Raised in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, Peele received his B.A. in political sciencecum laude on municipal and state scholarships from the University of Pennsylvania in 1967. Supported by a number of fellowships, he went on to earn a Ph.D. in social psychology from the University of Michigan in 1973. From 1976 to 2012, he maintained a private practice and consultancy while based in Morristown, New Jersey. After earning his J.D. from the Rutgers School of Law – Newark in 1997, Peele was admitted to the New York and New Jersey bars. He maintained a concurrent law practice until 2012. As a psychologist and addiction specialist, he has held visiting and adjunct academic positions at New York University, Bournemouth University and The New School. He currently resides in Park Slope, Brooklyn, New York. Peele is the author of twelve books, including Love and Addiction, The Meaning of Addiction, Diseasing of America, The Truth about Addiction and Recovery, Resisting 12-Step Coercion, 7 Tools to Beat Addiction, Addiction-Proof Your Child, "Recover! Stop Thinking Like an Addict", and his most recent book with Zach Rhoads, Outgrowing Addiction: With Common Sense Instead of "Disease" Therapy,, as well as 250 other professional publications.
Addiction
He began his critique of standard notions of addiction when he published Love and Addiction. According to Peele's experiential/environmental approach, addictions are negative patterns of behavior that result from an over-attachment people form to experiences generated from a range of involvements. He contends that most people experience addiction to some degree at least for periods of time during their lives. He does not view addictions as medical problems but as "problems of life" that most people overcome. The failure to do so is the exception rather than the rule, he argues. When it was published in 1975, Love and Addiction pre-dated by almost a decade the notion of sex addiction and codependency popularized by authors such as Patrick Carnes, whose Out of the Shadows, one of the earliest popular books to describe sex addiction, came out in 1983, and Melody Beattie, whose Codependent No More was published in 1986. Love and Addiction pre-dated the current popular use of the terms "sex addiction" and "codependency" to describe disorders of love attachment, as these terms were not part of Peele and Brodsky's nomenclature. However, because Love and Addiction was concerned with observing the same condition of addictive human attachments, it has been argued that this is the first book to be written on the subject of codependent relationships. In reviewing the legacy of Love and Addiction, psychologist Dr. Alex Kwee wrote:
"That experiences can be addictive was a prescient notion in 1975 as psychology now embraces the concept of the process addictions such as pathological gambling, compulsive eating, and sex addiction. But it must surely be to Peele's dismay that instead of rethinking substance addiction as a medical illness, psychology has gone and classified the behaviors as addictions in the same medical sense and yielded the solution into the hands of the 12-Steps."
Views on alcoholism
Peele maintains that, depending on the person, abstinence or moderation are valid approaches to treat excessive drinking. In a Psychology Today article which compared the Life Process Program with the disease model, he also argues against the theory proposed decades ago by modern physicians, mental health professionals, research scientists, etc. that addiction is a disease.
In a co-authored book, Resisting 12 Step Coercion, Peele outlined his case against court mandated attendance of twelve-step drug and alcohol treatment programs. He argued that these treatment programs are useless and sometimes harmful, he presented research on alternative treatment options, and accused some addiction providers of routine violation of standard medical ethics, an accusation that is likewise often leveled at Peele In The Truth About Addiction and Recovery and 7 Tools to Beat Addiction Peele laid out what he believes to be the elements of alternative treatment. He developed these ideas as the Life Process Program, which was the basis for a non-12 Step residential treatment program and is now offered as an online treatment resource by Dr. Peele and colleagues.
Criticism
In a review of The Meaning of Addiction, addiction researcher Dr Griffith Edwards stated the following about Peele's work:
Recognition
1989: Rutgers Center of Alcohol Studies Mark Keller Award for Alcohol Studies for his article "The limitations of control-of-supply models for explaining and preventing alcoholism and drug addiction," JSA, 48:61-77, 1987.
