At least it functions in the same way.
The object is jouissance, an identification with a truth, which is a pleasure, but more than that, a compulsion. A pleasurable spasm.
Any information that is in discord with this spastic truth is spastically discarded.
On a drug one does not need an ego, the drug does the chemical binding work. But off the drug, the ego is again required but, missing or diminished. The drug then re-enters as a relief of the need of an unattainable ego. So druggies are all ‘hippies’ - and this chemistry produces meta-ego’s, of which pop music is the main form. Not a superego but a meta-ego in which many ego-less druggies partake to attain the jouisssance, to which the music is a direct intimation.
Beyond the ego traditionally lies the Self, and we may assume that this is not a mere compulsion but a more stable truth, to which the joyous state of ego as well as the dire states of its collapse both pertain. Drugs give partial entry to this stable truth - the countless wisdoms penned by opium and lsd users is testament enough - but they aren’t enough to gain a stable foothold there; the drug keeps being instrumental to the truth, and the ego is further and further negated;
Have I been understood?
All too well.
When no drugs are used, no chemicals ingested which take over the nervous fountainhead that is normally occupied by the ego, this ego simply wanes and waxes, jouissance vs ennui, and investigations into the Self tend to remain academic, hypothetical, non-committal, at most philosophic in a Kantian, humanist sense.
So why do many people on drugs act with such gigantic ego’s?
They don’t; they act with leaking ego’s. A drug user after all generally finds himself somewhere between the perfect height and the perfect poverty of spirit, in the world of egoic design, the rational, postmodern world in which the shaman is merely an entertainer and the individual is not part of a rite-prescribed entity… the ego has been contaminated with the experience of its absence, there is no Apollo, and yet there is no Dionysos either.
It is reported that Alcibiades was once arrested for “possession of the Eleusian Mysteries”.
A healthy, fertile culture exists at the same level as the human Self; it has its ways to suspend the ego and occupy the fountainhead at given times.