Bermuda, New York and Zurich · 1926
A binge in Bermuda, a cousin who had been through it himself, and Carl Jung, five years before the date AA’s books give.
“Old boy, this is the dope for me, I’m sure.”
In March 1926, Rowland H. and his wife, Helen, were on vacation in Bermuda with his sister and her husband. He was forty-four. Somewhere in the trip his drinking apparently got away from him, there was a quarrel, and Helen sent him back to New York alone. She cabled his cousin Leonard Bacon to meet the boat on March 25 and take Rowland to Dr. Austen Riggs’s sanitarium in Stockbridge, Massachusetts, where he had spent the summer before.
Leonard was six years younger, a poet who had grown up in the same Rhode Island mill village, Peace Dale. The year before, he had gone to Zurich himself to be analyzed by Carl Jung. He heard Rowland out and came away thinking the marriage was more the trouble than the drink. Helen wrote from Bermuda that Riggs had not managed “to help Roy to help himself.” Roy was what the family called him. Leonard proposed Zurich instead, for both of them, and George Porter, Rowland’s Yale classmate and a former patient of Jung’s, backed him up. Leonard also put him in touch with Kristine Mann, a Jungian analyst in New York. After one meeting she wrote to Leonard on April 13 that Rowland hadn’t been in touch again, and that she had “not even taken down his name and address.”
By April 17 the couple were at sea, bound for Europe. After London, Paris and Brussels, they reached Zurich on May 6. The next day Jung’s assistant, Toni Wolff, saw them both, and Rowland began an hour a day with Jung. On May 15 he wrote to Leonard on the paper of the Dolder Grand Hotel, on the wooded hill above the city. On the first day, he reported, Jung asked for his dreams, and that night he produced three “corkers.” Jung read them and told him, “these are fine, fine — but for God’s sake don’t dream any more.” The next day Jung wrote to Leonard himself: “I began work with him, not yet with her.”
Helen was harder. Jung said, Rowland wrote, that she couldn’t be analyzed “because she doesn’t really want to be,” and for about ten days he didn’t see her. She spent a week alone in Paris, came back changed, and Jung agreed to try again. By June 6, Rowland had seen Jung “only once or twice, for she has had every hour.” In that letter he told the dream story again; this time Jung had whistled and said, “Please don’t dream anymore for awhile.” At this pace, he guessed, they would get home “just in time for Thanksgiving.”
It wasn’t cheap. On June 24, Rowland’s bank account recorded $5,002.50 cabled to him at his request, entered as travel. Cora Finch, the researcher who found the entry, reckons most of it went to Jung’s fees. By July 24 they were at the Ritz-Carlton in New York, months before Thanksgiving, and by August 2 Rowland was home in Peace Dale, showing his aunt Caroline the drawings he had made in analysis. She thought them “quite astonishing, symbolical things,” and Roy “well and vigorous.”
None of this is in AA’s books. When Bill W. wrote to thank Jung in 1961, he put Rowland’s months in Zurich at about 1931. The letters that tell it were written that spring, and they waited for decades in the family’s papers in Providence and in Leonard’s at Yale.
It’s May 1926, in a hotel on the hill above Zurich. Rowland H. is forty-four, a Yale man from an old Rhode Island family. Two months ago, on a vacation in Bermuda, his drinking seems to have got away from him, and his wife sent him home alone.
His cousin Leonard, a poet, has been through analysis with Carl Jung himself. He has talked them both into coming here instead of sending Rowland back to a sanitarium.
On the first day, Jung asks for his dreams. That night Rowland has three. Jung reads them and tells him they’re fine, fine, but for God’s sake, don’t dream any more.
Rowland writes home that this is the dope for him.
AA’s books would put this visit five years later, in 1931. The letters say 1926.
Compare the accounts
AA’s books put Rowland’s treatment in the early 1930s. The family’s letters put it in 1926. Here are seven accounts, in the order each was set down.
Only the letters of 1926 were written at the time; every account here came later. Quotations are short excerpts, shown side by side for comparison.
Set down in 1939 · 13 years after the trip
“Then he had gone to Europe, placing himself in the care of a celebrated physician who prescribed for him.”
Later printings add the doctor’s name in parentheses: “the psychiatrist, Dr. Jung.” The book has a relapse, then a return to the same doctor.
“There Is a Solution,” in Alcoholics Anonymous (1939), the Big Book. Bill W. wrote the chapter.
Set down in 1954 · 28 years after the trip
“He returned for further treatment with Jung, who told him at the time, as I recall it, that he thought that he was hopeless.”
Ebby had the story from Rowland himself, whom he met in 1934: Jung once, a relapse at home, then Jung again.
Ebby’s recollections, recorded at an AA conference in Texas in 1954 and quoted in Mel B., Ebby: The Man Who Sponsored Bill W. (1998).
Set down in 1954 · 28 years after the trip
“…had gone to Zurich, Switzerland, probably in the year 1930…”
In the same telling Rowland went to Jung “as the court of last resort” and stayed “a whole year.” Seven years later, writing to Jung himself, Bill made it about 1931.
Bill’s dictated memoir of 1954, published as Bill W.: My First 40 Years (2000), as Amy Colwell Bluhm quotes it.
Set down in 1961 · 35 years after the trip
“…it was about 1931 that he became your patient. I believe he remained under your care for perhaps a year.”
Then, Bill went on, Rowland drank again and went back, certain that Jung was his “court of last resort.” Jung’s reply didn’t question any of it.
Bill’s letter to Jung, January 23, 1961, as printed in Pass It On (1984).
Set down in 1995 · 69 years after the trip
“We know that by 1931 Rowland was under the care and treatment of Dr. Jung in Zurich, Switzerland.”
The same article notes that the published accounts of his life say nothing of a year in Zurich, or of a return after a slip.
Ron R., “What We Were Like,” AA Grapevine, May 1995, AA’s own magazine.
Set down in 2004 · 78 years after the trip
“…could not conceivably have seen Jung for more than two months, perhaps less, in 1931.”
The family’s papers place Rowland in America from 1930 to early 1933, apart from a family tour of Europe in the summer of 1931. They never mention Jung.
Richard M. Dubiel, The Road to Fellowship (2004), drawing on the Hazard family papers, as excerpted in AA History Lovers message 1822.
Set down in 2006 · 80 years after the trip
“…in the year 1926, rather than 1930 or 1931.”
Working separately, Amy Colwell Bluhm and Cora Finch found the letters of that spring. Bluhm’s letters stop in June; had Rowland kept to his guess of Thanksgiving, she noted, the stay ran at least six months. Finch found the couple back in New York by July 24.
Amy Colwell Bluhm, History of Psychology, November 2006, from letters in Leonard Bacon’s papers at Yale; Cora Finch, Stellar Fire (2006–07), from those and the family’s papers in Providence.
Memory or letters
AA’s date came from a story Rowland told, retold by Ebby and Bill years afterward, and Bill’s year moved between tellings. The 1926 date comes from letters written that spring. It means Rowland saw Jung eight years before he stood up for Ebby in court, and the years between were not steadily sober ones.
For a closer look
The cousin who sent him, whether he ever went back, and the Americans who went to Jung.
Leonard Bacon grew up in Peace Dale with Rowland and followed him to Yale. He taught at Berkeley until 1923, when his books sold well enough for him to move to Carmel, California, and write. There he sank into a depression he couldn’t explain. “I tried psychiatrists, exercise, alcohol …” he wrote later.
Early in 1925, friends persuaded him to go to Zurich. Jung liked patients to draw; Leonard couldn’t, so he wrote poems instead, nearly every day. They came out in 1926 as Animula Vagula, “wandering little soul,” with no word about Jung or analysis in it. He won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 1941.
He stayed close to Jung, going back to Zurich to see him through the 1930s, and Jung and his wife once stayed with the Bacons in Rhode Island, probably in 1936.
Every AA telling has a second visit: Rowland drinks again, returns to Zurich, and hears that only a spiritual experience can save him. The papers show one stay with Jung, in 1926.
In April 1928, drinking again in London, Rowland was urged by Leonard to go back to Zurich, and apparently didn’t. Amy Colwell Bluhm, whose paper doesn’t quote those letters, guessed otherwise: that the illness in Africa was the relapse of AA’s story, and that Leonard went over that spring to bring Rowland back to Jung. She called it a conjecture. Leonard’s letters to his wife that April, as Cora Finch quotes them, have him going on to Zurich alone and giving Roy up in London, and Rowland sailed home on April 14. In the summer of 1931 he and Helen toured Europe with their four children and seem to have gone to Switzerland without the children. Nothing shows whether they saw Jung. The curator who went through the family’s papers thought a couple of weeks in Zurich, at most, was possible that year.
Jung himself told a story in 1939 that may be Rowland’s. It is in part 7.
Jung had come home on March 14, 1926, from five months in East Africa, eight weeks before Rowland’s first session.
Wealthy Americans had been coming to him since 1908, when Medill McCormick, of the Chicago newspaper family, arrived as his only American patient. McCormick drank, relapsed several times during his years with Jung, and apparently stayed sober from 1911 until his death in 1925. Jung counted him a success, and the McCormicks sent others.
George Porter, who helped talk Rowland into going, had paid for most of Jung’s trip to the American Southwest in the winter of 1924–25, when Jung visited the Taos Pueblo. Another cousin, Carol Sawyer Baumann, Irving Fisher’s daughter, took Leonard’s advice and went to Zurich in 1929. She married there and stayed for the rest of her life, one of Jung’s early circle.