Normal Drunks

About the cause & cure of drunkenness doctors know little. But recently many of them have swung around to the theory that every drunkard is a spineless neurotic, driven to drink by some psychic gnawing.

Last week this theory got a bucket of cold water thrown right in its face. In the New England Journal of Medicine, hard-headed Psychiatrists Robert Edward Fleming and Kenneth James Tillotson denied that there is any such thing as an "alcoholic personality." Anyone, they said, "can become an alcoholic if he drinks long enough and heavily enough."

The doctors had followed like hawks the zigzag progress of 124 drunkards (100 male, 24 female) in McLean Hospital, Waverly, Mass. "A more variegated collection of personalities," they wrote, "would be difficult to assemble: some were sociable, some seclusive, some stubborn, some easily influenced, some cyclothymic [manic-depressive], some schizoid [ingrown] , some intelligent, some dull and so on, ad infinitum; the only trait these people seemed to have in common was addiction to the excessive use of alcohol." Why they drank, the doctors found it impossible to discover.

The feelings of inferiority which plagued a number of the patients were caused by "wife's, parents' and friends' exhortations, threats and so forth, and it is, we believe, these influences which . . . are largely responsible for those personality trends which alcoholic patients have been supposed to possess in common."

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