How Carl Jung inspired the creation of Alcoholics Anonymous

There are perhaps as many doors to Alcoholics Anonymous in the 21st century as there are people through them – from all world religions to no religion. “International aid scholarship” has had “a significant and long-term effect on the culture of the United States,” Charles Fox, a professor of psychology at Worcester State University, writes in Aeon. Indeed, its influence is global. Since its inception in 1935, AA has been “an extremely popular therapy and a testament to the interdisciplinary nature of health and wellness.”

AA has also represented, at least culturally, a remarkable synthesis of behavioral science and spirituality that translates into dozens of different languages, beliefs, and practices. Or at least that’s how it may appear when perusing the dozens of books on the 12 steps of AA and Buddhism, yoga, Catholicism, Judaism, indigenous religious traditions, shamanistic practices, stoicism, l secular humanism and, of course, psychology.

Historically, and often in practice, however, the (non)organization of global fellowships has represented a much narrower tradition, inherited from the evangelical (small “e”) Christian Oxford Group, or as AA founder Bill Wilson, “the ‘OG'” Wilson credits the Oxford Group with AA’s methodology: “their great emphasis on the principles of self-assessment, confession, restitution, and giving of oneself in service to others.” »

The theology of the Oxford Group, while nuanced and tempered, has also found its way into many of AA’s core tenets. But for the genesis of the recovery group, Wilson cites a more secular authority, Carl Jung. The famous Swiss psychiatrist took a keen interest in alcoholism in the 1920s. Wilson wrote to Jung in 1961 to express his “great appreciation” for his efforts. “A certain conversation you had with one of your patients, a Mr. Rowland H. in the early 1930s,” Wilson explains, “was instrumental in the founding of our fraternity.”

Jung may not have been aware of his influence on the recovery movement, Wilson says, even though alcoholics made up “about 13 percent of all admissions” in his practice, Fox notes. One of his patients, Rowland H. – or Rowland Hazard, “investment banker and former Rhode Island state senator” – came to Jung in desperation, saw him daily for several months, stopped drinking, then relapsed. Brought back to Jung by his cousin, Hazard learned that his case was hopeless unless there was religious conversion. As Wilson says in his letter:

(V)you have frankly expressed your despair to him regarding any further medical or psychiatric treatment. This frank and humble statement on your part undoubtedly constitutes the first foundation stone on which our Society has since been built.

Jung also told Hazard that conversion experiences were incredibly rare and recommended that he “place yourself in a religious atmosphere and hope for the best”, as Wilson recalled. But he did not specify any particular religion. Hazard discovered the Oxford group. For Jung, he could have encountered God as he understood Him anywhere. “His craving for alcohol was the equivalent,” the psychiatrist wrote in a response to Wilson, “at a lower level, of the spiritual thirst of our being for wholeness, expressed in medieval language: union with God.” .

In his response letter to Wilson, Jung uses religious language allegorically. AA took the idea of ​​conversion more literally. Although it was interested in the plight of agnostics, the Big Book concluded that such people must eventually see the light. Jung, on the other hand, seems very careful to avoid a strictly religious interpretation of his advice to Hazard, who started the first small group that would convert Wilson to the sobriety and methods of the Oxford group.

“How could one formulate such an idea that would not be misunderstood today? » asks Jung. “The only fair and legitimate way to have such an experience is if it happens to you in reality and that can only happen to you when you walk on a path that leads you to a higher understanding.” Sobriety could be achieved through “a higher education of the mind beyond the limits of mere rationalism” – through an experience of enlightenment or conversion, of course. It can also happen through “an act of grace or through honest, personal contact with friends.”

Although most of AA’s founding members fought for a stricter interpretation of Jung’s prescription, Wilson always entertained the idea that multiple paths could bring alcoholics to the same goal, even including modern medicine. He relied on the medical opinions of Dr. William D. Silkworth, who theorized that alcoholism was in part a physical illness, “a kind of metabolic difficulty which he then called an allergy.” Even after his own conversion experience, which Silkworth, like Jung, recommended he pursue, Wilson experimented with vitamin therapies, under the influence of Aldous Huxley.

His search to understand his mystical “white light” moment in a New York rehab room also led Wilson to the study of William James. Varieties of religious experience. The book “made me realize,” he wrote to Jung, “that most conversion experiences, whatever their variety, have one common denominator: the profound collapse of the ego.” He even believed that LSD could act as a “temporary ego reducer” after taking the drug under the supervision of British psychiatrist Humphrey Osmond. (Jung would probably have opposed what he calls “shortcuts” like psychedelic drugs.)

In the letters between Wilson and Jung, as Ian McCabe argues in Carl Jung and Alcoholics Anonymous, we see mutual admiration between the two, as well as mutual influence. “Bill Wilson,” writes McCabe’s editor, “was encouraged by Jung’s writings to promote the spiritual aspect of recovery,” an aspect which took on a particularly religious character among Alcoholics Anonymous. For his part, Jung, “influenced by the success of AA…gave “complete and detailed instructions” on how the AA group format could be further developed and used by “general neurotics.” than the more mystical Jungian. It could well have been otherwise.

Learn more about Jung’s influence on AA at Aeon.

Note: Note: An earlier version of this article appeared on our site in 2019.

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Rarely seen manuscript by Carl Jung, hand drawn The red book

Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, North Carolina. Follow him at @jdmagness