Games Alcoholics Play

Games Alcoholics Play

The most lucid account of the patterns of problem drinkers ever set down in a book! Drawing on soundly tested theories of transactional behavior, Dr. Steiner describes the three distinct types of alcoholics -- Drunk and Proud, Lush and Wino -- and their games, scripts and rackets: Debtor... Kick... Cops and robbers... Plastic Woman... Captain Marvel...Ain't it awful... Schlemiel... Look how hard I've tried... and others. His approach is the single most useful tool for dealing with alcoholism since A.A. and the Twelve Steps, and offers the first real help -- and hope -- for problem drinkers and their families. id account of the patterns of problem drinkers ever set down in a book! Drawing on soundly tested theories of transactional behavior, Dr. Steiner describes the three distinct types of alcoholics -- Drunk and Proud, Lush and Wino -- and their games, scripts and rackets: Debtor... Kick... Cops and robbers... Plastic Woman... Captain Marvel...Ain't it awful... Schlemiel... Look how hard I've tried... and others. His approach is the single most useful tool for dealing with alcoholism since A.A. and the Twelve Steps, and offers the first real help -- and hope -- for problem drinkers and their families. The most lucid account of the patterns of problem drinkers ever set down in a book! Drawing on soundly tested theories of transactional behavior, Dr. Steiner describes the three distinct types of alcoholics -- Drunk and Proud, Lush and Wino -- and their games, scripts and rackets: Debtor... Kick... Cops and robbers... Plastic Woman... Captain Marvel...Ain't it awful... Schlemiel... Look how hard I've tried... and others. His approach is the single most useful tool for dealing with alcoholism since A.A. and the Twelve Steps, and offers the first real help -- and hope -- for problem drinkers and their families. Claude M. Steiner, PhD , was a psychotherapist, author, and founder of Radical Psychiatry. He graduated from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, with a doctorate in clinical psychology and was a founding member of the International Transactional Analysis Association with his friend and mentor, Eric Berne. His works include Games Alcoholics Play, Scripts People Love, and A Warm Fuzzy Tale. He died in 2017. Introduction   THERE IS powerful and pervasive evidence that alcoholics seem driven, whether sober or drinking, by an inner compulsion for self-destruction. An alcoholic sober for years will commonly return to his previous state of alcoholism regardless of how long he has stayed sober. For Alcoholics Anonymous (AA), this is evidence that alcoholism is incurable, a disease that lurks in the depths of the personality, waiting to spring forth in full strength at the mere consumption of a single drink. Persons who believe in the AA approach feel that “once an alcoholic, always an alcoholic,” and recovered alcoholics in AA consider themselves alcoholics regardless of how long they have been sober.   To date, AA has achieved more success in the treatment of alcoholism, when the criterion is sobriety, than any other approach. The group’s wisdom about alcoholism is considerable. One of Alcoholics Anonymous’ official publications states:   We alcoholics are men and women who have lost the ability to control our drinking. We know that no real alcoholic ever regains control. All of us felt at times that we were regaining control … [but] we are convinced to a man that alcoholics of our type are in the grip of a progressive illness. Over any period of time we get worse, never better … Physicians who are familiar with alcoholism agree that there is no such thing as making a normal drinker out of an alcoholic.   According to the Manual on Alcoholism of the American Medical Association, alcoholism is a   “ … highly complex illness … characterized by preoccupation with alcohol and loss of control over its consumption such as to lead usually to intoxication when drinking is begun; by chronicity; by progression; and by tendency toward relapse.”   To say that alcoholism is an illness implies that it is “… an interruption or perversion of function of any of the organs, an acquired morbid change in any tissue of an organism, or throughout an organism, with characteristic symptoms caused by specific micro-organismal alterations.”   The above definition, however, does not seem to describe a large number of bona fide alcoholics. For instance, can it be said convincingly that a year after his last drink and the day before his next binge a young alcoholic is suffering from an interruption or perversion of the function of an organ or that there is an identifiable morbid change in any of his bodily tissue? Defining alcoholism as an illness implies that its treatment is basically a function of physical medicine. Further, defining it as a progressive or chronic illness implies that its treatment should be approached, as the Manual recommends,   “… in much the same way as are other chronic and relapsing me