The History of Spirituality & Recovery

The History of Spirituality & Recovery

In 1961 Bill W., one of the founders of Alcoholics Anonymous, wrote a letter to the famous Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung in which he thanked him for helping spark the fire that was to become Alcoholics Anonymous. Carl Jung had worked with a hopeless alcoholics named Rowland H. According to Carl Jung, Rowland’s only chance to recover from his alcoholism was a “spiritual or religious experience -- in short, a genuine conversion.” Jung went on to say that this type of spiritual experience had been happening to alcoholics for centuries, but that he did not know how to produce such a spiritual experience through the use of psychological methods.

Jung wrote back to Jung and said that Rowland’s alcoholism was “the equivalent, on a low level, of the spiritual thirst of our being for wholeness, expressed in medieval language: the union with God.”

The equally famous psychologist William James wrote something similar regarding [addiction]. In his book, The Varieties of Religious Experiences, he said that the “sway of [addiction] over mankind is unquestionably due to its powers to stimulate the mystical faculties of human nature, usually crushed to the earth by the cold facts of addiction.” He then added, “The drunken consciousness is one bit of the mystic consciousness, and our total opinion of it must find its place in our opinion of that larger whole.” James, in his book, describes a plethora of [spiritual] experiences that have happened to people over the centuries.

In Alcoholics Anonymous, Bill W. sought out to write out the steps needed to produce a religious experience in alcoholics and addicts of the type Jung and James talked about. Bill W. had had one of these religious/spiritual experiences that James and Jung describe. Bill’s spiritual experience stopped his chronic alcoholism abruptly and permanently. Alcoholics Anonymous is a series of twelve steps designed to create a spiritual experience, a “total psychic change,” of the type needed to cure chronic alcoholism. In fact, the only way a person can recover from drugs and/or alcohol is to have a total psychic shift based on spiritual principles. This is one of the reasons why psychology has failed to help alcoholics and addicts, because psychology, by definition, is not concerned with the type of spiritual element needed for a person to recover from drugs and alcohol.

Psychology and therapy have its place in recovery, but the only way to truly be free from [addiction] for the rest of your life is to have a spiritual experience.

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