ABSTRACT
There has been much speculation about the effects of the family on al coholism. The personality structure of the spouses of alcoholics has been the focus of many early studies. Based on psychoanalytic concepts, the disturbed personality hypothesis was introduced in the 1930s to explain alcoholism in the male on the basis of neurotic conflicts of the spouse. The model was hard to test empirically, and those studies that did attempt to test it (assessing interpersonal perception, dependency, dominance, and general measures of psychopathology) produced conflicting results (Drewery & Rae, 1969; Kogan, Fordyce, & Jackson, 1963; Kogan & Jackson, 1963; Lanyon, 1973; Mitchell, 1959; Paolino & McCrady, 1977). A variant of the disturbed personality hypothesis is the decompensation hypothesis, which states that the spouse of an alcoholic will decompensate when the alcoholic successfully becomes sober. There is only limited support for this hypothesis, and the fable of the neurotic woman who chooses an alcoholic to fulfill her own neurotic needs is oversimplified; these earlier typologies of alcoholics and their spouses have little validity. The only conclusion that can be drawn with certainty from the existing data is that the common characteristic of spouses of alcoholics is that they are married to alcoholics.
