Alcoholism as the Thirst for Wholeness — The Letters of Bill Wilson and Carl Jung
Exploring our sacred impulse to expand, unite, and say yes
Bill Wilson, cofounder of Alcoholics Anonymous, began writing letters to Carl Jung in 1961. Their correspondence forever changed the way that I think about spirituality and addiction.
Bill started the exchange with a story about his friend Roland H., an alcoholic who came to Jung 1931 for treatment. Jung’s diagnosis was unflinching: Roland was beyond the reach of any further medical or psychiatric treatment. The only hope was to “place himself in a religious atmosphere and hope for the best.” There Roland might be able to experience “a genuine conversion” — a spiritual experience stronger than the craving for alcohol.
That’s exactly what Roland did. After leaving Jung, he found sobriety by joining the Oxford Group, a Christian evangelical movement.
Bill was a recovering alcoholic as well, one whose story is well known to readers of Alcoholics Anonymous. In the first chapter of that book, Bill recalls slowly drinking himself into oblivion on a bleak day in late November 1934. He was interrupted by a phone call from Ebby T., an old friend and drinking buddy. Ebby said that he was in town wanted to drop by Bill’s place for a visit.
When Ebby arrived, Bill offered him a drink. Ebby refused, revealing that he was sober. “I’ve got religion” he said.
Bill was aghast, comforted only by the thought that he had enough gin to outlast Ebby’s preaching.
Ebby never rose to the pulpit, however. Instead of trying to fill Bill’s head with religious dogma, Ebby simply described his personal experience of getting sober: “You admit you are licked; you get honest with yourself…you pray to whatever God you think there is, even as an experiment.” Then he posed a question: “Why don’t you choose your own conception of God?”
This question riveted Bill and ultimately set him on the path to sobriety. “It was only a matter of being willing to believe in a Power greater than myself,” Bill wrote. “Nothing more was required of me to make my beginning.”
Bill finally hit bottom during his fourth alcoholism treatment at Towns Hospital in Manhattan. There, in “utter despair,” he cried out for God to show himself. What happened next is known in AA as “Bill’s white light experience”:
Suddenly the room lit up with a great white light. I was caught up into an ecstasy which there are no words to describe. It seemed to me, in my mind’s eye, that I was on a mountain and that a wind not of air but of spirit was blowing. And then it burst upon me that I was a free man.
There was no rational explanation for this event. But Bill never drank again.
Searching for a framework to understand his revelation at Towns Hospital, Bill eventually turned to The Varieties of Religious Experience by William James.
This book incudes a chapter about two types of conversion experience. One is the “volitional type” based on gradual accumulation of new habits. The other type is “self-surrender” based on “temporary exhaustion” of willpower and the sudden eruption of subconscious healing forces. Clearly Bill experienced the latter.
Bill described his conversion experience to Jung as “ego collapse at depth.” The first Step of AA expresses it more concretely: “We admitted we were powerless over alcohol — that our lives had become unmanageable.”
Replying to Bill’s letter, Jung recalled his work with Roland:
His craving for alcohol was the equivalent, on a low level, of the spiritual thirst of our being for wholeness, expressed in medieval language: the union with God.
Jung also made this distinction:
You see, alcohol in Latin is “spiritus,” and you use the same word for the highest religious experience as well as for the most depraving poison. The helpful formula therefore is: spiritus contra spiritum.
I can easily picture an alcoholic sitting at a bar and reaching for a his fifth cocktail. He feels expansive, illuminated, invincible. Each drink is God in a glass, delivering revelations that seem ineffable and noetic.
The literature of addiction is filled with stories of such ersatz enlightenment. One of my favorites comes the narrator of Jesus’ Son by Denis Johnson. High on speed and hashish, he declares: “I knew every raindrop by its name, I sensed everything before it happened.”
This is illusion, of course. But James traces its source to a holy impulse:
The sway of alcohol over mankind is unquestionably due to its power to stimulate the mystical faculties of human nature, usually crushed to earth by the cold facts and dry criticisms of the sober hour. Sobriety diminishes, discriminates, and says no; drunkenness expands, unites, and says yes.
I don’t condemn alcoholics for seeking spiritum (spiritual experience) through spiritus (alcohol). Like Jung, I see this search as a misdirection of our sacred impulse to expand, unite, and say yes. Spiritual practice is about obeying this impulse through practices that complete us rather than defeat us.
The letters of Bill Wilson and Carl Jung first appeared in the January 1963 issue of the Grapevine, an Alcoholics Anonymous publication.
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