Week 5 of 7: AA, Jung, and the Spiritual Hole 🌟

In 1961, a letter arrived on Carl Jung's desk. It was from Bill Wilson, the co-founder of Alcoholics Anonymous, the organisation that had by then already helped hundreds of thousands of people get sober. Wilson wanted Jung to know something. The founding of AA, he wrote, could be traced in a direct line back to Jung himself.

Jung was one of the most influential psychologists who ever lived, and he had, years earlier, treated a man named Rowland Hazard for severe alcoholism. Hazard had tried everything and nothing worked. Eventually Jung told him the truth: in his professional opinion, Rowland's case was hopeless, at least as far as medicine and psychology were concerned.

There was, Jung said, one possibility. A genuine spiritual experience, a transformation so profound it could rewire a person from the inside out. It had happened before and it was rare, but it was real.

Rowland took that seriously. He found it through a Christian movement called the Oxford Group, got sober, and passed what he'd found to a man named Ebby Thacher, who passed it to his old friend Bill Wilson, who was drinking himself to death.

The rest is history. Wilson got sober, founded AA, and built the 12 steps, a programme that at its heart is about spiritual transformation, not just abstinence.

When Wilson wrote to thank Jung for his unknowing role in all of this, Jung wrote back. His reply was remarkable. He said that Rowland's craving for alcohol was, at a deeper level, a craving for wholeness, for transcendence, for connection to something greater than himself.

In Latin, he noted, the word for alcohol is spiritus, the same word used for the highest religious experience. Spiritus contra spiritum. Spirit against spirit. The same longing, two very different destinations.

I find this one of the most profound ideas in the whole landscape of addiction, because it doesn't just explain why people drink. It explains why nothing seems to fill the hole that drinking leaves behind, until something genuinely meaningful takes its place.

AA understood this instinctively. The 12 steps don't just ask people to stop drinking, they ask people to find something to live for, a higher power, a community, a purpose, a practice, something that answers the same deep need that alcohol was trying, and failing, to meet.

In my own work as a counsellor, this rings true at the deepest level. I've come to see healing as a movement toward wholeness, a kind of homecoming. Jung put it beautifully when he said that neurosis is, ultimately, "the suffering of a soul which has not discovered its meaning." So much of addiction, I believe, is exactly this, a soul searching for meaning, reaching for transcendence, and finding only a temporary and destructive substitute. The work of recovery is helping someone find the real thing.

The question beneath the addiction is rarely "how do I stop?" It's "what am I actually looking for?" And when people begin to find an honest answer to that question, recovery becomes possible in a way it never was before.

Next week: the hero's journey and why the darkest point of addiction can also be the beginning of the most important transformation of a person's life.

 Does the idea of addiction as a spiritual search resonate with you? I'd love to hear your thoughts, especially if you've experienced or witnessed recovery that felt like more than just giving something up.