The Price Tag on Personal Growth

IF YOU ARE a social or behavioral scientist (as I am), you can look at AA this way: It represents the first successful effort in history by a group of people with a physiological and/or psychological disease to achieve their own common control of that disease. AA also stands as one of the few (but not only) successful attempts by individuals suffering from "anomie" or "alienation" to overcome this condition by creating, in effect, a community of the alienated, though they come of different religious, educational, national, and ethnic backgrounds. "Alienated" people are simply folk who cannot harmonize with their cultures' values and normal life-styles, and their inability may be manifested in many other ways besides drinking.