gleaned from interviews with drug addicts, and artistic in that I elucidate the lived experiences of criminalized male drug addicts in a series of stories about the fictional figure of Harry Scumbag.; Through these stories, I have elucidated the trickster archetype in drug addicts both in the stories themselves and in the act of story-telling, for in telling these stories, I, too, continue my own trickster ways creating works that are confabulation, partly factual and partly fictional. In the process, the redemptive possibilities in the trickster archetype emerge. |
