Is Alcoholism a Mother Trauma #2

By Atom Bergstrom

Atom’s Blog

Alcoholism and drug abuse “would suggest a connexion between the ego-ideal and the omnipotent fantasies of early infancy when the baby fantasies himself in the role of an omnipotent ideal figure, or as possessing an ideal object or part-object, often the breast or the penis.” (Herbert A. Rosenfeld, 1965)

You can be sure alcoholism has something to do with the above, either with a bottle of booze symbolizing a breast or a baby bottle, and a penis being a displacement of the same.

How can we tell for sure?

Not with years of pseudo-analysis, left to the devices of mainstream psychiatrists/psychologists, often leading deeper into the abyss with a lighter wallet.

Fortunately, Body Dowsing can tell for sure, and it’s as easy to learn as A.B.C.

The Cornerstone Technique is on a par with learning how to text, something 73 percent of the 83 percent of Americans who own cell phones have learned to do with grace and ease.

So, until we set aside the hours to learn how to Body Dowse, let’s return to some fairly reliable generalities.

Jerome David Levin (Introduction to Alcoholism Counseling: A Bio-Psycho-Social Approach, Second Edition, 1990, 1995) wrote …

“According to Freud, infantile masturbation is both compelling and guilt inducing. Often it is forbidden by parents or other caretakers, and the child comes to internalize the prohibition. A struggle ensues between a wish for instinctual gratification and the internalized prohibition. The struggle not to masturbate is almost always lost; the pleasures of genital, or pregenital (oral and anal), masturbation are too great. However, the return to masturbation is accompanied by guilt and the fall in self-esteem that accompanies the failure to carry through a resolution. Masturbation can then be used as a way of assuaging the anxiety, and a vicious cycle is set up. This certainly sounds familiar and is indeed the pattern of much addictive behavior. From this point of view, later addictions are not only displacements and reenactments of the original addiction to masturbation but also are attempts to master, through repetition, the traumatic loss of self-esteem that followed the failure to live up to the resolution not to masturbate. Here Freud was being very much a man of the 19th century, which was obsessed with masturbation and the alleged damage it caused.”

(Do psychiatrists really think that all that colossal cultural, medical, and scholastic energy that went into suppressing masturbation throughout the 19th Century just vanished like the clouds parting before the sun in both the 20th and 21st Century?)

According to the same source …

“It is now believed that infantile masturbation plays an important role in the process of separation-individualization and that it is a vehicle through which the child establishes autonomy and confirms the cohesion of self. If this is the case and later addictions are symbolic reenactments of the first addiction, then all addiction must serve the same purposes. The fact that addiction to alcohol fails in these purposes is not relevant to the present argument.”

According to Alcohol and Temperance in Modern History: An International Encyclopedia, Vol. 1 (edited by Jack S. Blocker, David M. Fahey, & Ian R. Tyrrell), 2002 …

“American men, like men in most societies, drink more than women. Men account for 70 percent of alcohol consumed.”

According to the same source …

“Going to a bar to take one’s first drink has been a rite of passage for many young males. Participation in bar culture confirms manhood, and conversation about sports, women, or politics reinforces the ‘manliness’ of the setting. Talk is about victory or conquest, real or imagined. Although drinking does not itself constitute a form of power, the use of alcohol can be a substitute for power. Drinking often occurs in proximity to power.”

(To Be Continued)
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