The idea for Addicere was born in a very obscure way as I was listening to Britanny Broski, an American social media content creator, while on the stair master at the gym. On the specific podcast episode I was listening to she dived completely off-topic declaring, “I do think as an adult, like an oral chew toy would be really really nice. Why do babies get to have all the fun?”1. Weird question but one that sent me into a spiral thinking about the shape of beer bottles, pacifiers, thumb sucking as an infant, Sigmund Freud’s oral stage of development, and the origins of addiction. These topics are from completely different subjects and spaces but somehow formed into a vision of a pacifier-beer bottle hybrid. An image that seemed important enough to stop the stair master and quickly type the idea down in the hot mess known as my iPhone’s notes app. I went into a research spiral starting with why infants always want a toy, their thumb, pacifier, etc. in their mouth. According to Sigmund Freud, the oral stage of psychosexual development evolves between a newborn to one year of life. During this stage, the libido is in the mouth and therefore infants get satisfaction through the act of putting things in their mouths. On the topic of thumb sucking Freud theorizes that children who retain the habit are prone to a “marked desire for drinking and smoking”2, as adults. Retaining the habit and thus becoming prone to substance abuse disorder (SUD) is caused by a fixation or becoming stuck to one stage of psychosexual development.
Fixations occur when the needs of that stage or not met or when it is overstimulated. Because thumbsucking is used as a way to self-soothe or satisfy the body's needs perhaps when the libido is overstimulated in that phase growing up in an emotionally unstable environment, thumb-sucking is used as a coping mechanism. Theorists other than Freud develop these connections such as the works of Adam, Rosenfield, and Khantzian who agree: “ the predominance of a regressive oral defense mode in response to conflicts, which emerges due to an interplay of unresolved traumatic childhood experiences and constitutional factors. The ego of addicts is seen as insufficiently developed and therefore unable to withstand the anxiety”3. Oral defense modes, such as thumb-sucking or pacifiers, as a way to self-soothe during childhood traumas that remain unresolved will merge into the ego of addiction in which alternative objects will replace the need for oral stimulation as a means to deal with anxiety. Additionally, the presence of other environmental factors such as being the child of an alcoholic will stimulate the regression and reinforcement of sensation-seeking and substance dependency. The vision of the beer baby bottle makes more sense to my mind when I place it in this context. The connection between the form of the bottle as one that holds beer and previously held milk seems to be holding a shared meaning of the origins of things I struggled with as a teenager and as an infant.
1. Brittany Broski, “The Broski Report with Brittany Broski,” Podcast, March 14, 2024, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ww4h7WvVlaE.
2.Sigmund Freud and Abraham Arden Brill, Three Contributions to the Theory of Sex, Google Books (Nervous and mental disease publishing Company, 1920)
3.Jürgen Fuchshuber and Human Friedrich Unterrainer, “Childhood Trauma, Personality, and Substance Use Disorder: The Development of a Neuropsychoanalytic Addiction Model,” Frontiers in Psychiatry 11 (June 9, 2020), https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyt.2020.00531.
SKETCHES
PROCESS
The beer baby bottle was made in three different molds. The first cast I made was the bottle which was done in one attempt. I filled a yogurt container with alginate and pressed the bottle down keeping my hand on the bottom because I knew I only wanted the cast to reach the part of the bottle before it curves. The second process was the bottle nipple. At first, I made an alginate mold and cast the object in plaster. However, I decided to keep the rubbery texture of a real baby bottle to increase the believability of this object. At first, I tried using the form itself as mold filling it with plaster but as demonstrated by the photos on the next page, the rubber stuck to the rubber-like consistency of the bottle nipple and therefore came out disfigured. Because the rubber seemed to not bond well with other objects, I created a mold in plaster easily removing the rubber bottle part. I then cast the rubber into the plaster mold and it was easily removed. The neck of the bottle was cast by filling an empty can of The Beast Unleashed (alcoholic monster) with alginate and placing the Heineken bottle upside down into the can. The part where the neck starts to curve rested on the edge of the cut can and therefore did not move and disfigure the alginate mold. I then cast plaster into the mold. Because the mold of the baby bottle retained the measurement engravings on the side, I decided to make a cast of the partial release on the Heineken bottle to put on the other side to further the duality of the object. I pressed the beer bottle into plasticine and gently wrapped it around the plaster baby bottle. After getting the curve I cast it in plaster before embedding it onto the bottle with plaster.
PROCESS 2
Both bases of the pacifier hybrids were cast in plaster into a plasticine mold. I experimented with several different molds from rubber to plaster and alginate. The form that created the best cast was created by creating a mold with the part I wanted to cast into plasticine and refining the shape with tools. Similar to the nipple of the bottle I at first cast the vape in plaster but decided to transition to rubber. The vape was a relatively easy mold to make as I held the form into alginate and cast it in rubber. My thumb was at first cast in plaster in rubber molds I was using for another project. However, I also wanted a rubber cast of the thumb. I made a mold in alginate with my thumb. I accidentally left the alginate mold uncasted overnight and the next morning it shrunk slightly. I cast in rubber anyway and ended up liking the smaller almost baby-like thumb I achieved over my original plan.
