ABSTRACT
Problem drinking is one of those sensitive areas, like politics and religion, where protagonists holding irreconcilable views take great pleasure in lampooning straw men and mauling the carcasses of dogs long since dead. During the last 50 years several schools of psychology and many conflicting theories of human behaviour have looked for popular support. In their time, psychoanalysis, behaviourism, biological psychology and gestalt psychology have all held sway. Alcohol is consumed by the social drinker and the problem drinker because of the expectation that a pleasant consequence will follow, or an unpleasant consequence will be avoided. Since alcohol alters the state of the central nervous system, it has been suggested that an adaptive or homeostatic process gradually develops in order to counteract alcohol’s effects. The proposition that a strong disposition to drink alcohol is associated with an extensive history of daily withdrawal-relief drinking received strong confirmation from the experimental studies concerned with priming effects.
