ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the folk, or lay, theory of alcoholism. The alcoholic’s lay theory of alcoholism seldom is acceptable to the significant others that make up his or her world. The lay theory of alcoholism and heavy drinking is both a theory of denial and a phenomenological theory of cause and effect; that is, it is a theory of temporality and the drinker’s place in the flow of inner subjective time. Although certainly based on “common sense notions of human behaviour and social arrangements” the lay theory of alcoholism incorporates all of the elements of accounts, disclaimers, techniques of neutralization, and quasi-theories of problematic situations into a workable theory of temporality and personal cause. The problem drinker constructs a personal theory of drinking behaviour in the midst of a social, scientific, and political dialogue that surrounds alcoholism in American society.
