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- The Common Sense of Drinking (1930)
The Common Sense of Drinking (1930)
- By Misc Author
- Published 01/2/2007
- Alcohol
-
Rating:
Unfortunately we can give no scientific explanation for the creation of alcoholics. Exceptions to any closed system of causal relationship would stare us in the face at every turn.
The study of many inebriates, however, has given definite clues to certain features which have a distinct bearing on the majority of situations, so that within limits we can recognize the forces that have an influence on the shaping of an alcoholic career.
The first question to be considered is inheritance. To what extent are parents responsible for the development of this trait in their offspring through the transmission of the germ plasm?
Without going into statistics a cursory examination of this situation shows, first, that among the children of alcoholics there is seldom more than one in a family with this propensity.
Secondly, that a much greater number have children who drink normally and in no sense as drunkards. Conversely, a great many alcoholics are born of parents who are temperate in their use of alcohol, in some cases being total abstainers.
This would seem to indicate that a man does not acquire chronic alcoholism from his father or mother.
Many inebriates use inheritance as an excuse, because it has become a sort of prejudice or credo to do so, but when they are carefully
questioned they do not consider that they have any inborn taste or craving for liquor, once they have completely sobered up.
At all events, whatever the validity of inheritance as a cause, it has been definitely proved over and over again that it offers no insurmountable obstacle, or, for that matter, any additional impediment, to the overcoming of the habit once a man has definitely made up his mind to do so.
What unquestionably is inherited is a nervous system which proves to be nonresistant to alcohol, though this same nervous system is more often acquired from neurotic parents who have expressed their nervousness in some other manner than that of chronic intoxication.
Just as a disposition to weak lungs is inherited and not tuberculosis itself, so I believe is a nervous system transmitted which is highly susceptible to alcohol and which may manifest itself in a variety of symptoms regardless of the original manner of expression.
An investigation of the inheritance of alcoholics indicates in almost every case a neurotic history at least on one side of the family, and often to an extreme degree.
While parents may be exonerated as far as the direct inheritance of alcoholism is concerned, they cannot escape the blame for an injudicious early environment which they themselves have created.
For many parents the bringing up of a child should require study and instruction from those who have made a business of treating children from the psychiatric point of view, particularly if the child presents difficult problems at an early age.
Because a woman has had six or seven children does not mean that she has been an intelligent mother, as the lives of many members of large families bear witness.
Mothers and fathers with the best intentions in the world can ruin a child's future because of a silly superstition that nature endowed all women, and some men, with a superior instinct for performing a very difficult task -- namely, the efficient rearing of children.
I am reminded of Dr. Austin F. Riggs's statement in his book, Intelligent Living: "The relation of grown-ups to children is second to none in importance, whether the grownups be parents, foster parents, or teachers. Obviously the future of civilization depends upon its children. The responsibility which they present to their parents and all other grown-ups is both immediate and absolutely non-transferable."
Certain features in the lives of many patients have stood out so clearly that it is pertinent to set forth what seem to be a few but indisputable instances of bad bringing up.
Too much prudishness and restraint either break a child's spirit so that he is never free from parental authority or, as a slightly better choice of two evils, drive him into open revolt.
His mind must either become a vassal to that of his more dominating parent, or he must over-assert himself to prevent this surrender. If to preserve his own personality he has been on the defensive with his family, he may in later life become unconsciously hostile to the
restrictions of society without being in the least a misanthrope, and may feel that he is satisfying a morbid desire for self-assertion (freedom) by an over-indulgence in alcohol.
The spoiled child, on the other hand, receives no discipline at all, and so is unprepared to meet the world on anything like a give-and-take basis. Confronted with reality and finding it unfriendly compared to the unrestrained solicitude of his doting parents, he has a tendency to seek refuge in a parent substitute, something that will dull his hyper-sensitiveness and make him feel in harmony once more with an unsympathetic environment.
It is for this reason that the majority of alcoholics are recruited from the ranks of only children and youngest sons.
In his study, The Structure and Meaning of Psycho-analysis, Dr. William Healy makes an interesting observation. "Rigel," he says, "makes much of a matter which comes frequently to the front in the modem child guidance clinic. He says that all sorts of considerations make it clear that normal psychic development depends upon the gradual emergence from a condition of parental authority.
"Failure in such a development will result in a relatively feeble adult personality. More dangers lie in the direction of too great rather than too little dependence on the efforts and guidance of the parents or their
substitutes. However too sudden or too complete revolt from parental guidance and tradition may be productive of a bias against every kind of authority and convention."
Again, if the parents have been of equal influence and have taken opposite attitudes, or if the more influential has frequently changed his or her attitude, the individual grows up with a twofold ideal of self. He is of unstable temperament because he does not know whether to think of himself as a saint or a sinner, a success or a failure.
One minute he has overconfidence and the next none at all. Now he may be elated for no particular reason, and now unduly depressed. These feelings may be semiconscious or they may be entirely unconscious and only demonstrate themselves in behavior.
However, when confronted by situations calling for mature judgment or courage, a person brought up in the manner outlined is unequal to the occasion and, having already tasted alcohol as a matter of social custom, he flies to it as a refuge, knowing that for the time being he can have the courage and poise that he craves and that temporarily he will have compensation for his deficiencies.
Brutality, neglect, and the deliberate teaching of pernicious doctrines are so obviously detrimental to a child's welfare that they do not merit discussion.
Rather, I shall conclude this all-important phase of parental influence by summoning to my argument four important quotations, the first two from Dr. Karl A. Menninger's The Human Mind and the latter two from Dr. Alfred Adler's Understanding Human Nature.
"The neurotic personality," says Menninger, "is one whose primitive instincts have been modified to meet social demands only with painful difficulty"
This difficulty arises because of the prejudices, misapprehensions, shocks, rebukes, experiences, and parental examples of early childhood. Hence the neurotic personality is very definitely a product of the childhood environment and depends largely on the individual's parents"
"The man was reliving a childhood situation in which fear had been instilled into him by an over-anxious fear-ridden mother, who robbed her son of his self-confidence. Or it may have been a hard-boiled, blustering, storming father, well-meaning perhaps, but intimidating. Some parents intimidate by silent disapproval, others by example, and still others by attack. Fears are educated into us, and can, if we wish, be educated out."
"It will be difficult," says Adler, "to mobilize a child who has grown up in a family where there has never been a proper development of the feeling of tenderness. His whole attitude in life will be a gesture of escape, and evasion of all love and tenderness"
"Education accompanied by too much tenderness is as pernicious as education which proceeds without it. A pampered child, as much as a hated one, labors under great difficulties. Where it is instituted, a desire for tenderness arises which grows beyond all boundaries; the result is that a petted child binds himself to one or more persons and refuses to allow himself to be detached."
The study of many inebriates, however, has given definite clues to certain features which have a distinct bearing on the majority of situations, so that within limits we can recognize the forces that have an influence on the shaping of an alcoholic career.
The first question to be considered is inheritance. To what extent are parents responsible for the development of this trait in their offspring through the transmission of the germ plasm?
Without going into statistics a cursory examination of this situation shows, first, that among the children of alcoholics there is seldom more than one in a family with this propensity.
Secondly, that a much greater number have children who drink normally and in no sense as drunkards. Conversely, a great many alcoholics are born of parents who are temperate in their use of alcohol, in some cases being total abstainers.
This would seem to indicate that a man does not acquire chronic alcoholism from his father or mother.
Many inebriates use inheritance as an excuse, because it has become a sort of prejudice or credo to do so, but when they are carefully
questioned they do not consider that they have any inborn taste or craving for liquor, once they have completely sobered up.
At all events, whatever the validity of inheritance as a cause, it has been definitely proved over and over again that it offers no insurmountable obstacle, or, for that matter, any additional impediment, to the overcoming of the habit once a man has definitely made up his mind to do so.
What unquestionably is inherited is a nervous system which proves to be nonresistant to alcohol, though this same nervous system is more often acquired from neurotic parents who have expressed their nervousness in some other manner than that of chronic intoxication.
Just as a disposition to weak lungs is inherited and not tuberculosis itself, so I believe is a nervous system transmitted which is highly susceptible to alcohol and which may manifest itself in a variety of symptoms regardless of the original manner of expression.
An investigation of the inheritance of alcoholics indicates in almost every case a neurotic history at least on one side of the family, and often to an extreme degree.
While parents may be exonerated as far as the direct inheritance of alcoholism is concerned, they cannot escape the blame for an injudicious early environment which they themselves have created.
For many parents the bringing up of a child should require study and instruction from those who have made a business of treating children from the psychiatric point of view, particularly if the child presents difficult problems at an early age.
Because a woman has had six or seven children does not mean that she has been an intelligent mother, as the lives of many members of large families bear witness.
Mothers and fathers with the best intentions in the world can ruin a child's future because of a silly superstition that nature endowed all women, and some men, with a superior instinct for performing a very difficult task -- namely, the efficient rearing of children.
I am reminded of Dr. Austin F. Riggs's statement in his book, Intelligent Living: "The relation of grown-ups to children is second to none in importance, whether the grownups be parents, foster parents, or teachers. Obviously the future of civilization depends upon its children. The responsibility which they present to their parents and all other grown-ups is both immediate and absolutely non-transferable."
Certain features in the lives of many patients have stood out so clearly that it is pertinent to set forth what seem to be a few but indisputable instances of bad bringing up.
Too much prudishness and restraint either break a child's spirit so that he is never free from parental authority or, as a slightly better choice of two evils, drive him into open revolt.
His mind must either become a vassal to that of his more dominating parent, or he must over-assert himself to prevent this surrender. If to preserve his own personality he has been on the defensive with his family, he may in later life become unconsciously hostile to the
restrictions of society without being in the least a misanthrope, and may feel that he is satisfying a morbid desire for self-assertion (freedom) by an over-indulgence in alcohol.
The spoiled child, on the other hand, receives no discipline at all, and so is unprepared to meet the world on anything like a give-and-take basis. Confronted with reality and finding it unfriendly compared to the unrestrained solicitude of his doting parents, he has a tendency to seek refuge in a parent substitute, something that will dull his hyper-sensitiveness and make him feel in harmony once more with an unsympathetic environment.
It is for this reason that the majority of alcoholics are recruited from the ranks of only children and youngest sons.
In his study, The Structure and Meaning of Psycho-analysis, Dr. William Healy makes an interesting observation. "Rigel," he says, "makes much of a matter which comes frequently to the front in the modem child guidance clinic. He says that all sorts of considerations make it clear that normal psychic development depends upon the gradual emergence from a condition of parental authority.
"Failure in such a development will result in a relatively feeble adult personality. More dangers lie in the direction of too great rather than too little dependence on the efforts and guidance of the parents or their
substitutes. However too sudden or too complete revolt from parental guidance and tradition may be productive of a bias against every kind of authority and convention."
Again, if the parents have been of equal influence and have taken opposite attitudes, or if the more influential has frequently changed his or her attitude, the individual grows up with a twofold ideal of self. He is of unstable temperament because he does not know whether to think of himself as a saint or a sinner, a success or a failure.
One minute he has overconfidence and the next none at all. Now he may be elated for no particular reason, and now unduly depressed. These feelings may be semiconscious or they may be entirely unconscious and only demonstrate themselves in behavior.
However, when confronted by situations calling for mature judgment or courage, a person brought up in the manner outlined is unequal to the occasion and, having already tasted alcohol as a matter of social custom, he flies to it as a refuge, knowing that for the time being he can have the courage and poise that he craves and that temporarily he will have compensation for his deficiencies.
Brutality, neglect, and the deliberate teaching of pernicious doctrines are so obviously detrimental to a child's welfare that they do not merit discussion.
Rather, I shall conclude this all-important phase of parental influence by summoning to my argument four important quotations, the first two from Dr. Karl A. Menninger's The Human Mind and the latter two from Dr. Alfred Adler's Understanding Human Nature.
"The neurotic personality," says Menninger, "is one whose primitive instincts have been modified to meet social demands only with painful difficulty"
This difficulty arises because of the prejudices, misapprehensions, shocks, rebukes, experiences, and parental examples of early childhood. Hence the neurotic personality is very definitely a product of the childhood environment and depends largely on the individual's parents"
"The man was reliving a childhood situation in which fear had been instilled into him by an over-anxious fear-ridden mother, who robbed her son of his self-confidence. Or it may have been a hard-boiled, blustering, storming father, well-meaning perhaps, but intimidating. Some parents intimidate by silent disapproval, others by example, and still others by attack. Fears are educated into us, and can, if we wish, be educated out."
"It will be difficult," says Adler, "to mobilize a child who has grown up in a family where there has never been a proper development of the feeling of tenderness. His whole attitude in life will be a gesture of escape, and evasion of all love and tenderness"
"Education accompanied by too much tenderness is as pernicious as education which proceeds without it. A pampered child, as much as a hated one, labors under great difficulties. Where it is instituted, a desire for tenderness arises which grows beyond all boundaries; the result is that a petted child binds himself to one or more persons and refuses to allow himself to be detached."
