For our purposes, the medical and psychiatric therapies may be divided into three categories according to their purpose: (1) those therapies that aid in the physical rehabilitation of the person suffering from the effects of an acute binge and / or prolonged excessive drinking over many years; (2) those that help to keep the
addictive cycle broken and thus maintain sobriety for sufficient time to
allow other therapies to take effect; (3) those that aim at lessening the alcoholic's
personality problems — both those that contributed to the causation of his addiction and those resulting from the interpersonal chaos of progressive alcoholism.