The Alcoholic Bout as an Acting out

In this paper the alcoholic bout is viewed as an acting out and several themes are considered. The first part of the paper focuses on the drinking bout as a repetitive re-enactment of the nursing experience, a hypothesis substantiated by data about the infancy and early childhood of the patients as recalled by their mothers. The last part of the paper considers the drinking bout as analogous to the traumatic dream and to sleepwalking, and thus the themes of motility and return to mother are integrated with the concept of acting out.

The data are selections from the case histories of patients studies in an alcoholic research project which has been in progress for the past ten years (vide infra). Basic information on each patient consists of a physical and a psychiatric evaluation and a social history. Social histories were also obtained from the spouse of each patient and, in some cases, from the patient's mother. Over seven hundred patients have been evaluated in the study, approximately twenty per cent of them women. Over one hundred patient-spouse couples have been seen in concurrent individual long-term treatment by a psychiatrist and a psychiatric social worker. In half of the cases, the alcoholic