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One Response to “How would a behaviorist and a psychoanalyst differ in their explanations of the causes of alcoholism?”

1. Blue Hues Says:
   July 14th, 2010 at 6:16 pm

   Hi. A good question, but not too difficult, on the surface, to explain. You know, of course, about these theories. I won’t go into detail here.

   Firstly, alcoholics have a dependent personality. This is something Freudians see developing from an overactive oral fixation. No it’s not just to wet the lips, it’s the need to have a crutch, to escape from reality, or deal with it in a different way. It’s also called self medicating, but it is of course unhealthy in it’s side effects to the nth degree.

   A behaviourist, as you know, see’s behavioural patterns as learned. That is someone in the drinkers environment exhibited undesirable behaviour that he emulated and, because of the rewarding feeling of being drunk, went on to become an alcoholic. That would be the social modeling theory. Also, a classical conditioning behaviorist would just say the drunk feeling rewarded someone into becoming an alcoholic on it’s own.