“Spiritus Contra spiritum”

“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.” C.G. Jung

2025 marks my sixth year of alcohol sobriety. It also marks the year I learned about correspondence discussing the spiritual nature of recovery between William G. Wilson, the co-founder of Alcoholics Anonomyous, and Dr. Carl Gustav Jung, the world renowned psychotherapist famous for his analytical psychology. These letters were a lightbulb moment for me, casting light on a connection I did not even realize I had already intuited through personal experience. I have attended more than a few AA meetings over the past 15 years and though I personally did not get sober through AA, I have witnessed in these meetings the communal and spiritual nature that define the program, that are pivotal to recovery.

For the first half of my sobriety I was what AA members call a “dry drunk.” A dry drunk is someone who has successfully quit drinking but still displays similar dysfunctional behaviors to those of their former drunk selves. And yes, looking back now, it clocks. While I was no longer drinking having stopped cold turkey, a feat accomplished through a promise made to my self from a mounting fear of early death among other things, I was still battling with the same internal demons that partly led me to over-drink in the first place. Sure, I picked up obssessions here and there to replace drinking, but I was only hiding from the issues, running from them as it were. The kinds of issues that you are forced to face when completing the Twelve-step program, the issues that you inevitably face when integrating your shadow, when you make the unconscious conscious as discussed in Jungian psychology.

I did not do the twelve steps, but I organically found my way to Jungian psychology and it just made sense. There is so much shame, triple extra large shame, that comes with nascent sobriety. Shame of things you did, shame of things you let others do to you, shame of decisions, missed opportunities, wasted potential, pain inflicted on loved ones, and so on and so forth. It is brutal psychologically to face this shame sober, to raw dog it. No anesthetizing, nothing to wash it down with, no distractions. Just you and your memories day in and day out. Naturally your brain, your nervous system, in an effort to protect itself from pain, creates coping mechanisms that can begin to mirror the self-sabotoging patterns from your drinking days. You dissocciate, neglect yourself, distract yourself for a while with running, work, other people’s problems, your phone. Eventually, life gets rocky, as life does now and again, and you find yourself bursting at the seams emotionally. You are sober but you are far from healed.

Now let’s pause here for a second, because the word “healed” has been hijacked by our trauma and psychoanalysis obsessed culture, its been over-used to high heaven, dragged to hell, and back. But this isn’t the faux healing for the sake of your social media coaching business, I’m talking the healing you crawled through to earn your place on the other end, the type of healing you treasure and guard with your life not exploit. This is healing through pain and desperation baby, healing from a mental anguish so jacked you run marathons without even training just to quiet your mind as acid burns through your legs.

Recovery is interesting to say the least, so much of life is done under the influence, however minor. You don’t even think about it until you’re faced with the moments and you realize you are daaamn aware of them and everything they involve. Again, no hiding under any liquid courage, no stimulant for the slightest assistance. Inevitably, you begin to learn yourself on a deeper level. You both yearn for and are thrust into a deeper self-knowing. That yearning, to learn who I am at my core and what I need to do to fully accept everything that I am and more importantly was, good and bad, is what naturally led me to Carl Jung.

It can be argued that my psychedelic experiences with psilocybin guided me towards that direction as well since the concept of a collective consiousness is part and parcel of psychedelic wisdom. Not to mention the ego death that is experienced on a proper trip, the type that allows for spiritual transformations. To trip on a proper dose of shrooms, in my experience 3.5 grams or more, is to be reminded that we are all connected. That your life is not defined by just one or a handful of experiences. To trip is to zoom out of your life and take inventory of your actions, as a witness, as objectively as you can and then decide what to change and how to be a better version of yourself. It is to feel spiritually connected to everyone, to the Earth, to the Universe. We are all comprised of the same particles that were created during the Bing Bang after all, our particles therefore are estimated to be 13.8 billions years old, as old as the Universe itself. That is beyond my comprehension of time, that to me is spiritual time. It is infinite and it is source. We are all from there, we are all connected.

To accept the worst parts of yourself, in Jungian terminology, is to integrate your shadow. From what I hear from recovering alcoholics who do the twelve steps and what I myself have read about them, the process also consists of accepting the parts of yourself that you are ashamed of in order that you may have a chance to return to your whole self. You must be honest with yourself in recognizing that you have a problem, have faith in a higher power, surrender to a higher purpose, soul search to uncover who it is that you really are and who it is that you want to be, prioritizing integrity throughout. You must accept all parts of yourself, your history, and drop the shame so that you may move forward (sounds just like integration of the shadow, does it not?). Humility then becomes essential in recognizing that you have no control over this addiction and not letting your ego lie to you about who you are, aka ego death. You then make amends to the people you have hurt followed by forgiving those who have hurt you. The entire process requires constant maintenance, checking in on your progress to determine what needs work and where you can move forward. You then make contact with your higher power, whatever that higher power means to you, and with its help you will identify your gifts and with their help your higher purpose. This higher purpose, these gifts, will help you be of service for the rest of your life. The knowledge and insight gained through this process, though this healing journey, then becomes wisdom: knowledge in action. You will help continously build a better version of yourself through helping others.

***

William (Bill) G. Wilson wrote the book Alcoholics Anonymous, referred to as the Big Book, and in it he covers his own personal story of recovery and the events that led to the foundation of the program of AA. In the second chapter, “There Is A Solution,” he describes visits between an American business man Roland Hazard III and Dr. Carl Gustav Jung. Roland Hazard III, is described in the Big Book as a man of “good sense and high character” but also a hopeless alcoholic. After seeing the best American psychiatrists to no vail, he traveled to Europe to place himself under the care of Dr. Jung. After finishing his treatment, this man returned home confident that

“after gaining profound knowledge of his mind and its hidden springs that relapse was unthinkable. Nevertheless, he was drunk in a short time. More baffling still, he could give himself no satisfactory explanation for his fall. So he returned to this doctor, whom he admired, and asked him point-blank why he could not recover…He begged the doctor to tell him the whole truth and he got it. In the doctor’s judgement he was utterly hopeless…The doctor said: ‘You have the mind of a chronic alcoholic. I have never seen one single case recover, where that state of mind existed to the extent that it does in you.’
He said to the doctor, ‘Is there no exception?’
‘Yes,’ replied the doctor, 'there is. Exceptions to cases such as yours have been occurring since early times. Here and there, once in a while, alcoholics have had what are called vital spritual experiences. To me these occurrences are a phenomena. They appear to be in the nature of huge emotional displacements and rearrangements. Ideas, emotions, and attitudes which were once the guiding forces of the lives of men are suddenly cast to one side, and a completely new set of conceptions and motives begin to dominate them…’
Upon hearing this, [Roland H] was somewhat relieved, for he reflected that, after all, he was a good church member. This hope however, was destroyed by the doctor’s telling him that while his religious convictions were very good, in his case they did not spell the necessary vital spiritual experience” (Alcoholics Anonymous, p. 26-7).

I want to emphasize that last line here as I have heard from a few people a common misconception about AA: that it attempts to push a certain religion onto its members. As Dr. Jung himself explained to Roland H, religion does not necessarily equate spirituality. The “vital spiritual experience” that Dr. Jung alludes to is a personal one, it is not guaranteed merely by practicing any specific religion. There are a “multitude of ways in which men have discovered God,” God as you understand him/her, and the founders of AA knew and appreciated this. They made it clear in the second chapter of the Big Book:

“We have no desire to convince anyone that there is only one way by which faith can be acquired. If what we have learned and felt and seen means anything at all, it means that all of us, whatever our race, creed, or color are the children of a living Creator with whom we may form a relationship upon simple and understandable terms as soon as we are willing and honest enough to try…We think it no concern of ours what religious bodies our members identify themselves with as individuals. This should be an entirely personal affair which each one decides for himself in the light of past associations, or his present choice.”

Roland H, following Dr. Jung’s advisement, and desperate for change eventually achieved his own spiritual transformation through his involvement with the Oxford Group, a Christian Evangelical Movement of the 1920’s and 30’s. And though he himself was never a member of AA, his treatment and discussions with Carl Jung and subsequent membership with The Oxford Group were the start of a chain of events that William G.W. considers foundational to the creation and ethos of AA.

The Oxford Group was founded by American Lutheran minister Frank Buchman in 1921. It was Buchman’s belief that “fear and selfishness were the root of all problems” and “the solution to living without fear and selfishness was to ‘surrender one’s life over to God’s plan.’ “ Part of this process of surrender for members required sharing with others how the pursuit of four moral absolutes changed one’s life, the absolutes of honesty, purity, unselfishness, and love. Roland thus met Edwin (Ebby) Thacher while in the practice of this personal evangelism through the example of personal change. Ebby Thacher was another hopeless acoholic who was awaiting commitment to Brattlebro Retreat, founded in 1834 as the Vermont Asylum for the Insane. When Roland H learned about this he and two other Oxford Group members “shared with him their Oxford Group recovery experiences.” One of the other two members was Cebra Graves, son of the family court magistrate in Ebby’s case and through this connection the Oxford Group arranged for Ebby’s release from Brattlebro Retreat and into the Oxford Group’s care. After achieving his own sobriety, it was now Ebby Thacher’s turn to go out and share his experience of personal recovery with an aquaintance of this own, enter William. G. W.

I learned about this fateful meeting between Ebby Thacher and Bill W. in the first chapter of the Big Book: “Bill’s Story.” In this chapter Bill recollects his own experience with alcohol: how it was there for him during his time in foreign wars. He writes of his talents, his successes, his travels with his wife once he returned home from the war. Drinking became a part of his life, though not yet in a destructive way. I continued reading, noticing the patterns that I myself know, where drinking starts innocently enough and then turns into a weapon against you. Bill W. was spiraling, he found himself broke and moved into his wife’s parents house. He was met with “a promising business opportunity…then went on a prodigious bender and the chance vanished”( 5). He was locked in a cycle of self-destruction and knew he needed to make a change. He would promise as much only to find himself drinking again, questioning his own sanity. As he sank deeper into alcoholism he was placed in a hospital for the “mental and physical rehabilitation of alcoholics.” He learned from a doctor that in alcoholics “the will is amazingly weakened when it comes to combating liquor, though it remains strong in other respects.” He was relieved to find an explanation for his inability to stop drinking. With this new self-understanding he felt reassured that he could hold on to sobriety this time around. But much like Roland H, this sobriety was short lived and he again found himself drinking once more and back to the hospital he went. The doctors told his wife the end was near, he would die from heart failure or would develop “wet brain” within a year. Bill lamented his decline and defeat:

“It was a devastating blow to my pride. I, who had thought so well of myself and my abilities, of my capacity to surmount obstacles, was cornered at last. Now I was to plunge into the dark, joining that endless procession of sots who had gone on before. I thought of my poor wife. There had been much happiness after all. What I would not give to make amends. But that was over now. No words can tell of the loneliness and despair I found in that bitter morass of self-pity. Quicksand stretched around me in all directions. I had met my match. I had been overwhelmed. Alcohol was my master.”

Bill W. returned home a “broken man” and though fear sobered him up a bit, he soon again returned to drinking. One night near the end of November in 1934, as he drank alone in his kitchen, his telephone rang and on the other end was the sober voice of an old school friend, Ebby Thacher, asking if he could come over. Bill recalled the rumor that Ebby had been committed for alcohol insanity, he wondered how he had escaped, and looked forward to drinking with him for dinner. Ebby was soon at his door, a different man than what Bill remembered:

“The door opened and he stood there, fresh-skinned and glowing. There was something about his eyes. He was inexplicably different. What had happened? I pushed a drink across the table. He refused it. Disappointed but curious, I wondered what had got into the fellow. He wasn’t himself. ‘Come, what’s all this about?’ I queried. He looked straight at me. Simply, but smilingly, he said, “I’ve got religion.’ I was aghast. So that was it—last summer an alcoholic crackpot; now, I suspected, a little cracked about religion. He had that starry-eyed look. Yes, the old boy was on fire alright. But bless his heart, let him rant! Besides, my gin would last longer than his preaching. But he did no ranting” ( 9).

Ebby Thacher calmly proceeded to explain how members of the Oxford Group interceded on his behalf and persuaded a judge to release him onto their care. He described the “simple religious idea” and “practical program of action” that made him a changed man in just two months. Ebby was there to pass this experience onto Bill, should he care to have it. And, hopeless as he was, Bill was curious but his experience with the war had rendered him cynical about religion. He “doubted whether, on balance, the religions of mankind had done any good. Judging from what [he] had seen in Europe and since, the power of God in human affairs was negligable, the Brotherhood of Man a grim jest. If there was a Devil, he seemed boss Universal, and he certainly had [him]” (11). Nevertheless, Ebby continued speaking, confidently asserting that God was responsible for doing “for him what he could not do for himself. His human will had failed. Doctors had pronounced him incurable. Society was about to lock him up. Like [Bill] he had admitted complete defeat. Then he had, in effect, been raised from the dead, suddenly taken from the scrap heap to a level of life better than the best had ever known!” As he listened, Bill considered if he had been wrong about religion all along, for there sat a miracle right across from him that night. But still, the word God triggered a “certain apathy” within Bill, he rejected the notion of a God personal to him. His intellect, his experiences, what he knew of humanity did not allow him to accept the idea of a personal God who was “love, superhuman strength, and direction.” Though he believed in a Power greater than himself, he admitted he became irritated and closed off against this notion of a “Czar of the Heavens.” Until Ebby Thacher hit him with this:

“Why don’t you choose your own conception of God?”

Bill had never considered this before, the idea that he could form his own relationship with his own understanding of God was a revelation that brought him forth from his own personal darkness: “I stood in sunlight at last…A new world came into view” (12). With this new perspective, Bill admitted himself to the hospital one last time as he was showing signs of delirium tremens. Clear of alcohol, he fell into a terrible depression seemingly unable to gain this faith his friend described. Ebby visited him and repeated what he learned from Oxford Group. Still, this faith evaded Bill and in a moment of utter desperation he cried out:

“If there be a God, will he show Himself.”

It was at this moment that Bill experienced a spiritual breakthrough by way of complete ego death, complete surrender. For the first time he admitted that he was nothing, that he had no control, that he was lost. He offered himself up to God as he understood him, placing his life under his care and direction. After his spiritual experience, Bill W. received another visit from Ebby this time bringing with him a copy of William James’s Varieties of Religious Experience. The book taught Bill W. that the common thread through personal journeys to God is “ego collapse at depth.” There in the hospital, making these connections about the conditions that allow hopeless alcoholics to find new life, Bill had a “vision of a society of alcoholics, each identifying with and transmitting his experience to the next-chain style.” And so, AA was born.

***

In his letter of appreciation to Carl Jung twenty-seven years later in 1961, Bill writes that “his release from the alcohol obsession was immediate. At once, [he] knew he was a free man.” He wrote the letter to thank Carl Jung and in it explained the aforementioned chain of events that started with Roland H in Carl Jung’s consultation room and led to liberation of Bill W. and the birth of Alcoholics Anonymous in that hospital.

As I read Carl Jung’s response to Bill W.’s letter I was overcome with emotion for multiple reasons. You see, Jung explains to Bill that he had to becareful with his language when talking to Roland H for fear of being misunderstood. He could not talk freely about his ideas in regards to God, spirituality, and alcoholism. And I found myself understanding his fears because I live in a society that still misunderstands God, spirituality, and alcoholism. I live in a society that weaponizes God and religion for materialistic pursuit and selfish gain, for violence and destruction. Religion many times gives spirituality a bad name and turns people away from it. I live in a society that constantly promotes drinking and drugs, a society riddled with alcoholism/addiction and businesses and politicians that profit from it; that attacks community and pushes division. I myself know how some people can dismiss you when you speak of God, of the Devil, of spiritual battles fought on Earth.

But I also know people who understand these concepts, beyond their misconceptions and misuses. People who themselves have had spiritual experiences, who have witnessed the miracle of transformation, who were saved from themselves and in turn wish to save others. I know people who still believe in the true meaning of religion, not the bad reputation that morally comprised people have given it. But rather the meaning of community based relationship to God, to love, to helping others. That is the religion that I grew up knowing. That is the spirituality that my own life has opened me up to. I appreciate both the communal path and the individual path and the myriad ways in which one can find their own relationship to Creator.

Bill W. wrote to Carl Jung that “many thoughtful AAs are students of [his] writings.” As mentioned in the beginning of this piece, I myself am not a member of AA, but I am a student of sobriety and I found my own way to Jung’s writing. A friend in sobriety asked me this summer if I knew that Bill W. and Carl Jung had written to one another, he knew of my interest in Carl Jung’s writing as I have shared quotes in my own reflections. I was not aware of this connection and I immediately looked up the letters. When I read Carl Jung’s, I felt something electric for he articulated something I believe in regard to alcoholism. When describing Roland H’s condition and the condition of the alcoholic in general, Jung wrote:

“His craving for alcohol was the equivalent, on a low level, of the spiritual thirst of our being for wholeness, expressed in the medieval language: the union with God…I am strongly convinced that the evil principle in this world leads the unrecognized spiritual need into perdition if it is not counteracted either by real religious insight or by the protective wall of human community. An ordinary man, not protected by an action from above and isolated in society, cannot resist the power of evil, which is called very aptly the Devil…

You see, “alcohol” in Latin is spritus, 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.”

Spiritus contra spiritum. Spirit against spirit. I can’t adequately describe what I felt when I read this but I’ll try. It felt like a revelation, like a lighting bolt, only it wasn’t for I knew the importance of a spiritual connection, of community, to combat this specific devil of alcoholism. But Carl Jung had through this letter provided me with the correct language, with the validation that my intuition, my own wisdom was correct. I myself was overcome with the need to share, and I took to social media to read this portion of the letter right then and there. I know this is a stereotype, the person who finds sobriety and makes it a huge part of their identity, but can you blame us? As human beings, there are parts of us that no one will ever know. As alcoholics, these parts are amplified, we keep them to ourselves, we try to at least. And in doing so we are further isolated from society so, naturally, only we can understand these dark parts of one another. When we manage to escape a certain type of darkness, we tend to want to help someone else do the same. It is in my nature to keep to myself, this is why I never joined AA, but after reading these letters I understand more now how AA functions as that “protective wall of human community" that Jung refers to. I recognize the spirit of AA in my own need to share about my personal spiritual journey and sobriety, the lessons I face, the insight I gain from them, the difficulties I encounter, in hopes that I may provide hope and motivation to another fellow alcoholic. I many times have referred to alcoholism as a spiritual battle for ones soul, and I remind people that I know and love that they are worth fighting for. If you find yourself in this battle, if you find yourself isolated in society, find a meeting, find your community and find that protection. You are worth fighting for and just when you feel the most hopeless and defeated, you might just find a way to replace that poisonous “spirit” with a higher one, and in doing so breath life anew.