Upon reviewing the scientific research in the fields of pathological addiction and trauma, we find that there is a broad overlap between the neurophysiological substrate of memory and learning mechanisms in subjects suffering from these two ailments. We observe how these patients may develop an extraordinary ability to use their addiction, or their post-traumatic personality, in a generative way, by polarizing their functioning more and more intensely and pervasively around the substance or the

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... post-traumatic transformation, which ends up functioning as an attractor, as defined in Complexity Theory. Such a process then sometimes also brings these patients to a 'titanic' type of functioning, which -again according to Complexity Theory -may be described as a hypercycle. We further observe that such dissociation from every other part of the personality is like the phenomenon described by Ferenczi [1] with the concept of Orpha, which takes place after a trauma allowing the traumatized person to go on living while experiencing a deep dissociative process.