William James, Carl Jung, and The Beginnings of Alcoholics Anonymous

This year marks the 100th anniversary of the most important work on the topic of religious experience: The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature (1902) by William James, the founder of the psychology of religion in America. James “perhaps first introduced the linkage of religion and experience in what has since become the study of religious experience.” (Ralph W. Hood, Jr., ed., Handbook of Religious Experience, 1995, p. 3, emphasis in original) Thus, modern secular interest in experiences with the divine or transcendent, as well as the phrase used to describe such encounters, owes much to James. The following describes the fascinating nexus of religious experience, psychology, social networks, religious institutions, and individual agency that led to the creation of Alcoholics Anonymous, and eventually the literally dozens of similar twelve-step programs for which it has been a model.

In The Varieties of Religious Experience James directs a good deal of attention to what he calls “conversion,” by which he means not adopting new religious beliefs but

the process, gradual or sudden, by which a self hitherto divided, and consciously wrong inferior and unhappy, becomes unified and consciously right superior and happy, in consequence of its firmer hold upon religious realities. This at least is what conversion signifies in general

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terms. (1982 Penguin Books edition, p. 189)

As an example, he provides the lengthy, dramatic, and astonishing first-person account of S.H. Hadley, a man who felt “cornered” and suicidal:

“I sat in a saloon in Harlem, a homeless, friendless, dying drunkard. I had pawned or sold everything that would bring a drink. I could not sleep unless I was dead drunk. I had not eaten for days, and for four nights preceding I had suffered with delirium tremens.” (p. 201)

Yet within a couple of days, Hadley had an experience that so radically transformed him that he later asserted, “‘From that moment till now I have never wanted a drink of whiskey’.” (p. 203) What happened? Hadley briefly recounts a series of important transcendent experiences, though the final transformation from “‘indescribable gloom’“ to “‘glorious brightness’“ came following a single culminating religious experience, which in turn followed a pleading prayer from the depths of ego collapse. Moments later, he says, “‘I felt I was a free man’.” (p. 203)

Just a few months before his death in 1961, Carl Jung wrote a private letter to Bill Wilson, the founder of Alcoholics Anonymous (AA), in which he confirmed his knowledge of such alcoholism-liberating spiritual experiences and his belief in their efficacy. He revealed his deep conviction that alcoholism is rooted in unmet spiritual needs but said he had learned to be very cautious in sharing this conviction because it was badly received by the many who accepted “the misleading platitudes one usually hears about alcoholism.” Fortunately, however, Jung had suggested the hope of such deliverance to at least one patient in despair more than three decades before. The conversation “was to become the first link in the chain of events that led to the founding of Alcoholics Anonymous.” (“The Bill W.-Carl Jung Letters,” AA journal Grapevine, January 1963, pp. 2-7, <www.aagrapevine.org/archive/billw/CJung.html>)

The patient was Roland Hazard. A successful businessman ruined by alcoholism, he unsuccessfully ran the gamut of treatments in the United States. Then as a last resort Hazard moved to Europe to become a patient of famed psychiatrist Jung. He stayed sober during his year with Jung but was drinking again within a month of leaving and so returned in despair. Jung made him aware of the transformative spiritual experiences, declared such an experience might be his only hope, and suggested Hazard seek a religious atmosphere and hope to be the recipient of “this benign lightning.” (Bill Wilson, “Bill W. At Guest House,” address delivered about 1968/1969, <www.interwham.com/aa/gsttalk.htm>) Exactly what took place is unclear but Hazard followed Jung’s advice, began associating with an evangelical assembly known as the “Oxford Groups,” and lost his compulsion to drink.

Returning to America, Hazard shared the Oxford Groups’ model with another chronic alcoholic named Ebby Thatcher. It included the religious principles that would become foundational to twelve-step programs: self-examination, confession, restitution, and selfless service to others. Thatcher applied the principles and was also released from his addiction. “And [‘release’] was the word to use,” said his friend Bill Wilson, whom Thatcher visited in the hospital. “He didn’t say he was on the water-wagon; the obsession had just left him as soon as he became willing to try on the basis of these principles, and, indeed, as he became willing to appeal to whatever God there might be.” (Wilson, “Bill W. At Guest House”) In presenting these ideas to Wilson, Thatcher became the second degree of separation between Jung and the man who became the founder of Alcoholics Anonymous.

Space does not allow a recounting of Wilson’s troubles with alcohol but a statement from his presentation to the New York City Medical Society on Alcoholism (April 28, 1958) suffices: “I had gone the familiar course. In the summer of 1934 my doctor … had given up and had pronounced me hopeless.” (Bill Wilson, “Alcoholics Anonymous In Its Third Decade,” <www.historyofaa.com/billw/med1958.htm>) Thatcher visited Wilson in November 1934 and presented the religious angle, which Wilson took with a grain of salt. (It should be pointed out that for Hazard and Thatcher, the two intermediaries between Jung and Wilson, the perceived reason for “release” seems to have shifted from dramatic transcendent experience to the applied teachings of the evangelical movement.)

Nevertheless, following a second visit by Thatcher in December, as Wilson lay in a New York hospital experiencing “the blackest depression I had ever known,” he cried out to God from the depths of ego collapse, as had Hadley in William James’ classic, and Wilson, too, experienced

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an ecstatic transformation:

The result was instant, electric, beyond description. The place seemed to light up, blinding white. I knew only ecstasy and seemed on a mountain. A great wind blew, enveloping and penetrating me. To me, it was not of air, but of Spirit. Blazing, there came the tremendous thought, ‘You are a free man’. (Wilson, “Alcoholics Anonymous”)

Like Hadley, who had used almost identical language, Bill Wilson never drank again. He went on to help found Alcoholics Anonymous, now with more than 2,000,000 members in 100,000 groups around the world (“Membership,” <www.aa.org>), whose core remains a reliance on and expectation of divine help. Just last year, a friend of mine who had a similar religious experience that freed him from the grip of alcoholism shared this: “There is no question in my mind that without the spiritual component, people do not heal or truly get well! They might get sober but not well.” (Personal correspondence, February 20, 2001)

Immediately after Bill Wilson’s spiritual experience there were two things that convinced him that he wasn’t crazy. One was the kind doctor to whom he related the experience, who assured him he wasn’t mad and “had perhaps undergone a psychic experience which might solve my problem.” (Wilson, “Alcoholics Anonymous”) The other was a book he “devoured” that his friend Thatcher had brought him: The Varieties of Religious Experience by William James.

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