Alcoholics Anonymous as Treatment and as Ideology,
Tournier RE, Journal
of Studies on Alcohol, Vol. 40 (3), 230-239, 1979
“Since
its founding in 1935, Alcoholics Anonymous has come to dominate
alcoholism both as an ideology and as method, and has successfully
established itself as the primary representative of alcoholics and
recovered alcoholics in our society. A.A. has come to serve as a
major vehicle for defining alcoholism and alcoholism treatment in
this country, and, in conjunction with the National Council on
Alcoholism (N.C.A. ), members of A.A.
have become the most important lobby advocating the now generally
accepted disease concept of alcoholism. As a result of four decades
of effort, A.A. has acquired a moral ascendancy which has enabled
many of its members to be preeminently successful in asserting a
claim to be the voice of the alcoholic, a claim which has never been
effectively challenged. So successful have A.A.
members been in proselytizing their ideas that their assumptions
about the nature of alcohol dependence have virtually been accepted
as fact by most of those in the field. It is significant that when
Pattison et al. (1) seek to define the traditional model of
alcoholism, they regarded A.A. and interpretations of A.A.
perspectives as being among the most important influences in the
field and add to the list only Jellinek's disease model.”
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