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This paper examines the assumptions, conditions and consequences of employing the concept of denial in the identification and treatment of alcoholism. The discussion involves 1) describing the prevailing conception of alcoholic denial as a psychological construct; 2) analyzing the nature of the human puzzle to which the concept of denial is a socially constructed solution; 3) articulating the ubiquity of denial in everyday life; and 4) describing the implications of utilizing the concept of denial for personal and social control.

Personal effects drinkers seem more likely than nonpersonal effects drinkers to benefit from an alcoholism treatment program emphasizing abstinence and self-actualization.Why people drink alcoholic beverages has long fascinated students of human behavior. While social scientists have paid very little attention to the motivational factors involved in most of the typical activities of people, drinking, while rather typical itself, has usually been viewed as an activity requiring some sort of motivational understanding. More often than not, it is presupposed that there is usually something better or more useful for people to be doing than drinking. Therefore, in order to understand the phenomenon of drinking, it is believed that we must account for the motivational factors involved. While much of what people ordinarily do is not open to question, why people drink alcoholic beverages appears to be unquestionably questionable.

Intensive interviews with women married to alcoholics reveal a taken-for-granted use of the term "codependent" to describe the spouses of alcoholics, despite considerable definitional ambiguity as to what co-dependency is. Although most of the wives agreed that codependency involves caretaking behavior and exists by virtue of their association with an alcoholic, they disagreed widely as to its impact on the self, its locus as personal or social, its disease status, its longevity, and whether or not it is distinctive to alcohol-complicated marriages. Self-labeling and identification occur through retrospective reinterpretation of their lives with their alcoholic husbands, guided and legitimated by rehabilitation personnel. These reconstructions then serve as self-evidence of codependency. In challenging the notion of codependency as an objective condition, we emphasize the social construction and application of this condition and, in doing so, suggest that there has been a twofold process of deviantizing the women's identities and medicalizing this new-found deviance. While this situation perpetuates a traditional view of women as more passive than active, a more serious possibility is its affinity to a historical view of wives of alcoholics as pathological.

This study reports on the subjective evaluations of treatment by 162 patients who had been treated and discharged with staff approval at Hazelden Rehabilitation Center. At 2 years following treatment, these patients were asked to comment on what they considered the most important aspects of their treatment experience. Four principal groupings of comments emerged as being most important: (1) Formal Hazelden activities, i.e., lectures, counseling; (2) Inner-directed learning, i.e., understanding, insight; (3) Informal Hazelden activities, i.e., personal friendships, fellowship; and (4) General learning, i.e., effect of alcohol on mind and body. The implications of these findings are discussed in terms of the utility of evaluating treatment effectiveness through the subjective judgments of the treated patients.

This paper is a discussion of the relationship between dramaturgical social psychology and the study of collective behavior. Initially, the relevance of the traditional conceptualization of collective behavior is examined with reference to the questions of the dramaturgical model. The contributions of the collective behaviorists to dramaturgical social psychology and general sociology are then specified.