From the author: In the article I discuss the symptoms of organic personality disorders associated with alcohol dependence. Quite a lot has been written on the topic of alcohol dependence. We know methods of working with alcoholics and their families when they seek advice, methods of correcting addictive behavior and psychological rehabilitation of former alcoholics and their loved ones. But sometimes alcoholism causes irreversible changes in the brain. And then the person becomes a patient of a psychiatric clinic and is observed (in addition to the psychiatrist) not by a consulting psychologist, but by a neuropsychologist. In case of severe intoxication, an alcohol addict may develop Korsakov syndrome. The syndrome is named after the psychiatrist S. S. Korsakov who described it. This an organic disorder necessarily includes three components: Amnesia. With Korsakoff's syndrome, the patient experiences memory lapses, he does not remember what he did in the morning, what he had for breakfast yesterday, what tasks he performed at an appointment with a clinical psychologist an hour ago. Auditory-speech memory suffers most, and visual memory to a lesser extent. Although there are exceptions, in my practice there was a patient who was much more successful in memorizing words using the “10 words” method than he could reproduce on a control sheet the images that he saw a minute ago. Amnesia is also closely related to attention impairment, because . the amount of attention becomes greatly reduced, which complicates mnemonic processes. Temporal and spatial disorientation. An alcoholic with a neurophysiological disorder may be disoriented and not understand where he is, what time of year it is and similar details associated with the space-time plane. In this case, this is also a sign of Korsakoff's syndrome. Most often, temporary disorientation occurs. Spatial manifests itself in varying degrees of severity. In the case of a severe form, the patient cannot find his way in a room with a minimally simple environment. For example, if there is only a bed and a chair in the room, then finding a chair can sometimes be an impossible task. Confabulation. Confabulation is false memories when the patient reports fictitious events that never took place in his life. Such false memories are compensatory in nature and fill in Gaps in memory associated with amnesia. Also, confabulation can be used as a defense mechanism in order to impress the interlocutor. I once observed an example of this form of confabulation: a former recidivist thief, who was undergoing inpatient treatment in a psychiatric clinic, claimed that he had robbed the apartment of a very famous person. In addition to these three symptoms that characterize Korsakoff syndrome, it is necessary to note such a feature of all organic disorders as fatigue, exhaustion of all mental processes. Exhaustion can be zigzag (hypersthenic type) and increasing (hyposthenic type). This symptom manifests itself in any organic disorder and is not typical only for alcohol-dependent patients.