CONCEPT
Therapeutic Adoption
Stiegler's prescriptive practice — not refusal, not uncritical acceptance, but the constant, vigilant, never-completed care that maximizes the remedy while minimizing the poison in every pharmakon.
Therapeutic adoption is Stiegler's name for the practice adequate to the pharmacological condition. Because the pharmakon cannot be separated into pure remedy and pure poison, neither refusal nor celebration constitutes an adequate response. What is required is the cultivation of a specific practice — analogous to the physician's care in calibrating a dose, the helmsman's navigation between dangers — that manages the dual nature of the technical object across the duration of its use. Therapeutic adoption cannot be codified as rules. It is a form of practical wisdom developed only through the specific attentiveness to one's own pharmacological relationship with the tool.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The concept responds to the limitation of both the Luddite response and the triumphalist embrace. Refusal pretends one can stand outside the pharmacological condition that constitutes human existence as technical. Uncritical acceptance pretends the poison does not exist. Therapeutic adoption refuses both pretenses and installs itself in the difficulty of managing what cannot be separated.
Segal's practice provides