Forget fornicating monks and American presidents. For a lesson on lust in its purest, most pathological form, think drugs. Think cocaine, heroin and nicotine—and how slavishly addicts crave them. That, at any rate, is the advice of Anna Rose Childress. And to be fair to this University of Pennsylvania psychologist, she does—unlike the monks and presidents—practise what she preaches. For years, Childress has been studying the intense cravings of cocaine addicts, trying to work out what these feelings really consist of in the brain. Think of strong sexual desire and multiply it ten thousandfold, some of her patients have told her. Now Childress is calling their bluff. She and her colleagues are trying to find out whether the urge for drugs really is like the urge for sex—or whether we automatically use sex as the benchmark to describe all our desires.
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