Asher R, Brissett D
Department of Sociology, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis 55455.
Int J Addict. 1988 Apr;23(4):331-50. doi: 10.3109/10826088809039202.
Intensive interviews with women married to alcoholics reveal a taken-for-granted use of the term "codependent" to describe the spouses of alcoholics, despite considerable definitional ambiguity as to what codependency is. Although most of the wives agreed that codependency involves caretaking behavior and exists by virtue of their association with an alcoholic, they disagreed widely as to its impact on the self, its locus as personal or social, its disease status, its longevity, and whether or not it is distinctive to alcohol-complicated marriages. Self-labeling and identification occur through retrospective reinterpretation of their lives with their alcoholic husbands, guided and legitimated by rehabilitation personnel. These reconstructions then serve as self-evidence of codependency. In challenging the notion of codependency as an objective condition, we emphasize the social construction and application of this condition, and, in doing so, suggest that there has been a two-fold process of deviantizing the women's identities and medicalizing this new-found deviance. While this situation perpetuates a traditional view of women as more passive than active, a more serious possibility is its affinity to a historical view of wives of alcoholics as pathological.
对嫁给酗酒者的女性进行的深入访谈表明，尽管“共依存”的定义相当模糊，但人们却理所当然地用这个词来描述酗酒者的配偶。虽然大多数妻子都认为共依存涉及照顾行为，且因她们与酗酒者的关系而存在，但她们在共依存对自身的影响、其属于个人还是社会范畴、其疾病状态、其持续时间，以及它是否为酒精问题复杂的婚姻所特有等方面存在广泛分歧。在康复人员的引导和认可下，她们通过对与酗酒丈夫共同生活的经历进行回顾性重新诠释来进行自我标签和自我认同。这些重构随后成为共依存的自我证据。在质疑共依存作为一种客观状况这一概念时，我们强调了这种状况的社会建构和应用，并且在此过程中表明，存在一个将女性身份偏差化以及将这种新发现的偏差医学化的双重过程。虽然这种情况延续了一种认为女性比男性更被动的传统观点，但更严重的可能性是，它类似于一种将酗酒者的妻子视为病态的历史观点。
