Do you smoke? Actually, it does not matter. Cigarets are so popular in the contemporary world that almost everyone knows something about it. Smoking has been a cause of disputes and investigations for many years. Of course, it's important to talk about nicotine and its harm to the human body, but in this essay I want to reveal the topic a bit deeper.
Historians say that in ancient times in the territory of Africa, Asia and Europe, people burned tobacco on bonfires and the smoke had a dizzying effect on them. Some devices for smoking, in particular a tube, whose age dates back three thousand years have been found in archaeological.
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During the First and the Second World Wars, soldiers received cigarettes from the government. In the mid-twentieth century, smoking has become very popular. In the fifties, there was an epidemic of lung cancer and no one knew that the reason for this was tobacco. In 1950, 90% of English men were smokers.
Today, worldwide, according to the American expert W. Chandler, there are at least one billion people smoking, consuming a total of up to 5 trillion cigarettes a year. There is another figure: for every inhabitant of our planet, regardless of sex and age, up to 1,000 cigarettes per year are produced.
Tobacco is not listed in the register as a narcotic, but in recent years, scientists are increasingly inclined to think that tobacco smoke acts on the human body like a drug. In 1985, an American scientist of the National Center for Drug Addiction Pennigfield, speaking at a representative forum, concluded: «The role of nicotine in the impulsive need to smoke a cigarette is identical to the role of cocaine». If in the first months and years, smokers are content with a small number of cigarettes, then in the future the act of smoking is fixed in the form of a conditioned reflex, and to obtain the next portion of satisfaction and positive sensations, it is necessary to shorten breaks between smoking and to make deeper puffs.
Several years ago, scientists established that nicotine acts directly on the so-called 'biological remuneration systems' located in the central parts of the brain, changing the course of biological reactions in the nerve cells responsible for the subjective sense of comfort. Nicotine enters these parts of the brain within seven seconds after inhaling tobacco smoke.
So how and when it all starts? According to statistics, children most often try to smoke in 5-8 forms. At the age of 16 to 18 years, the number of teenagers smoking in different countries varies from 40 to 60 percent. There are several reasons why children start smoking.The first one is obvious - parents`prohibition. As a result disobedience as a child's protest. The second reason is based on the principle that smoking is a social habit. Although nicotine addiction plays a key role in long-term smoking, most children start smoking in the company of friends or classmates. Adolescence is characterized by the desire to receive respect and recognition in the reference groups. If such reference group is «nicotine lovers» you in order to belong to them must smoke too. Also, adolescents have a special form of self-awareness, a subjective notion, as people more likely to belong to the adult world. This causes the desire to smoke and as a result show themselves as adults. It is not a secret that children tend to imitate their parents and other adults in their lives. So in a family where at least one parent smokes, it will be difficult to prevent children from this habit.
Freud said that smoking can be compared with the subconscious desire to suck your mother's breast. According to his theory of psychosexual development, people go through several stages of development: oral (0-18 months), anal (18 months - 3 years), phallic (3-6 years), latent (6-12 years) and genital (of puberty and up to 22 years). The psychosexual development of the child is an adaptation to the environment. The driving forces of this development are innate unconscious instincts and motives. These stages differ from each other in a way of satisfying the libido. At each of these stages a person can get stuck in the development - what is called a fixation. More
specifically, the fixation is persistent human affection to certain objects and goals, phases and stages.The trauma that forms the structure of the oral fixation is the abandonment of the child. The child feels lost and deprived of attention, he lacks physical contact, attention, sometimes food and emotional contact. An adult with this type of fixation is characterized by passivity, dependence and trustfulness (oral-passive) or negativism, the desire to exploit others and sarcasm (oral-sadistic). So smoking according to Freud is a fixation on the oral stage. Also, such habits of chewing of chewing gum, nail-biting, kissing, overeating, drinking alcohol, oral sex, etc relate to this type of fixation. Irritation of the muscles of the mouth gives pleasure such people and soothes them.
According to Freud's judgment about the constitutional meaning of the lips: when it is increased, people are more prone to sucking. If such a constitutional increase persists, then such children, be- coming adults, become lovers of kisses, tend to perverse kisses (the lips (tongue) of one person come into contact with the genitals of another) or acquire a strong motive for drinking and smoking.
When Freud was talking about Eros and Thanatos, he mentioned that those who can not satisfy their Eros, that means do not get rid of accumulated sexual energy, or do not sublimate, uncon- sciously trying to reach Thanatos as a way of discharging accumulated energy. Smoking is a special form of subconscious self-destruction as one of ways of satisfaction of Thanatos. To prove this the- ory, modern psychologists conducted a survey among smokers. Most people that were asked 'what will be the consequences of smoking?' answered with the following: 'first I'll start coughing, then my lungs become ill, I will cough up blood, in the end, there will be lung or throat cancer, I can not get out of bed and so on until death».
There is such a stereotype that cigarettes are a way of getting rid of stress. Many of the avid smokers explain and justify their addiction to tobacco with the desire to calm down at a difficult moment, to recover. It is not entirely clear for scientists whether the cigarette removes negative emotions, whether it makes people calm or not. However, it is clear that a cigarette smoked during a period of stress cannot prevent a neurosis. Smoking, in this case, can be defined as a neurotic obses-
sion. After all, a neurotic and a smoker, realizing the senselessness and painfulness of obsession, is not able to get rid of it independently. There is a vicious circle. Neurotic anxiety makes you take a cigarette, smoking turns into an obsession, which, in turn, leads to a neurotic breakdown. This sce- nario does not always happen, but often neurosis and harmful habit of smoking are closely inter- twined.
There is a theory that in the modern world there is a program of making people smoking more. Most often hidden propaganda and advertising of cigarettes are made through the movie and TV series. From the early period of cinematography we can see characters with a cigarette or a cigar in their mouths in many films. We can explain this by the fact that cigarettes were considered harm- less, moreover, they were fashionable. Although, a few decades later, when people were already aware of the harm of smoking, the number of smoking characters in the films were not decreased. It is impossible to imagine a movie where Marlene Dietrich or Jean-Paul Belmondo had not smoked. In the modern world, according to research scientists from the University of California at San Fran- cisco, despite all the prohibitions, the number of scenes with people smoking in the cinema is grad- ually increasing.
There is such a lucky type of people who have no dependence on smoking. They can smoke in the company or at the resort, but they have no permanent desire to inhale tobacco fume. in contrast, there is another type of absurdly dependent. For instance, The main character of the film 'On my way' Betty, who discovered that she does not have cigarettes, drove for hours in search of them. Another example is Carrie from the «Sex and the city» television series that cannot survive without cigarets. One of the most ardent smokers in history was Sigmund Freud.
About Freud said that he depended on only two things - the youngest daughter Anna and cigars, and the daughter appeared in his life much later than the habit of smoking. He started to be addicted to cigars in very early age and could not imagine his life without them even when his health or ex- treme poverty demanded it. At the age of thirty-five years, for the first time, heart problems ap-
peared: palpitations, weakness, depression, shortness of breath. The doctor of Freud imposed a strict prohibition on cigars. However, the period of abstinence from tobacco did not last long. Freud com- plained that, excommunicated from cigar smoke, he was 'absolutely inoperative, just killed». He believed that it was the cigars that caused the 'colossal intensification' of his work, that without them he could not write even a single line. He again began to smoke in the usual rhythm and felt relieved. Five years later, sixty-seven-year-old Freud was found to have cancer of the palate. Then there were sixteen years of unceasing suffering. More than thirty complex surgical operations, a rough prosthesis replacing the removed tissues between the oral and nasal cavities, difficulties with speech and eating, constant pain. But all these together did not make him quit smoking. When his mouth no longer opened wide enough for a cigar, Freud unclenched his jaws with a clothespin. Cig- ars were more important to him than his life. Everything turned out exactly according to Freud: be- yond the principle of pleasure, there was an irresistible attraction to death.His death occurred in 1939 in London after a double injection of morphine, made by a doctor at his request. To this day it is one of the most famous cases of euthanasia.
To avoid such terrible consequences, an electronic cigarette was invented fifteen years ago. Chi- nese scientist pharmacist Hon Lik had had a father who smoked a lot and died because of lung can- cer. The scientist, being a passionate smoker too, decided to stop smoking. Suffering from the tor- ment itself and remembering the suffering of a dying father, Hon Lik set himself the goal of invent- ing a device that would make the smoking process less harmful to the smoker and others. As a re- sult, he created a real breakthrough, a whole new culture. Electronic cigarettes and vapes bring 95% less harm to smokers and people surrounding them than usual ones. This device can not be consid- ered a panacea, but still, it has saved millions of people from daily inhalation of tobacco smoke and many harmful chemicals. Of course, many fans of lighting a spark, cannot stand plastic in their mouths and steam instead of smoke. They are still in search of a perfect way to stop smoking. Un- fortunately, such a method does not exist.
Nicotine patches and gum, pills, hypnosis, acupuncture, various books and courses are created to help people quit smoking. They can help, but do not solve the problem. Russian psychologist Mikhail Lobkovsky claims that it is impossible to stop smoking. It's only possible to CEASE smok- ing! The most important thing is to realize that you do not love smoking. That you have a psycho- logical, psychophysical, emotional, chemical, whatever dependence. From this moment on, each cigarette will be felt to you not as an act of love, but as a forced concession of its dependence.
So what is the difference: when you cease, you do it right away and you do not have dreams about a cigarette, you do not reduce their amount gradually, you are not nervous and you do not ask your family and friends to support you in a severe struggle.You just cease it. «Dear drug addicts! As long as you think that your story is about love - you do not give up smoking, and smoking will not give up you. While smoking is almost the only way for you to self-assert, express yourself and feel free - a neurotic romance with a cigarette will last and kill you».
Summarizing, smoking people are more psychologically dependent on the process of smoking than physically - from nicotine. Most often, people begin smoking at an early age in order to appear more grown-up, gain the respect of friends or show their protest to parents` prohibition. Freud was convinced that smoking is caused by fixation on the oral stage of psychosexual development. A hundred years ago people did not know about the harmful effects of smoking on the body so there was a lot of smokers. Today, scientists have proved the negative impact of cigarettes, but the num- ber of smokers has not decreased. Almost every movie or TV series we see smoking propaganda which particularly affects teenagers. One of the few good news about smoking is the invention of electronic cigarettes that do much less harm. Unfortunately, many people still can not give up smok- ing. There are many different devices and methods that help to stop smoking, but not one of them will be effective until the person himself does decide to cease. And of course, smoking is a very se- rious subject, but even Freud once said: «Sometimes cigar is just a cigar».
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