Download Author: Levin, Jerome D. Ph.D.

Dr. Levin has been kissed by a wolf, petted a jaguar, climbed Kilimanjaro, plunged into a crevasse on Alaska’s Mount Denali, and looked down on Everest’s base camp from 18000 foot Kala Pitar, all while writing seventeen books, carrying a heavy caseload of psychotherapy patients in Manhattan and Long Island and teaching at the New School for Social Research in New York’s Greenwich Village. His teaching at the New School has been wide ranging. He directed and taught in a program to train addiction counselors for over 25 years, as well as teaching “cross-over” philosophy-psychology courses, the first of which was “Reason and Passion in Western Thought: Plato, Spinoza, and Freud,” followed by “Anxiety and the Nature of Reality,”  “Theories of the Self,” and “Our Relationship to the Wild.” He went on to teach a variety of other innovative courses, which he designed, and has taught more standard curricula at St. Joseph’s, Marymount Manhattan, and Suffolk County Community Colleges. He has also taught and supervised at psychoanalytic institutes and has been a guest lecturer at such diverse venues as the Pennsylvania Society of Clinical Social Workers, Boston College School of Social Work, and Harvard University’s Continuing Education Addiction Program. Dr. Levin has been featured on a range of media, including over a hundred radio shows, and on television onChris Matthews’ “Hardball,” NBC’s “Dateline,” and Danish, Spanish and German TV. Dr. Levin was educated at the University of Pennsylvania, McGill University, and New York University, from which he received his Ph.D. He is also a Fellow of the American Institute of Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis, where he received his psychoanalytic raining. His clinical practice has also been wide ranging. He treats adults, older adolescents, and couples. In over thirty years of practice, there is little in the scope of human misery and psychopathology that has not been presented to Dr. Levin by people looking for relief. Priding himself on his ability to relate to all kinds and conditions of men and women, he has usually been able to offer meaningful assistance. Although primarily about addictions (including sexual addiction) and their treatment, Dr. Levin’s writings have also covered a wide range of other topics, including narcissism, childlessness and chronic depression, as well as book reviews and travel articles. They include textbooks, professional works, and popular expositions. In all these genres, Dr. Levin strives for clarity and accessibility. Dr. Levin’s work has been translated into Italian, Greek, Farsi and Arabic. He can be reached at jeromedlevin@gmail.com or 631-369-0922. Or you can write him at P.O. Box 309, Manorville, New York, 11949.
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Other “Recreational” Drugs

Cross-addiction is increasingly common, and the counselor must deal with the client’s total drug involvement. To do so effectively, it is necessary to know what those drugs are, how they work, and what they do.

Somatic Illnesses Associated with Alcohol Abuse

Although the mechanisms by which alcohol destroys cells and damages organs are multiple, complex, and only partly understood, it is believed that alcohol’s ability to penetrate membranes and disrupt membrane phenomena leads to cell death and is one of the most important pathways to somatic damage secondary to alcohol abuse.

How Alcohol Has Been Used

Almost every culture has discovered the use of beverage alcohol. Since any sweet fluid will soon ferment when exposed to the yeast spores omnipresent in the air, spontaneous fermentation must have been a common occurrence. One might say that prehistoric peoples discovered alcohol early and often. Apparently, when they tasted the beers and wines produced by serendipity, they liked them. At any rate what was once produced by accident was soon produced intentionally, and the production of alcoholic beverages became one of humanity’s earliest technological achievements.

What is Alcoholism?

One reasonable conclusion that can be drawn from a perusal of the literature on alcoholism is that nobody knows what alcoholism is. An equally reasonable conclusion is that everybody knows what alcoholism is, but that they just happen not to agree.

What Do We Know About Alcoholism?

In terms of solid, empirically verified, replicated knowledge, surprisingly little is known about alcoholism. Aside from the physiological evidence and some imprecise demographic findings, there are few hard facts about alcoholism. Some studies strongly suggest that there is a genetic component or predisposition to some forms of alcoholism; there are a handful of replicated empirical psychological findings; there are fewer than half a dozen longitudinal studies; and there is a limited body of known fact about special populations suffering from alcoholism. This chapter takes a look at what is known in each of these areas.