Not-God (69 page)

4
     Amos, “History,” especially pp. 2-3;

early, significant perceptions were those of W. H. Thompson, “The Treatment of Chronic Alcoholism,”
American Journal of Psychiatry
, 98: 846-856 (1942); and W. L. Voegtlin and F. Lemere, “The Treatment of Alcohol Addiction: A Review of the Literature,”
QJSA
2: 717-803 (1942);

George A. Little, “The God Concept in Alcoholics Anonymous,”
Religion in Life
18: 25-33 (1948);

G. Aiken Taylor,
A Sober Faith
(New York: MacMillan, 1953);

A. H. Cain,
Philosophical Psychology of the Socially Estranged Alcoholic
, unpublished dissertation, Columbia University, I960;

G. Mouchot, “Alcoholics Anonymous. Lettre d’Angleterre,”
Concurs medical
76: 1863-1864 (1954);

R. K. Jones, “Sectarian Characteristics of Alcoholics Anonymous,”
Sociology
(Oxford) 4: 181-195 (1970);

P. M. Sessions, “Ego Religion and Supergo Religion in Alcoholics,”
QJSA
18: 121-125 (1957);

H. S. Ripley and J. K. Jackson, “Therapeutic Factors in Alcoholics Anonymous,”
American Journal of Psychiatry
116: 44-55 (1959);

H. M. Trice and P. M. Roman, “Sociopsychological Predictors of Affiliation with Alcoholics Anonymous: A Longitudinal Study of Treatment Success,”
Social Psychology
5: 51-59 (1970;

I. P. Gellman,
The Sober Alcoholic
(New Haven: College and University Press, 1964);

R. F. Bales, “The Therapeutic Role of Alcoholics Anonymous,”
QJSA
5: 267-278 (1944);

G. E. Metcalfe, “Alcoholics Anonymous.”
Journal of Indiana Medical Association
37: 684-686 (1944);

R. M. Holmes, “Alcoholics Anonymous as Group Logotherapy,”
Pastoral Psychology
21: 30-36 (1970);

D. A. Stewart, “The Problem of Value in the Study of Alcoholism,”
QJSA
12: 489-494 (1951);

D. A. Stewart, “The Dynamics of Fellowship as Illustrated in Alcoholics Anonymous,
QJSA
16: 251-262 (1955);

S. D. Bacon, “A Sociologist Looks at A.A.,”
Minnesota Welfare
10: 35-44 (1957);

W. G. Madsen, “A.A.: Birds of a Feather,” in
The American Alcoholic
(Spring-field, IL: C. C. Thomas, 1974); pp. 154-197;

O. R. Whitley, “Life With Alcoholics Anonymous: The Methodist Class Meeting as a Paradigm,”
JSA
38: 831-848 (1977);

R. L. Hoggson,
Alcoholics Anonymous: A Study in Solidarity
, unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, Fordham University, 1952, is especially revealing;

M. A. Maxwell, “Interpersonal Factors in the Genesis and Treatment of Alcohol Addiction,”
Social Forces
29: 443-448 (1951), the heavily condensed version of an unpublished report in the A.A. archives, is the most profound treatment carefully avoiding explicit “religion.”

5
     Beyond the whole tenor of the “We Agnostics” chapter of
AA
, this distinc tion is especially clear in Wilson to C.R.L., 1 April 1953; to Bill L., 9 November 1955; to Ed. K., 27 June 1961; to Paul H., 28 October 1964.

The “spiritual kindergarten” quotation used here is from Wilson to Caryl Chessman, 3 May 1954; other significant Wilson letters using the phrase in a clarifying way are to Dr. Tom P., 4 April 1955; to Walter B., 1 July 1958; to Father K., 28 July 1958; to Betty L., 8 December 1967;

the quotations on “theology” are from Wilson to Dr. Tom P., 4 April 1955.

6
     Wilson, to Russ J., 23 June 1959; to Al ?, 22 May 1942;
cf
also to Ted ?, 25 March 1940; to Dr. Humphrey O., 17 April 1961; to Stuart S., 8 February 1963; to Frank S., 11 March 1963.

7
    Smith, “Last Major Talk,” p. 19; “The Co-Founders of Alcoholics Anonymous;”
AA
, p. 570 (italics Wilson’s);
cf
. also “Take Step Eleven: One Man’s View — by Bill W.,"
AAGV
15:1 (June 1958), 3; Wilson to Bill F., 2 September 1966; to Jim C., 11 January 1961. The concern may be followed most easily by examining materials in the archive folder of “The Humanist Group,” a New York City A.A. group which flourished under this name in the mid-1940’s; also in the correspondence of Denys W. (Cambridge, England) to Wilson, 31 July, 2 October, and 12 October 1963.

Often, within Alcoholics Anonymous as elsewhere, “open-mindedness” seems valued only to the point where the one on whom it is urged begins to think as does the one doing the urging. This appears to be a function of individual temperament rather than inherent in A.A. itself, but on the possible affinity of “the closed mind” for Alcoholics Anonymous,
cf
. Milton Rokeach,
The Open and Closed Mind
(New York: Basic Books, 1960), as stimulating.

8
     Wilson to Fred W., 5 March 1960; Mr. W. had been a patient of Dr. Jung and was interviewed by this writer on this point. Wilson to Helen C, 9 April 1962: “[Jung] portrays the drinker as one who is seeking a spiritual release through alcohol.… deeply convinced that this is a part of the motivation that most heavy drinkers have. Therefore alcohol is not always taken for escape or obliteration — rather it is an attempt, very often at least, to reach higher values.… Aldous Huxley … held to this identical view.” On A.A.’s mindfulness of the Washingtonians,
cf
. above, pp. 116-117.

9
     Augustine,
Confessions
, Book One,
Chapter One
: “… fecisti nos ad te et inquietum est cor nostrum, donee requiescat in te.”

10
    Philip Rieff,
The Triumph of the Therapeutic
, can also be read as “The End of Tragedy;”
cf
. also E. M. Cioran, and especially, Henry Alonzo Myers,
Tragedy: A View of Life
(Ithaca, NY: Cornell, 1956); and
A Short History of Decay
, tr., Richard Howard (New York: Viking, 1975), especially p. 83, “Conditions of Tragedy.”

11
    On the Humanistic and Liberal tradition,
cf
. William R. Hutchison (ed.),
The Liberal Tradition in America
(New York: Harper Torchbook, 1968); for Evangelicalism, especially the Introduction to William G. McLoughlin (ed.),
The American Evangelicals: 1800-1900
(New York: Harper Torchbook, 1968), pp. 1-27. For an avowedly liberal but honest evaluation,
cf.
William R. Hutchison,
The Modernist Impulse in American Protestantism
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard, 1976).

On the Oxford Group, and especially how it may have mediated this insight to Alcoholics Anonymous,
cf
. above, pp. 46-50, especially the examination of Buchman’s background, p. 48.

12
    The broad diffusion of the “Return to Orthodoxy” may be glimpsed in Handlin, HUS, pp. 509-510. Sidney Ahlstrom (whose phrase is
“annus mirabilis”)
offers the best brief description of neo-orthodoxy:
cf
. “Theology in America: A Historical Survey,” in James Ward Smith and A. Leland Jamison (eds.).,
The Shaping of American Religion
(Princeton, NJ: University Press, 1961), pp. 312-316, and
A Religious History of the American People
(Garden City, NY: Doubleday-Image, 1975), vol. 2, pp. 434-438. The best and briefest primary source from the phenomenon’s own point of view is H. Richard Niebuhr,
The Kingdom of God in America
(New York: Harper & Row, 1937). The ideas outlined in this paragraph are drawn from Ahlstrom,
Iocs, cits.
, and William R. Hutchison,
The Modernist Impulse in American Protestantism
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1976), p. 195.

13
    On the transformation of the Oxford Group into Moral Re-Armament,
cf
. especially Walter Houston Clark, as cited above, p. 324.

14
    The representative literature that justifies the point here includes:

R. V. Seliger and V. Cranford, “The Rorschach Analysis in the Treatment of Alcoholism,”
Medical Record of New York
158: 32-38 (1945);

E. Bergler, “Personality Traits of Alcohol Addicts,”
QJSA
7: 356-359 (1946);

M. Werner, “Der Alkoholismus als ethisches Problem (Alcoholism as an Ethical Problem)”
Fursorger
23: 1-14 (1955);

R. G. Bell, “Alcohol and Loneliness,”
Journal of Social Theory
2: 171-181 (1956);

J. D. Armstrong, “The Search for the Alcoholic Personality,”
The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science
135: 40-47 (1958);

R. R. Rudie and L. S. McGaughran, “Differences in Developmental Experience, Defensiveness, and Personality Organization between Two Classes of Problem Drinkers,”
Journal of Abnormal Psychology
62: 659-665 (1961);

P. M. Sands, P. G. Hanson, and R. B. Sheldon, “Recurring Themes in Group Psychotherapy with Alcoholics,”
Psychiatric Quarterly
41: 474—482 (1967);

E. S. Lisansky-Gomberg, “Etiology of Alcoholism,”
Journal of Consulting Clinical Psychology
32: 18-20 (1968);

A. I. Malcolm, “On the Psychotherapy of Alcoholism,”
Addiction
(Toronto) 15 (No. 1): 25-40 (1968);

J. L. Carroll and G. B. Fuller, “The Self and Ideal-Self Concept of the Alcoholic as Influenced by Length of Sobriety and/or Participation in Alcoholics Anonymous,”
Journal of Clinical Psychology
25: 363-364 (1969);

W. A. White, “Alcoholism, A Symptom,”
Interstate Medical Journal
23: 404-407 (1916);

H. H. Hart, “Personality Factors in Alcoholism,”
Archives of Neurological Psychiatry
(Chicago), 24: 116-134 (1930);

R. P. Knight, “The Psychodynamics of Alcoholism,”
Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease
86: 538-548 (1937);

R. P. Knight, “The Dynamics and Treatment of Chronic Alcohol Addiction,”
Bulletin of the Menninger Clinic
1: 233-251 (1937);

M. E. Bonney, “Parents as the Makers of Social Deviants,”
Social Forces
20: 77-87 (1942);

D. Anderson, “The Process of Recovery from Alcoholism,”
Federal Probation
8 (No. 4), 14-19 (1944);

C. Landis, “Theories of the Alcoholic Personality,” in
Alcohol, Science and Society:
Twenty-nine Lectures with Discussions as Given at the Yale School of Alcohol Studies (New Haven, CT: Quarterly Journal of Studies on Alcohol, 1945), pp. 129-142;

R. E. Mogar, W. M. Wilson, and S. T. Helm, “Personality Subtypes of Male and Female Alcoholic Patients,”
International Journal of Addictions
5: 99-113 (1970);

S. M. L. Kammeier, H. Hoffmann, and R. G. Loper, “Personality Characteristics of Alcoholics as College Freshmen and at Time of Treatment,”
QJSA
34: 390-399 (1973);

A. F. Fontana, B. N. Dowds, and M. H. Bethel, “A.A. and Group Therapy for Alcoholics: An Application of the World Hypothesis Scale,”
JSA
37: 675-682 (1976);

M. Keller, “Alcoholism: the Image of Reality,”
Alcoholism
(Zagreb) 11: 18-27 (1975);

M. Keller, “The Nature of Addiction: Some Second Thoughts,”
Alcoholism
(Zagreb) 11: 28-32 (1975);

J. Westermeyer and V. Walzer, “Drug Usage: An Alternative to Religion?”
Diseases of the Nervous System
36: 492-495 (1975);

M. Tomsovic, “Group Therapy and Changes in the Self-Concept of Alcoholics,”
JSA
37: 53-57 (1976);

C. E. Thune, “Alcoholism and the Archetypal Past: A Phenomenological Perspective on Alcoholics Anonymous,”
JSA
38: 75-88 (1977);

E. M. Jellinek, “The Symbolism of Drinking: A Culture-Historical Approach,”
JSA
38: 849-866 (1977).

15
    
Cf
. Hutchison and McLoughlin as cited in note #11, above, and especially the McLoughlin “Introduction;” on William James,
cf
. above, pp. 34-35 and 164.

16
    On the neo-orthodox rejection of “psychologism,”
cf
. sources cited in note #12, above, especially Ahlstrom in Smith and Jamison; “pluralism” will be treated in greater depth in
Chapter Nine
,
cf
. pp. 220-221, below, with citations.

17
    Among the wealth of literature on “mind-cure,”
cf
. especially Donald Meyer,
The Postive Thinkers
(New York: Doubleday, 1965); Meyer’s treatment of specifically the role of William James, pp. 315-324, should be supplemented by the insights in Cushing Strout, “The Pluralistic Identity of William James,”
American Quarterly
23: 135-152 (1971); David W. Marcell,
Progress and Pragmatism
(Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1974); James B. Gilbert,
Work Without Salvation
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, 1977), especially pp. 181-210; and especially William Barrett,
The Illusion of Technique
.

18
    The Biblical reference is to “the tree of the knowledge of good and evil,” Genesis 2: 16-17 and 3: 1-23. Many thinkers through the ages have explored the implications of this mythic story; a recent and stimulating effort, on other levels also provocative of thought
re
Alcoholics Anonymous, is Thomas Szasz,
The Second Sin
(New York: Doubleday, 1973);
cf
. also Leslie H. Farber, “Thinking About Will” and ‘Our Kindly Family Physician, Chief Crazy Horse,” in
Lying, Despair, Jealousy, Envy, Suicide, Sex, Drugs, and the Good Life
(New York: Basic Books, 1976), pp. 3-12 and 106-119.

19
    J. Clancy, “The Use of Intellectual Processes in Group Psycho-Therapy with Alcoholics,”
QJSA
23: 432-441 (1962): the direct quotation is
via
CAAAL #9456;

H. M. Tiebout, “Conversion as a Psychological Phenomenon,” paper read before the New York Psychiatric Society, 11 April 1944, most easily available in pamphlet form from the National Council on Alcoholism, 733 Park Avenue, New York 10017.

20
    Charles G. Finney, “What a Revival of Religion Is,” reprinted in William G. McLoughlin,
The American Evangelicals: 1800-1900
(New York: Harper Torch-book, 1968), pp 87-100: the passage here is from pp. 92-94; the timing is given by McLoughlin in his introductory note, p. 86;