Loneliness and adolescent alcoholism

This paper first shows how the feelings of separation anxiety, hostility, and loneliness are intrinsically related. In pursuing this line of thought, the views of Fromm-Reichmann, Fromm, and Erikson are synthesized. The foregoing emotions are then discussed within the context of Freud's speculative postulation of the "oceanic feeling." All these conceptual connections, in turn, are then analyzed as essential factors contributing to, and indeed determining, adolescent drinking disorders. Traumatic issues and conflicts, initially centered in the infant's sense of separation from the mother, are later reexperienced and revived during the critical period of adolescence as the child is confronted with a sense of separation from the family. The paper concludes with a more empirically oriented treatment of the concrete features exhibited in adolescent alcoholism.