GEORGE MIKES, the Hungarian writer, spent most of his life in this country, observing us minutely and introducing us humorously to our own peculiarities. He summed up the mainland European’s opinion of our sex lives with the line: “Continental people have a sex life; the English have hot water bottles”. The poet Philip Larkin confirmed Mikes’s dictate by suggesting that having sex was “an activity a bit like asking someone to blow your nose for you ”.

Those to whom sex is an alternative to a hot water bottle are unlikely to be addicted to it, but the Larkin approach could, in some people, be the basis of what is politely referred to as love addiction, but what is in fact addiction to sex. Lovesickness is quite different from an addiction to sex — the former was first recognised as medical diagnosis by the Ancient Greeks. However, Hippocrates’ own description of love sickness is different from the Renaissance love sickness and corresponds to what is now known as erotomania, often the basic cause of stalking. Hippocrates stressed the obsessional and delusional nature of the condition, but didn’t have the necessary antipsychotic drugs to relieve its symptoms.

By the Middle Ages the descriptions of lovesickness, still a favoured diagnosis, were no longer equated with erotomania and stalking but used to describe the devastation to the spirit wrought by the first manifestations of romantic love during its early, lustful stage.

Addiction to alcohol and drugs is well recognised. It is classified as a substance use disorder. Although compulsive gambling is accepted by the public as an addiction, most medical authorities include it among personality disorders (impulse control disorders). There are many weirder personality quirks that make the press from time to time, are commented upon by clinical psychologists and are then forgotten until another incident brings them to the public’s attention. Some are described as evidence of addiction, others are thought to be manifestations of impulse control disorders. The purists include, for example, among this latter group dromomania. People with dromomania have an intermittent compulsion to travel and get relief from the increasing sense of tension at home and office only once they are on their next journey. Others have periodic irresistible impulses to go on a shopping spree, to steal, to set light to property (pyromania) or to twist their hair until it falls out (trichotillomania).

But what about sex addiction? An American organisation, LifeWorks, is setting up a health clinic in Surrey to treat sex and other addictions. It claims that people with an addictive personality use sex as a form of home (or presumably, in many cases, away) medication. They claim that sex releases neurotransmitters in the body that produce a natural high, and that this dulls the emotional pain in their lives. The constant need to prescribe for this ever-present pain can lead to a perpetual cycle powered by the compulsion to seek new partners and new thrills. It suggests that the internet and sex stimulate the same part of the brain as do cocaine and other substances.

Most doctors consider that promiscuity is not so much a question of the number of partners but of motivation. They are suspicious of sex pursued only for physical gratification. Many psychological or psychiatric troubles have promiscuity without any commitment or regard for the partner numbered among their symptoms. Nor does the LifeWorks analysis of sex addiction, in reality an addiction to orgasm, separate a great, some would say excessive, demand for sex within a relationship from sex with all and sundry. The ideal established relationship is said to follow a pattern of 18 months to two years of blissful, lustful, romantic love followed by seven or eight years of nesting love, when there is a deep commitment and preoccupation with joint interests. This should lead to a lifetime of loyal friendship. The activation of these stages can be illustrated on the functional MRI scanning of the brain.

LIFEWORKS WARNING SIGNS