The correspondence between Carl Jung, Leonard Bacon and Rowland Hazard, along with other contemporary material, has filled in many of the details concerning Rowland's initial therapy. However, in the traditional account of Jung's role in the development of AA, the analysis itself is relatively unimportant. Of much greater importance is a conversation thought to have occurred later, when Rowland had relapsed and returned to Zurich.
In my initial research, I tried unsuccessfully to find a date on which such a conversation might have occurred. My hope was that the context might clarify Jung's meaning. Robert Winer M.D. (www.neurocareusa.com), who is a neurologist, psychiatrist and Jungian analyst, informed me recently that Carl Jung had given his own account of a patient who was very likely Rowland Hazard. As Dr. Winer pointed out, Jung's own explanation of his thinking is of much greater value than secondary sources.
Jung made the remarks during a seminar for the Guild of Pastoral Psychology in London, on 5 April 1939. His talk was issued privately in 1954 as a transcript from shorthand taken by an attendee (Jung approved the transcript). This was later included in Volume 18 of the Collected Works, The Symbolic Life. In answering a question concerning the reasons Roman Catholics were unlikely to develop neurosis (it was Jung's position that they rarely did, due to the richness of the symbolic life in the church), Jung said (p 272, paragraphs 620-1):
My attitude to these matters is that, as long as a patient is really a member of a church, he ought to be serious. He ought to be really and sincerely a member of that church, and he should not go to a doctor to get his conflicts settled when he believes that he should do it with God. For instance, when a member of the Oxford Group comes to me in order to get treatment, I say, "You are in the Oxford Group; so long as you are there, you settle your affair with the Oxford Group. I can't do it better than Jesus."
I will tell you a story of such a case. A hysterical alcoholic was cured by this Group movement, and they used him as a sort of model and sent him all round Europe, where he confessed so nicely and said that he had done wrong and how he had got cured through the Group movement. And when he had repeated his story twenty, or it may have been fifty, times, he got sick of it and took to drink again. The spiritual sensation had simply faded away. Now what are they going to do with him? They say, now he is pathological, he must go to a doctor. See, in the first stage he has been cured by Jesus, in the second by a doctor! I should and did refuse such a case. I sent the man back to these people and said, "If you believe that Jesus has cured this man, he will do it a second time. And if he can't do it, you don't suppose that I can do it better than Jesus?" But that is just exactly what they do expect; when a man is pathological, Jesus won't help him but the doctor will.
Although the Oxford Group claimed many adherents during the 1930s, the members who toured with the "international team" were a small and elite group. Rowland Hazard made a trip to Europe, as part of the international team, in September 1935. He had spoken at previous Oxford Group events in the United States and Canada, and his mentors in the Group felt that he was ready to take more prominent role. The primary destination in 1935 was Geneva, where the Group held an international conference. (Hazard/Smith correspondence, 16 June through 21 August 1935, H. Alexander Smith papers, Mudd Library, Princeton University). Rowland had a relapse the following summer while in New Mexico, and was brought to New York to be treated.
In a later talk, also included in Volume 18 of the Collected Works (p 242), Jung said:
This compartment psychology reminds me of another case. It was that of an alcoholic who had come under the laudable influence of a certain religious movement and, fascinated by its enthusiasm, had forgotten he needed a drink. He was obviously and miraculously cured by Jesus, and accordingly was held up as a witness to divine grace or to the efficacy of the said organization. After a few weeks of public confession, the novelty began to wear off and some alcoholic refreshment seemed to be indicated. But this time the helpful organization came to the conclusion that the case was "pathological" and not suitable for an intervention by Jesus. So they put him in a clinic to let the doctor do better than the divine healer.
Richard Dubiel, in The Road to Fellowship (p 162), reports that Rowland Hazard was hospitalized in New York City during August 1936, after his relapse. His family also sought the help of Shep Cornell, Rowland's closest Oxford Group friend, in dealing with the problem. It is interesting to note that Carl Jung arrived in New York on August 30, 1936 for a lecture tour which included New York, Cambridge and Providence. He gave a seminar at Bailey Island, Maine, and met with many former analysands (Deirdre Bair, Jung:A Biography, pp 418-423). Jung's recollection that he "sent the man back to these people" therefore may have referred to a conversation which took place in the United States, not Switzerland.
It certainly seems likely that Jung's remarks refer to Rowland Hazard. If so, Wilson's recollection--that Jung's refusal to treat Rowland, and the accompanying message, was fundamental to Bill's own conversion and recovery--must have been in error. According to Jung, there was a trip to Europe (with the Oxford Group) prior to the relapse. The only possible correlation with Rowland's activities would place the conversation in 1936. Wilson was a member of the Oxford Group in 1936 and may have heard something about the conversation at the time. Bill Wilson stopped drinking in 1934, however, and the founding of AA is traditionally associated with Dr. Bob Smith's last drink in 1935.
If the conversation did occur in 1936, the new chronology might help provide answers to two other questions. First, why did Bill Wilson wait so long to write Carl Jung? According to Mel B. (in his book, New Wine, quoting Nell Wing), a Jungian student first made the suggestion in 1945. Then, "the idea came up from time to time over the next 15 years without any action ever being taken" (p 9). When Wilson finally did write the letter, Jung was 85 years old and quite ill, having had a stroke in 1960. Is it possible that the delay reflected a concern that Jung would remember a different sequence of events?
It is also interesting that there are significant differences between the account of the conversation in the 1939 book, Alcoholics Anonymous, and the letter Wilson wrote to Jung in 1961. The words of doom attributed to Jung in the book are much more extreme ("he could never regain his position in society and he would have to place himself under lock and key or hire a bodyguard if he expected to live long") than those in the letter (which refer only to the worthlessness of further medical or psychiatric treatment). Perhaps by 1961 someone had told Bill Wilson that Jung had his own recollection of the conversation.
Whatever the explanation may be for Wilson's story, Jung's own account of his thinking on these issues is an invaluable addition to our understanding of them. Jung's message is not so much about hopelessness (medical, psychiatric or otherwise) as it is about consistency. Jung clearly felt that people need to pay attention to what has worked for them in the past, particularly with regard to spiritual things. His gentle mockery of the Oxford Group implies that the objective truth of a belief system may not be important.
There is no reason to doubt that the teachings of Carl Jung were transmitted to Ebby Thacher by Rowland Hazard, and that in some form they influenced Bill Wilson also. Bill Wilson later emphasized one particular claim: that immediately following Rowland's treatment he returned to drinking, that Jung told him he could not recover except through religious means, and that he then achieved long-term sobriety in the Oxford Group. The details of the story do not seem to match this chronology. Jung's influence was apparently less specific, a reflection of his general respect for religious healing.
This section gathers together some details which, although interesting, did not fit in with the main story line. A few questions occurred to me as I was writing, and I was able to find (at least partial) answers.
Rowland Hazard didn't go to Africa alone, did he? Who were his traveling companions?
Here is an excerpt from a Chicago Tribune article about the trip. Rowland was in the hospital in Arusha at the time it appeared.
Naples, Italy, January 20
George F. Getz, wealthy Chicago coal man and noted amateur zoologist, accompanied by his party of five other hunters, arrived here from Zanzibar on the Italian steamer Mazzini after what was described as the mightiest big game hunting invasion ever made into the Dark Continent. The hunters were accompanied by 250 native porters while in the wilds.
Part of their adventurous, dangerous foray into Tanganyika, formerly German East Africa, lay over Theodore Roosevelt's old trail of about twenty years ago. Elephants, lions, tigers, jackels, rhinoceroses, hippopotami, and giraffes fell before their rifles. In addition, Mr. Getz reports the special accomplishment of shooting the rare animal called the oryx, which is a furry beast larger than a greyhound.
The adventurers met the furious charge of African buffaloes, which Mr. Getz says are the most savage beasts in Africa. Treacherous natives guides went on strike when the party was several days inland, threatening to desert. Still another difficulty presented itself in the form of malaria, which attacked the hunters in the marshes.
The Getz party made a trip of 1,200 miles inland, going toward Lake Victoria in Tanganyika. They covered about 2,500 miles in 60 days. The party consisted of Mr. Getz, George F. Getz Jr., C.D. Caldwell, president of By-Products Coke company; Harry Vissering of Kenilworth, Dr. Arthur Metz of Chicago, and Roland Hazard of New York.
George Getz was the official promoter for the second Dempsey-Tunney boxing match, held immediately before his departure for Africa. Getz owned a large private zoo in Holland, Michigan, the fulfillment of a boyhood dream. Live animals captured during the trip were shipped to the zoo-according to the article there were six giraffes, six zebras, one young rhinoceros, and many baboons and monkeys.
In his Oxford Group testimonial in 1935, Rowland said that his OG experience had helped him through a "desperate and humiliating situation." What was the nature of the situation?
My first thought was that he was remembering the circumstances of his 1929 divorce. However, he and his wife remarried in 1931, and in the testimonial Rowland was referring to the 1932-34 period.
The answer, I think, lies in the history of the Allied Chemical and Dye Corporation. It was formed in December 1920 through the merger of five American chemical companies including some largely owned by the Hazard family. Rowland Hazard was one of nine founding directors of Allied Chemical and Dye, and remained a director the rest of his life.
Allied Chemical and Dye grew rapidly through the booming 20s under the conservative management of president Orlando Weber. The company was said to have been governed as a monarchy by Weber, whose reputation for guarding financial and technological secrets was unsurpassed.
After the stock market crash of 1929, this approach brought the company into conflict with shareholders and the New York Stock Exchange. Companies whose stock was traded on the exchange were expected to provide accurate information to stockholders about the value of the company's holdings. Allied Chemical continued its old policy of providing almost no information, despite increasing pressure for compliance during the years 1931 and 1932.
When Allied finally capitulated and provided figures, it became evident that the figures were calculated using methods of accounting so creative as to be considered dishonest. In May 1933 the Stock Exchange announced that Allied Chemical and Dye would be removed from the list of stocks traded on the Exchange on 23 August. It was, according to the New York Times, a "drastic step the Exchange has never taken because of a company's accounting methods, since it was felt that unoffending stockholders would be penalized for the policies of the management."
On 7 July 1933, a truce was announced. Allied Chemical and Dye agreed to supply more information and was allowed to retain their listing on the Exchange. Rowland Hazard later said that "business in the United States was awakening to the spiritual needs of the times, and declared that he thinks his job is to see that there is a place for God in all director's meetings." (Winnipeg Free Press, 28 November 1934, "Many Cities are Represented as Groupers Gather"). It was a source of pride in the Oxford Group that their methods had been used to resolve business disputes as well as labor-management disputes. Rowland may have felt that his Oxford Group experience helped him contribute to the resolution of the crisis.
According to Richard Dubiel, (in The Road to Fellowship p 66-67) the first indication that Rowland was to be seeing Courtenay Baylor appeared in a letter from his mother to his brother written 24 July 1933. This was about two weeks after the resolution of the standoff between Allied Chemical and the Stock Exchange. Courtenay Baylor billed the family (there was a fund set aside for such expenses) a substantial amount of money over the next few months and then smaller amounts through the fall of 1934.
Early in 1933, Rowland had turned over the management of his businesses, including those in New Mexico, to other family members. My guess is that during the first six months of 1933, the reason Rowland was not involved in his usual business concerns was the crisis at Allied Chemical and Dye. In late 1933 and early 1934 he was probably recovering from a relapse.
The specific reason for chosing Baylor is not known, although Baylor had a good reputation as a lay therapist who worked with alcoholics. Interestingly, he was not the first person to treat Rowland who had Emmanuel movement connections. Dr. Edward Cowles had worked with the Emmanuel groups while completing a fellowship in psychiatry/neurology at Harvard in 1907-09. Beginning in 1922, Cowles directed a "Body and Soul Clinic," on the Emmanuel pattern, at St. Mark's-in-the-Bowerie Church in New York City.
Rowland's family evidently had some acquaintance with Courtenay Baylor as early as 1929. On 28 December of that year, Elmer Keith wrote a letter to Courtenay Baylor from Switzerland. It is listed in a bibliography compiled by Dick B., as "regarding Dr. Carl Jung, Dr. Frank Buchman and his fellowship, on an experience of God, sharing and 'power' from above." The letter is not in Dick B.'s own collection, however, and I have not been able to locate it.
On 2 December 1928, Rowland's mother wrote to his brother about a trip Rowland had just made. He had driven to Santa Barbara in a rental car, beginning somewhere north or east of Arkansas (I cannot tell where the trip began). He spent some time in Rockwall, Texas where there was an excavation of a possible archeological site.
The Rockwall site was in fact a natural geological formation, but there was evidently some dispute about that at the time. Byron de Prorok, an eccentric adventurer/excavator with an interest in Atlantis and other crypto-archealogical themes, had recently made a trip there. Rowland's interest in the site raises the possibility that his interest in the Southwest was partially archeological.
Rowland's trip to Santa Barbara took him through New Mexico. According to later newspaper accounts, it was car trouble that led to his chance discovery of the beautiful La Luz area. In the months following the trip, he began to make arrangements to purchase the property. A 1955 article in the Albuquerque Journal described the area and its history:
It was the same panorama--one embracing the White Sands of New Mexico, whose light in the west melts into the shadows of the San Andres--that in 1719 appealed to some Franciscan padres and again in 1929 to a wealthy young man from the East.
The view was from the western slope of the Sacramento Mountains on the east. A stream splashed down a deep canyon from some high watershed. Here the Franciscan fathers in 1719 built a church and called it Nuestra Senora de la Luz (Our Lady of Light).
The village which grew up in the site of the mission was a popular stopping place for many years, with a successful inn. It was all but deserted after the railroad passed it by. Then Rowland Hazard arrived, with "as many ideas as he had dollars."
He began operations in a big way, hiring men who were experts in their professions or trades. Hazard himself was a chemical engineer and had served in World War I. He also was an avid traveler and during sojourns in California had become an admirer of the old hand-made tile roofs and floors of early missions there. He decided to have such tiles for his La Luz Canyon home and brought in Conia Rodrigues for Old Mexico, a well-known ceramic artist.
Rodriguez discovered there was suitable clay to be found in the hills nearby where Hazard was erecting his home. The New Yorker erected a pottery plant on the site.…
Hazard established elegant display quarters for the pottery in New York City, Florida and the West coast.… The New Yorker then bought the rambling old inn in La Luz. He had it redecorated and reroofed with the rosy-red tile from the pottery plant. By this time Hazard had invested $300,000 in the area. (Albuquerque Journal, 22 November 1955)
The article quoted above did not even mention Rowland's farms, which produced a range of agricultural products using modern water-saving methods.
While in Vermont years before, Rowland had become friends with Carl Ruggles, the composer. Ruggles, his wife Charlotte and son Micah spent the winter of 1929-30 at Rowland's ranch. Another friend, artist Henry Schnakenberg, also visited that winter.
Hazard's ranch, just outside of Alamogordo on one of the nearby mountains, consisted of the main house, where he lived, and several smaller guest houses. When Schnakenberg … visited in March, he wrote to his family the "the place is high up on a mountain looking for miles into the distance." Carl remembered that everyone spoke Spanish, and that the cowboys taught Micah to ride horseback. …
Life in Alamogordo was not all work. Often there were dinners at the ranch house with their host, who arranged sight-seeing trips for them where Carl could paint or sketch. When Henry Schnakenberg arrived, there were even more festivities, and he, too, had his own little house near the Ruggleses. Hazard arranged for all of them to go on a three-day trip to the Carlsbad Caverns, guided by his overseer, the state geologist of New Mexico. (from Marilyn J. Ziffrin, Carl Ruggles: Composer, Painter, Storyteller, Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1994)
But is there no exception as to the wickedness of man's heart? Yes, in those that are born of God.
John Wesley, sermon preached in Halifax, 21 April 1790
Begbie cites several cases in which drunkards of years' standing become free from the drink habit seemingly at one stroke, and turn from lives of criminality to eager service of others. Cases of this sort have driven both theology and psychology to search for explanation somewhere outside the field of ordinary mental occurrences. Theology has, of course, had recourse to the supernatural, and psychology to the subconscious. And there is no doubt that if the subconscious be given a sufficiently wide interpretation, psychology is justified in looking to it for the explanation of these striking phenomena. Experiments with … posthypnotic suggestion and with those pathological cases which Freud, Prince, Sidis and others have made so familiar. … —experiments of these and other types show much the same sort of sudden rise of ideas, convictions and emotions not to be accounted for by the normal consciousness as is to be found in the conversion of St. Paul! or of Alphonse Ratisbonne.
James Pratt, the Religious Consciousness: A Psychological Study (New York: Mac Millan, 1923) p 160
The faith-state may hold a very minimum of intellectual content. … When, however, a positive intellectual content is associated with a faith state, it gets invincibly stamped in upon belief, and this explains the passionate loyalty of religious persons everywhere to the minutest details of their so widely differing creeds.
William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience1
Partakers of the life of God,
"Drunkards of the Divine" — what else?
We face the serpent or the rod
And buckle truth within our belts —
Truth that strange thing that must describe
The instant feeling of a man,
Nor shirk the emotions of the tribe,
That all must know or no one can.
Leonard Bacon, William James and Autumn2
And long after "pragmatism' in any sense save as an application of his Welt-Anschauung shall have passed into a not unhappy oblivion, the fundamental idea of an open universe in which uncertainty, choice, hypotheses, novelties and possibilities are naturalized will remain associated with the name of James; the more he is studied in his historic setting the more original and daring will the idea appear.
John Dewey, The Pragmatic Acquiescence3
The advice of Carl Jung has been transmitted to us by way of at least two people, Rowland Hazard and Bill Wilson. The substance of the advice, as reported in Bill Wilson's writings, is reminiscent of William James' views on conversion. Carl Jung spoke to William James in 1909, and had presumably read some of his work. If Jung was familiar with The Varieties of Religious Experience, Rowland's problems may have reminded him of a phrase quoted by James: "the only radical cure for dipsomania is religiomania."
Intellectually, James was the heir of Charles Sanders Peirce, who coined the term pragmatism. When Peirce attempted a thumbnail sketch of pragmatism he used the maxim, "Dismiss make-believes." But James had absorbed the mysticism of Emmanuel Swedenborg in his childhood home, and throughout his life believed in the objective reality of paranormal phenomena. His instinct led him to see different possibilities in pragmatic theory.
James wrote his two-volume Principles of Psychology over a period of 12 years, completing it in 1890. It was an unprecedented study of the physical basis and biological function of consciousness, and was foundational to American cognitive and social psychology. James took an empirical and naturalistic approach, ostensibly avoiding metaphysics. His more strictly philosophical work, on pragmatism and radical empiricism, appeared over the next 20 years.
The most enduring of his writings on religious philosophy is The Varieties of Religious Experience. The book is primarily a descriptive work, and the title implies an appreciation for a wide range of religious phenomena. However, James regards only the most dramatic (and often bizarre) experiences of the transcendent as of "religious" interest. The more ordinary manifestations of religious consciousness are simply, in his view, a matter of training or volition.
Theodore Flournoy, a psychologist and friend of William James, wrote "When one attempts to put the very varied content of his essays and lectures into precise and well-arranged formulae one runs the risk of gravely misrepresenting him."4 Unfortunately, religious philosophy of James reached Alcoholics Anonymous through the Oxford Group. The Group was famous for turning out formulae, checklists, slogans and mnemonic devices.
Harold Begbie's Twice-Born Men, A Clinic in Regeneration: A Footnote in Narrative to William James's "The Varieties of Religious Experience" (1909) was a popular title among Groupers. Begbie was a London journalist, novelist and conservative Christian who had studied the work of the Salvation Army in the London slums. In the early 1920s Begbie became involved with Frank Buchman and wrote a book about Buchman's movement, Life-Changers: More Twice-Born Men.
Twice-Born Men begins with an outline of James' religious philosophy as understood by Begbie.
What is "conversion"?
According to Professor James, in whose steps we follow with admiration and respect, "to be converted, to be regenerated, to receive grace, to experience religion, to gain assurance, are so many phrases which denote the process, gradual or sudden, by which a soul 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."
Elsewhere he speaks of "those striking instantaneous instances of which Saint Paul's is the most eminent, and in which often, amid tremendous emotional excitement or perturbation of the senses, a complete division is established in the twinkling of an eye between the old life and the new."
These definitions, as all the world knows, are illustrated in Professor James's book by remarkable and well-authenticated histories of personal conversion. The evidence for the reality of these immense changes in character is overwhelming, and the only point where the psychologists find themselves at issue is the means by which they have become accomplished. As to that interesting conflict of opinion the reader is referred to the combatants. The purpose of this book, which I venture to describe as a footnote in narrative to Professor James's famous work, is to bring home to men's minds this fact concerning conversion, that, whatever it may be, conversion is the only means by which a radically bad person can be changed into a radically good person. 5
A shift seems to have occurred from James' careful definition of a transformational experience to Begbie's version (the italics are in the original). James at least attempts some anthropological detachment. Begbie throws caution to the winds and makes conversion-inevitably Christian, in his world-the only route to reformation. It was natural that he would find common cause with Buchman. Although Oxford Group members probably also read James in the original, their reading of it was undoubtedly influenced by the interpretation of Begbie.
