Harry M. Tiebout (2 January 1896 – 2 April 1966) was an American psychiatrist who promoted the Alcoholics Anonymous approach to the public, patients and fellow professionals.
[1] The psychiatry service at Hopkins was led by Adolf Meyer, who had an eclectic approach in which Freudian theory was contributory but not dominant.
John B. Watson was also at Hopkins during the time Tiebout was there, conducting research in behaviorism which had substantial influence on the field of child development during the 1920s.
[4] The institute was a well-funded center for training and research, dominated by psychoanalysis and specializing in "exhaustive case histories 75 pages long.
They describe an ongoing verbal battle lasting several months, in which Tiebout refused to accept Marty's rejection of the book.
[7][8] In the end, Mann did become an active member of AA and within a few years made education about alcoholism, and promotion of alcohol-abuse treatment, her second career.
Over the next 10 years, he published a number of articles outlining his theories about alcoholism, the psychodynamic causes of the disorder and his reasons for endorsing AA as the definitive solution.
In one of his early papers[11] Tiebout discounted the idea, common among psychoanalytically inclined doctors, that there was a classic type of pre-alcoholic personality.
These features included: Howard Clinebell understood Tiebout to mean that there was, in fact, a pre-alcoholic personality but that "the distinctive factors have not yet been isolated".
[15] In a 1947 lecture, Tiebout located the roots of alcoholism in poor parenting, either excessive strictness which caused the child to suffer "perpetual frustration and blocking of his desires and expectations," or over-indulgence.
[19] Rado hypothesized that the elation induced by alcohol produced a reaction in the form of a "tense depression", which then reactivated the childish megalomania normally outgrown by adulthood.
The result was a type of magical thinking in which "the ego secretly compares its current helplessness with its original narcissistic stature...and aspires to leave its tribulations and regain its old magnitude.
The Oxford Group had a successful program involving public and private meetings for witness and confession, as well as individual work.
Their concept of "surrender" was the traditional Christian one, as a contemporary observer noted: Conversion, surrender, confession, restitution and the necessity of evangelizing others were ideas brought from the Oxford Group to Alcoholics Anonymous by members who had found that the intense religious devotion they inspired was the key to a changed life.
[18][21][22] Tiebout had found that superficial compliance in therapy often correlated with lack of real change, and he saw in the AA concept of surrender an antidote to this phenomenon.
A "vague, groping, skeptical intellectual belief" would not accomplish this but only a true emotional religious feeling, for "unless the individual attains in the course of time a sense of the reality and the nearness of a Greater Power, his egocentric nature will reassert itself with undiminished intensity, and drinking will again enter into the picture.