ABSTRACT
Caroline Knapp's memoir provides innumerable personal articulations of a fantasy life wherein transformations of self are magically rendered by alcohol. The idioms referring to the effects of intoxication suggest why drug use and recidivism continue to increase. Charles Bukowski was a writer who eloquently conveyed the function of alcohol in providing him with a makeshift bridge to attaining what Bollas described as a magical transformation of self. Ernest Becker was among the first to develop a robust theory implicating addiction in humankind's denial of death, but others have followed him in describing omnipotent wish fulfillment as a means to transcend human limitations. Many addiction theories that followed continued to see the drug as a substitute for something else; however, theorists began to consider the drug as a replacement for the loss or absence of significant others in the user's early relational world.
