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Within recent years there has appeared a series of books designed to appeal to popular interests in the matter of alcoholism. Many of such books have served to give a descriptive picture of the alcoholic's reactions to alcohol and to the environment, but they have contributed little to a better understanding of the problem.
Strecker and Chambers, on the basis of extensive clinical experience, have incorporated a clinically scientific attitude in their approach to this most difficult field. In the first place, they emphasize that it is not desirable to think of all alcoholic individuals as presenting a similar problem. 'Alcoholism is an illness'; rather, the alcoholic individual is an ill person, ill in the sense of possessing a personality that cannot sustain a high level of adjustment over a continuous span of years. Alcohol strips off the 'veneer of adulthood' and causes self-critique to disappear; 'alcohol is utilized as an escape from the responsibility and burden of mature life and its decisions', leading to infantile or primitive, archaic behaviour. Not all alcoholics, however, regress to the same level; some regress to the level of puerilism, others only to that of adolescence.
But there are other qualities that serve to distinguish members of the group, and which help to determine amenability to treatment. When abnormal alcoholism is associated with a frank mental disorder, or with feeblemindedness or with that large group of individuals classified as 'constitutional psychopathic inferior' or with grave personality defects, the outlook, with the type of therapy recommended by the authors, is unfavourable. Moreover, their plan of treatment may not be expected to act favourably when the alcoholic is of the aggressive type, 'temperamentally anti-social and inconsiderate', or when he is impulsive, impatient, restless; or 'adynamic', that is, dull, listless, ambitionless; or when his fundamental reactions are primitive, that is, instinctual.
There is one type