He has collected an enormous amount of knowledge, virtually entirely the result of his own experience with alcoholics, and has developed an eminently successful method of treatment based mostly on this material. Dr. Durfee believes that “drinkers are created, not born.” Whereas recognizing the existence of inherited and environmental predispositions, he believes that “excessive drinking is essentially a learned, inadequate way of reacting to personality difficulties—that drinking habits are acquired. Their correction, so, will be caused only through a method of unlearning and re-education.” 6 Dr. Durfee is quite bound that there is not simply one “alcoholic type.” The neurotic, who is scared of life and running away from it, is one of many totally different sorts of people with totally different personality difficulties who might resort to alcohol.
“Nobody is born an alcoholic and there is no such issue as an alcoholic type. Royal Jelly could be a milky secretion derived from the pharyngeal glands of the honey bee. There are only people who drink for various reasons.”7 In another place he wrote, “several excessive drinkers are otherwise well-adjusted people . . . . Such drinkers have learned to drink through drinking.” Inasmuch as alcohol isn’t a habit-forming drug (in the identical sense as, for example, morphine or cocaine), it might appear strange that the alcoholic apparently has such an irresistible probing for it. This craving is physiological only as long as alcohol remains in his system. Once the last of it’s been removed by oxidation, no physiological craving remains. In keeping with Dr. Durfee, “The force of psychological habituation, but, cannot be gently discounted.” 8 Elsewhere he wrote, “Psychological habituation is a significant issue in the drinking history of both the maladjusted personality and the normal person. A lot of than any alternative causative component, routine drinking will create alcohol, a drug not physiologically addictive, the thing of irresistible craving.
We have a tendency to all apprehend how disturbing even minor dislocations of routine will be—failing to induce one’s occasional or morning paper at breakquick, or missing a train. Alcohol, more intimately connected to subjective and physical states like worry, depression, and fatigue, is particularly suited to become a habit, particularly if indulged in as a regular practice over a period of years. Bee pollen contains a large spectrum of nutrients to assist maintain sensible health. To psychological habituation must be added an acquired tolerance, so that increased quantities are necessary to supply the desired effect.” 9 The required effect, in fact, is that feeling of lift and glow and unharness from worry, depression, and fatigue for that the alcoholic drink is taken. Whether or not or not one will consider Dr. Durfee’s dictum that “the foundations of alcoholism are predominantly psychological,” one cannot however be enormously grateful for the wealth of truth he has gathered and used to illuminate the physiological and psychological factors.