Illustration · A stone table in a garden by a lake at dusk in spring 1961, with a typed letter of three pages and the airmail envelope it came in. Carl Jung’s house at Küsnacht stood on Lake Zurich, but the garden, the table and the pipe are the drawing’s own. Not drawn from a photograph.

New York, Los Angeles and Küsnacht · 1944–1961

Spiritus contra spiritum

Could the experience be brought on? Bill W. came to think a new drug might help, and put the question to Carl Jung, who never answered it.

“If only we could give him a straight dose of that ‘transcendent symbol’ and have it over with!”

Bill W., of the agnostic newcomer, answering an article in the AA Grapevine, September 1944 · reprinted in The Language of the Heart, 1988

A straight dose

In September 1944 the Grapevine printed an article by the writer Philip Wylie, an alcoholic who said he had quit on his own, with psychiatry and other scientific aids to keep him sober. Bill W. answered it in the same issue. What caught his attention most, he wrote, was Wylie’s mention of a spiritual experience “a la Jung,” seemingly brought on “by scientific psychological technique.” He half wished for one: a dose like that would spare members the long wait while a newcomer battered his way to an open mind. Still, he agreed with Wylie that it mattered little how the change came, so long as it worked, though most members, he thought, would find that way of living inadequate, and call humility and faith in God the stronger medicine.

Twelve years later something of another kind was on offer. In the mid-1950s two psychiatrists at a mental hospital in Saskatchewan, Humphry Osmond and Abram Hoffer, were giving alcoholics LSD, a drug so new that no law yet covered it. They had expected it to frighten them like an attack of the D.T.’s. Instead, Osmond said, it gave people pause “not on the grounds of how terrifying it was, but how illuminating it was.” Bill, he remembered, was “extremely unthrilled” at first. Then he heard of their results, and on August 29, 1956, in California, he took it himself. Mr. Anonymous, in Number One Man, tells those years, and Backing away from hell tells Father Ed Dowling’s part in them.

Bill didn’t claim the drug made the experience. As he saw it, it cut the ego down for a while, and “ego reduction makes the influx of God’s grace possible”; it would “never take the place” of the other ways of reducing the ego and keeping it reduced. But in June 1958 he wrote to the minister Sam Shoemaker that prayer, fasting, meditation and despair probably had chemical sides too, and if so, it mattered little whether a mystic result came by fasting or some other way. His secretary, Nell Wing, said his first session was “totally spiritual,” like the night at Towns Hospital that had freed him.

In January 1961 he wrote at last to Carl Jung, to thank him for what he had told Rowland H. decades before (Court of Last Resort tells it). Jung answered within a week. Rowland’s craving, he wrote, had been the equivalent, on a low level, of the spiritual thirst for wholeness, and “the only right and legitimate way to such an experience is, that it happens to you in reality,” to someone walking a path toward higher understanding. Alcohol in Latin is spiritus, he added, the same word as for the highest religious experience; hence the formula, spiritus contra spiritum.

Bill wrote back on March 20. On the letter’s third page, which AA’s biography of him leaves out and the writer Ian McCabe printed in 2015 from a copy a source he doesn’t name sent him, Bill told Jung that on his first trial of LSD his experience of twenty-five years before had been “re-enacted in wonderful splendor and conviction,” and asked for Jung’s comment. None came. In May Jung’s secretary wrote that he had read the letter and meant to answer, but had fallen ill. He died on June 6.

Listen Spiritus contra spiritum About 1 minute

Letters, 1954–1961

The question by mail

Bill and Jung never argued it out face to face; the question went back and forth by mail. Here are nine letters, in the order they were written, on whether such an experience can be brought on: those written in America on the left, those from Switzerland on the right.

Quoted from Pass It On and The Language of the Heart; from Ian McCabe’s book, which prints two of Jung’s letters from his published Letters and the third page of Bill’s from a copy he was sent; and from Ernest Kurtz’s essay on Bill and LSD. Quotations are short excerpts.

April 10, 1954Bollingen → England

Carl Jung, at his lakeside tower, to Victor White, a Dominican priest, who had written to him about patients given LSD at an English asylum

“I am profoundly mistrustful of the ‘pure gifts of the Gods.’ You pay very dearly for them.”

From Jung’s Letters, vol. 2, as McCabe quotes them
1957, before AugustLos Angeles → Switzerland

Betty Eisner, a psychologist who took LSD with Bill and helped guide a session in February 1957, to Jung

LSD, she wrote, was “almost a religious drug.”

As Jung’s published letters record it, quoted by McCabe
August 12, 1957Switzerland → Los Angeles

Jung to Betty Eisner

Religion was “a state of mind which cannot be injected by a syringe or swallowed in the form of a pill.”

From Jung’s Letters, as McCabe quotes them
June 1958New York → Pittsburgh

Bill W. to Sam Shoemaker, the Episcopal minister who had led the Oxford Group in New York

Prayer, fasting, meditation and despair, he wrote, probably “do have their chemical components.”

Quoted in Pass It On
January 10, 1959Los Angeles → Kentucky

Aldous Huxley, the novelist, to Thomas Merton, a Trappist monk

A friend saved from alcoholism “by a spontaneous theophany” found the drug “identical with the spontaneous experience which changed his life.”

Quoted by Ernest Kurtz, who sets it at the head of his essay on Bill and LSD
January 23, 1961New York → Switzerland

Bill W. to Jung, in thanks

AA’s chain of drunks talking to drunks had made conversion experiences “available on an almost wholesale basis.”

In The Language of the Heart
January 30, 1961Switzerland → New York

Jung to Bill W.

“The only right and legitimate way to such an experience is, that it happens to you in reality…”

In The Language of the Heart
March 20, 1961New York → Switzerland

Bill W. to Jung, on the third page

On his first trial of LSD, his experience of twenty-five years before was “re-enacted in wonderful splendor and conviction.”

As McCabe prints it, from a copy sent by a source he doesn’t name
May 5, 1961Switzerland → New York

Aniela Jaffé, Jung’s secretary, to Bill W.

Jung had read the letter, she wrote, and “had in his mind to answer you,” but had fallen ill.

As McCabe quotes it, from the archives at Stepping Stones
June 6, 1961Küsnacht

Jung dies at home, at 85. Bill’s question goes unanswered.

No answer

Bill came to think a drug could clear the way for the experience, as fasting or despair might. Jung held that it had to come in the course of a life, not in a pill. The question reached Jung in his last spring, and the two never argued it out.

For a closer look

Go deeper

What William James wrote about a gas, the novelist the Grapevine recommended, and the numbers.

The nitrous oxide trance

The question was already in the book Ebby T. brought Bill in 1934. In the lectures where William James wrote that drink stirs the mystical side of human nature (The book Ebby brought tells it), he wrote that nitrous oxide, diluted with air, stirs it “in an extraordinary degree.” Depth beyond depth of truth seems to open, he wrote, then fades at the moment of coming to, and whatever words are left turn out to be nonsense, though the sense that a profound meaning was there persists.

He had tried the gas himself. It convinced him that ordinary waking consciousness is only one kind, with others all about it, “parted from it by the filmiest of screens.” Such states could shape a person’s outlook, he wrote, though they gave no formulas. His own came to one insight, a reconciliation of opposites, and the living sense of its reality, he wrote, came to him only in “the artificial mystic state of mind.”

On the night table

Aldous Huxley, the English novelist who lived in California, comes into AA’s story more than once. In February 1946 the Grapevine reviewed his anthology of the mystics, The Perennial Philosophy, and said it belonged on the night table beside AA’s own book. The review quoted him that when the mind “is subjected to certain rather drastic treatments,” the divine element in it shows itself, and that to believe spiritual exercises are enlightenment, or guarantee it, is “mere idolatry and superstition.”

In 1953 Humphry Osmond gave Huxley mescaline, a drug from the peyote cactus, and Huxley’s book about it, The Doors of Perception, came out the next year. Pass It On quotes it and adds that it is “certainly not A.A. language,” though the thought, it says, is the same as Bill’s about deflating the ego. Gerald Heard had introduced Huxley to Bill in the mid-1940s, Ernest Kurtz writes. Huxley’s 1959 letter to Thomas Merton, in the letters above, names no one, but Kurtz set it at the head of his essay on Bill and LSD.

How many stayed sober

The numbers depended on who gave them. Nell Wing remembered that among hospital alcoholics AA could reach only about five percent, while the doctors had about fifteen percent recoveries with LSD. Bill told Jung that of 150 such cases his Canadian friends had given LSD and then placed in AA groups over three years, “seventy-five are remaining perfectly sober.” Ernest Kurtz notes one Canadian study that reported seventy percent.

Later trials compared patients given a full dose of LSD with patients given a low dose, another drug or none. A 2012 review of six of them, published from 1966 to 1970, with 536 patients in all, most of them men in hospital, found that 59 percent of those given a single dose had improved at the first follow-up, against 38 percent of the others. By a year the difference was no longer statistically significant, and the review’s authors called the trials underpowered.

Sources

Bill W., comment on Philip Wylie’s “Philip Wylie Jabs a Little Needle into Complacency,” AA Grapevine, September 1944, and Bill W.’s letter to Carl Jung of January 23, 1961, with Jung’s reply of January 30, printed in the Grapevine in January 1963. Both in The Language of the Heart. AA Grapevine, 1988.
Pass It On. AA World Services, 1984. Chapter 23, quoting Humphry Osmond, Nell Wing, Bill’s letter to Sam Shoemaker of June 1958 and Aldous Huxley’s The Doors of Perception.
Ian McCabe. Carl Jung and Alcoholics Anonymous: The Twelve Steps as a Spiritual Journey of Individuation. Karnac, 2015. Chapter 1, quoting Jung’s letters to Victor White of April 10, 1954, written at Bollingen, and to Betty Eisner of August 12, 1957 (C. G. Jung Letters, vol. 2, Princeton, 1975, where the Eisner letter is at pages 382–83; also Selected Letters of C. G. Jung, 1909–1961, 1984), and Aniela Jaffé’s letter to Bill of May 5, 1961, at Stepping Stones; and Appendix Six, the third page of Bill’s letter to Jung of March 20, 1961, from a copy sent by a source he doesn’t name.
Ernest Kurtz, “Drugs and the Spiritual: Bill W. Takes LSD,” in The Collected Ernie Kurtz, 2008 (first published 1999), quoting Aldous Huxley’s letter to Thomas Merton of January 10, 1959, and the Saskatchewan figures.
William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature. Longmans, Green, 1902. Lectures XVI and XVII, “Mysticism.” Free at Project Gutenberg (the text of a 1917 printing).
“The Pleasures of Reading: The Perennial Philosophy, by Aldous Huxley,” AA Grapevine, February 1946.
Betty Grover Eisner, “Remembrances of LSD Therapy Past,” a memoir dated August 7, 2002, chapter 2, on the session of February 16, 1957.
Teri S. Krebs and Pål-Ørjan Johansen, “Lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD) for alcoholism: meta-analysis of randomized controlled trials,” Journal of Psychopharmacology 26 (2012): 994–1002.
Matthew Oram, “Prohibited or regulated? LSD psychotherapy and the United States Food and Drug Administration,” History of Psychiatry 27 (2016), on Sandoz in 1966; and Public Law 90-639, October 24, 1968.
Michael P. Bogenschutz and others, “Percentage of Heavy Drinking Days Following Psilocybin-Assisted Psychotherapy vs Placebo in the Treatment of Adult Patients With Alcohol Use Disorder: A Randomized Clinical Trial,” JAMA Psychiatry 79 (2022): 953–962.