Stanton Peele
Morristown, New Jersey

Abstract

The conventional wisdom among clinicians and others who study alcoholism is that the disease of alcoholism takes on an independent life and must be understood in its own terms — as a self-perpetuating, uncontrollable urge to overdrink. Personality characteristics of the drinker, the social setting of his or her imbibing, and other life events are irrelevant to this equation. The biographer, on the other hand, comes to a subject's drinking behavior from quite another direction, seeing alcoholism or drunkenness as a response to persistent personality and situational conflicts and other social and cultural pressures. This view — at once "ecological" and psychodynamic — is in fact the hallmark of good biography, for to dismiss overdrinking as some accidental trait in the actor's make-up would be to abrogate the biographer's job of deciphering a subject's life themes. The case of James Boswell is used here as a template for the life study of drunkenness.

Introduction

In his widely heralded work, The Natural History of Alcoholism, psychiatrist George E. Vaillant (1983) rejected the idea that alcoholism is a response to inner conflicts the person experiences, or to psychological, situational, and interpersonal pressures of any sort. In taking this stance, Vaillant has adopted the currently popular "disease" mythology of alcoholism (Peele, 1984), which holds that alcoholism represents an inner urge to overdrink which is brought on in the alcoholic by exposure to alcohol. Originally presented by Alcoholics Anonymous after the demise of Prohibition in the United States, the disease ideology actually picked up the view of alcoholism promulgated by the nineteenth century temperance movement, with the major difference that alcoholism was no longer seen to be an inevitable consequence of habitual drinking, but rather was thought to occur only in those people with an inbred alcoholic tendency.

The idea that alcoholism is a disease was officially adopted by the American Medical Association in 1956, and has since become standard wisdom in the treatment field, in media announcements and pubic service broadcasts, and in the stylized public confessions of the many public figures who have come out of the closet to reveal that they are alcoholic. What is often missing from these accounts is a sense of the place the person's overdrinking has in his or her personal ecology, that is, the role of drinking in mediating internal and external life pressures. The power of the current disease ideology is made all the more evident by the fact that most people tend naturally to assume that alcoholics drink for emotional reasons and due to personal difficulties, a view that disease proponents attack as representing an outmoded "moral model" of alcoholism. The disease theory of alcoholism has in large part been successful in discrediting this opposing perspective, at least within the alcoholism field. Indeed, in an earlier classic work, Adaptation to Life, Vaillant (1977) himself took the approach that alcoholism was a psychological defense, a position he explicitly recanted in his later work due to his involvement in treating alcoholics and his association with AA members.

Biographers, on the other hand, are generally not content with this point of view. From their engagement with the deep-seated themes of their subjects' lives, they instead see alcoholism as a natural outgrowth of their subjects' overall beings, as perhaps an inevitable tendency given their subjects' situations (although not one which is neurologically or pharmacologically preprogrammed). To illustrate this point, I turn to the life of James Boswell, as described by his excellent biographer, Frank Brady (1984). Brady sets as his task an understanding of the role of Boswell's drinking as part of Boswell's "psychic economy." In doing so, Brady describes the "common but unfortunate mistake... [of taking] drinking as a cause rather than a symptom of malaise" (p. 109), the exact position Vaillant (1983) — in keeping with disease ideas — was at pains to refute.

The Man Boswell And His Drinking

James Boswell was born in 1740 in Edinburgh, Scotland to a successful and titled family. Boswell studied law at the University of Edinburgh and became an advocate before the Scots bar. Although he had a moderately successful legal career, his espousal of unpopular causes and clients, his strong intellectual predilections, and a nature that chafed at the provincial bonds of Scotland combined to make Boswell a perpetual malcontent. He especially railed at his bondage to his father, Lord Auchinleck, who was a judge of the very court before which Boswell pleaded. The elder Boswell meted out an allowance to his son which made up half the younger man's earnings, while seeking to entail his estate to an heir other than his son (whom he simply didn't trust to manage it). This last matter was the source of continuous dispute between father and son, and signified Boswell's inability fully to come to grips with an adult role.

While conducting his business affairs in Scotland, Boswell periodically planned to escape to London, where he generally visited for two months of the year after his marriage. In London Boswell had become a respected intellectual figure, in part because of his legendary association with Samuel Johnson, the leading literateur of his time. Boswell was, of course, to cap his own sporadic literary career with his Life of Samuel Johnson, "by common consent the greatest biography ever written" (Brady, 1984, p.423). Boswell only completed this work late in his life, after his father's and his wife's deaths and after finally moving permanently to England. On his forays to London — but not exclusively then — Boswell consorted with prostitutes and carried on various romantic liaisons, often preceded by heavy drinking bouts. At home in Scotland too he drank heavily, leading him to "low haunts" (gambling dens and brothels) and to abuse his wife. His long-suffering spouse was, however, a model of forbearance (she and Boswell shared a deep and genuine affection), and Boswell was overcome with guilt and remorse when he was informed of this behavior (which generally occurred as a part of "alcoholic blackouts").

Recounting Boswell's frequent drunken escapades, Brady summarized the nature of Boswell's drinking problems in the following way:

Boswell never would become an alcoholic nor even a solitary drinker, and though drinking sometimes interfered with his daily practice it never impeded his legal career. Nor was he unusual: Edinburgh was full of hard-drinking advocates . . . . Nor would drinking keep him from finishing his two greatest books, with the extended daily labor they required. But Boswell, to apply Johnson's phrase, was a man "without skill in inebriation." He tended to get drunk quickly and then stay at the same level of intoxication for some time; if he went on for too long he either lost all control or blacked out. Aware that he was using liquor more and more as a release from his boredom with his daily life, Boswell reacted by swearing reform and reprobating his conduct in his journal . . . . he began to keep tabs on himself by noting each day how much he drank and what effect it had on him (pp. 108-109).