Final research paper I submitted for TP5020 on December 21, 2019
As I was going through old files in preparation for selling my parents’ home, I came across some press clippings about my paternal grandfather, Maurice Howe Richardson, Jr. I knew very little of this man since he died in March of 1961, more than a year before I was born. My father had only passed down a handful of stories about him.
As I reviewed the clips, one in particular from The New Witness jumped out at me. It included a photograph of my grandfather in his Army Reserve uniform, and the caption noted he had made the following comment at recent Oxford Group gathering, “Wars will continue until human nature is changed. I know that God can change human nature because he has changed mine” (Holme, 1937).
I knew that my grandfather had struggled for much of his life. He was born into a well-to-do Boston Brahmin family with a famous father who was Surgeon-in-Chief at Boston’s prestigious Mass General Hospital, and he also was a Professor of Surgery at Harvard Medical School. Yet, my grandfather never found his footing, which was made even more difficult by the fact that his brothers became renowned doctors in their own right.
He tried his hand at insurance, which never really amounted to much. And while the rest of his siblings were marrying into equally established families, which included his sister marrying Eleanor Roosevelt’s brother, my grandfather sent shockwaves through the family when he decided to marry a 2nd Generation Irish-Catholic girl from a rough section of Boston. This cemented his legacy as the “Black Sheep” of the family.
As I reread his quote, he became much more real to me. I tried to visualize what types of struggles he endured, what led him on his spiritual journey, and what “changes” God caused in him. I pondered what led him to the Oxford Group, what it was all about, and was it his involvement in this group that led to his “spiritual awakening.”
I will seek answers to these questions by examining aspects of transpersonal transformations that occur from participating in quasi-spiritual movements like the Oxford Group. Alcoholics Anonymous’s (A.A.’s) two founders Bill Wilson and Dr. Robert Smith, met through the Oxford Group, and they brought with them some of its principles when they founded their movement, so I will examine the transformative nature of A.A. as well.
Carl Jung, in an exciting exchange of letters with Bill Wilson, provided his views regarding the efficacy of movements like the Oxford Group and A.A. He cites the groups’ approach as instrumental in transforming and saving people’s lives. I will examine Jung’s concepts of individuation and “shadows,” and illustrate how it dovetails with the experiences of those who are transformed by these types of approaches, which are now simply referred to as “12-step programs.” Finally, I will examine the views of a few transpersonal psychologists’ regarding the transformative process that those participating in groups like the Oxford Group and A.A. undergo.
According to the Encyclopedia of New Religious Movements, The Oxford Group was founded in 1921 by an American Lutheran pastor named Frank Nathan Daniel Buchman. While at Oxford University, he organized a group of students into something originally called The First Century Christian Fellowship, which later became more commonly known as The Oxford Group (2006, p. 408). As Linda Mercadante notes, “The Oxford Group was a ‘parachurch,’ or independent, evangelistic religious movement.” Despite its name, which was firmly ensconced by 1931, the group “was a primary an American phenomenon that worked alongside, although kept its distance from, organized Christianity” (2015, p. 615).
As Mercadante points out, despite being ordained, Buchman didn’t spend his time with church life but rather “focused his efforts on a ministry of personal evangelism, first with college students and then with the ‘up and outers’ rather than the ‘down and outers’“ (2015 p. 615). He and his recruits organized “house parties” to lead “invited guests” “to realize and then confess their personal failings and pray for God’s help in restoring them to spiritual health” (2015 p. 615-616). She adds that unlike tent revivals that were common during this era, the Oxford Group’s approach was personal and intimate. The group held small group gatherings where those invited could confess openly, tell of their life’s struggles, and spend time listening to success stories of “changed” people (2015 p. 616).
According to a blog post by the Lakeview Health Treatment Center, the four principles, or “absolutes,” of the Oxford Group were love, purity, honesty, and unselfishness. The blog adds that Buchman taught “that in order to experience true change, one must have a relationship with God. Selfishness and fear are the main sources that put a barrier between men and God” (https://www.lakeviewhealth.com/blog/oxford-group). Mercadante adds that there were four requirements for attaining the four Oxford Group absolutes. These included “sharing (including confession and witness), surrendering to God, making restitution, and following divine guidance” (2015 p. 616). The group saw the conversion process occurring over stages, which they called the “‘five Cs,’ that is, confidence, conviction, confession, conversion, and continuance” (2015 p. 616).
Bill Wilson, a previously successful New York stockbroker who had tried to quit drinking on numerous occasions, joined the Oxford Group after a former drinking buddy explained how the group had helped him stay sober, according to the Washington Post. “Finally, following his fourth trip to the hospital and a ‘bright light’ conversion experience, Wilson took his last drink in late 1934. He threw himself into the Oxford Group, focusing his service efforts on getting other alcoholics sober,” the paper notes (Brockwell, 2018). Through this outreach effort, Wilson met a fellow struggling alcoholic, Dr. Robert Smith, who took his last drink on June 10, 1935, the date that A.A. now cites as its founding (Brockwell, 2018).
Wilson immersed himself in William James’ writings, who described countless conversion experiences that he had heard from recovering alcoholics, as a Hazelden Betty Ford Foundation article says. It also explains how he “borrowed heavily from the Oxford Group” and “embraced many of the group’s principles, which required the member to:
- Make restitution to any people they’d harmed.
- Take a moral inventory by listing ‘personal defects.’
- Confess these defects to another person.
- Receive direction from God through prayer and meditation” (https://www.hazelden.org/web/public/ade00828.page)
Mercadante adds that in addition to a step-by-step approach borrowed from the Oxford Group, A.A. also carried over several other concepts. These included “reframing the problem of alcoholism in medical terms, seeing ‘self-will run riot’ as the core problem, recognizing a Higher Power and giving one’s will over, [and] making amends” (2015 p. 616-617). She indicated that the A.A.’s founders felt more comfortable striking out on their own as they wanted to soften the Oxford Group’s Protestant evangelism approach. They hoped to attract “a diversity of people with varying religious (or non-religious) backgrounds” who might be turned off if the movement was “too religious.” Meanwhile, the Oxford Group viewed Wilson and Smith’s sole focus on alcoholics as “too narrow” (2015 p. 617).
In 1939, Wilson, using the name Bill W. since a central tenet of A.A. was anonymity, published what’s referred to as The Big Book, according to Publisher’s Weekly. The article adds that the publication “laid the foundation for the 12-step movement that revolutionized addiction treatment and helped millions of people get and stay sober” (https://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/authors/).
In Chapter 5 of The Big Book, which is titled, “How it Works,” Wilson lays out the 12-steps an alcoholic can employ as a personal “Program of Recovery.” The steps, as presented in the original manuscript, include the following:
- Admitted we were powerless over alcohol – that our lives had become unmanageable.
- Came to believe that a Power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity.
- Made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care and direction of God as we understood Him.
- Made a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves.
- Admitted to God, to ourselves, and to another human being the exact nature of our wrongs.
- Were entirely willing that God remove all these defects of character.
- Humbly, on our knees, asked Him to remove our shortcomings – holding nothing back.
- Made a list of all persons we had harmed, and became willing to make complete amends to them all.
- Made direct amends to such people wherever possible, except when to do so would injure them or others.
- Continued to take personal inventory and when we were wrong promptly admitted it.
- Sought through prayer and meditation to improve our contact with God, praying only for knowledge of His will for us and the power to carry that out.
- Having had a spiritual experience as the result of this course of action, we tried to carry this message to others, especially alcoholics, and to practice these principles in all our affairs. (1938, pp. 26-27)
The steps are now loosely grouped, according to the Toronto Star, and we can see the process of an individual’s transformation. The first three steps are where an alcoholic not only comes to understand the seriousness of their problem – a common A.A. quip is that “denial is not a river in Egypt” – but they also offer a glimmer of hope (Gordon, 2005). The next five steps are classified as “action,” where the alcoholic, “so long immersed in self-pity, resentment, rage and fear, start to take responsibility for their actions and themselves” (Gordon, 2005). The final three steps are known as “maintenance” or the “growth and development steps.” It is here where recovering alcoholics focus on “their spiritual needs” and carries A.A.’s hopeful message to others in need, a step Wilson and Smith deemed critically important in staying sober (Gordon, 2005).
So, what is the magic behind this organic approach, founded by two men who were near death due to excessive alcohol use and which were based loosely on the principles of a niche evangelical Christian spiritual movement and the teachings of William James? How could so many downtrodden, depressed, and in some cases, destitute individuals ultimately turn their lives around by following the 12-steps program outlined in The Big Book, which were based in part on the teachings of the Oxford Group?
Part of the answer is found by turning to the famous Carl Jung, the Swiss psychiatrist, and psychoanalyst. Wilson wrote to Jung on January 23, 1961, where he introduced himself and relayed his own story of alcoholism and conversion. He also noted that one of Jung’s former patients, “Mr. Rowland H.” as Wilson identifies him, “played a critical role in the founding of our Fellowship” (Wilson, 1961). Wilson goes on to explain Rowland H.’s dire circumstances when he was Jung’s patient in the early 1930s, and how Jung had told him that any “further medical or psychiatric treatment” was “hopeless” (Wilson, 1961). Wilson pointed out how impactful Jung’s frankness was for Rowland H. since he had admired the famous psychiatrist so much (Wilson, 1961).
Wilson adds that a comment Jung made to Rowland H. when he was a patient not only set him on the road to conversion and recovery but also gets to the heart of why such quasi-spiritual movements are so successful. “When [Rowland H.] then asked you if there was any other hope, you told him that there might be, provided he could become the subject of a spiritual or religious experience – in short a genuine conversion. You pointed out how such an experience, if brought about, might remotivate him when nothing else could” (Wilson, 1961). As a result of Jung’s frankness and suggestion for spiritual conversion, Wilson turned his life around by joining the Oxford Group and later as a pioneer of A.A.
Jung replied almost immediately to Wilson with a letter dated January 30, 1961. He said he recalled Rowland H. and had wondered what had happened to him (Jung, 1961). Jung then makes an extraordinarily insight about Rowland H’s condition, “His craving for alcohol was the equivalent, on a low level, of the spiritual thirst of our being for wholeness, expressed in medieval langued: the union with God” (Jung, 1961). Obviously, this craving for God can be applied not only addicts but to all humans. As said by another individual with an incredible conversion story, Saint Augustine, in a book he tellingly titled, Confessions, “You have made us for yourself, O Lord, and our heart is restless until it rests in you” (Augustine, 397-400).
Jung points out that the only way out of something as dire as alcoholism is to walk “a path which leads you to higher understanding,” which might come about “by an act of grace or through a personal and honest contact with friends, or through a higher education of the mind beyond the confines of mere rationalism” (Jung, 1961). He then makes a comment about two of A.A.’s pillars: the need for spiritual recognition and fellowship with other alcoholics. “I am strongly convinced that the evil principle prevailing in this world leads the unrecognized spiritual need into perdition, if it is not counteracted either by real religious insight or by the protective wall of human community” (Jung, 1961).
Spirituality and active faith in God or “Higher Power” is a critical ingredient in the transformative power of movements like the Oxford Group, A.A., and other quasi-spiritual self-help efforts. In their review of the “psychoreligious dimensions of healings,” David Lukoff, Robert Turner, and Francis Lu note that “spirituality has been acknowledged as an important aspect of a person’s well-being” with its efficacy finally being recognized in such agnostic places as “the diagnostic nomenclature, the medical and psychiatric establishments, and the media” (1993, p. 11). Dr. C. Paul Yang and Lukoff, in an article for Psychiatric Annals, add that a growing body of data shows that spirituality and religion have beneficial impacts on people. “People use spirituality for healing of illness, psychological growth, and self-actualization” (2006, p. 168). Charles Matthews & George Hollingsworth put it this way: “Understanding how the addiction population frequently values both ‘the knowing of the heart’ and ‘the knowing of the mind’ is central to gaining an understanding of the addict’s spiritual dimension…One of the defining characteristics of transpersonal psychology is an honoring of both the spiritual dimension, or the knowing of the heart, and the knowing of the mind” (1999, p. 22)
Another critical transpersonal element of these movements is that they achieve what Jung calls the process of individuation. He says this process answers the question of what’s underneath a person’s “social roles and responsibilities” or those masks we all put on. According to the Harley Therapy Counseling Blog, Jung adds, “ Who would you be if you faced up to all your hidden secrets and made peace with your darkest corners? And dared to be yourself no matter how different you are from others?” (https://www.harleytherapy.co.uk/counselling/).
There is no more powerful way of removing the mask of the persona than falling to the depths of what those in A.A. refer to as rock bottom. It may come in the form of a jail sentence due to drunk driving charge, a spouse deciding to leave, the loss of a job, hospitalization, or a combination of these and more. Wilson described his rock bottommoment in his letter to Jung when he found himself “terribly depressed,” and in “utter despair I cried out, ‘If there be a God, will He show Himself’” (Wilson, 1931). As Mercadante notes, The Oxford Group’s Buchman understood that “sin was anything that stood between the individual and God,” and that any change begins with the individual and moves outward (2015 p. 616). She also adds that for both The Oxford Group and A.A., the problem centered on “self-will versus God’s will,” and they urged “a complete surrender of the self to God.”
Surrendering one’s will to God’s to better your life is a concept seen in both the Old and New Testaments. For example, The Book of Daniel states, “Many will be purged, purified and refined” (Daniel 12:1). Christ said, “If anyone wishes to come after Me, he must deny himself, and take up his cross daily and follow Me,” (Luke 9:23). St. Paul adds, “we are under obligation, not to the flesh, to live according to the flesh– for if you are living according to the flesh, you must die; but if by the Spirit you are putting to death the deeds of the body, you will live” (Romans 8:12-13). The genius of A.A., however, was to put these ideas of overcoming the will in less “religious” terms and by doing so, they drew a much broader audience, particularly in a time of growing secularism.
Jung used the term, shadow, to describe an ego that is allowed to rule the roost, one that is so self-centered it ignores God and anyone else for that matter. David Schoen says that Jung believed “the personal shadow reinforces, encourages, and becomes dependent upon the addictive behavior to express itself, to have any existence in the light outside of the closet, the attic, and the basement where it has been locked up and hidden for so long,” in a 2009 book he wrote on the correspondence between Wilson and Jung, which was quoted on the Academy of Ideas blog (https://academyofideas.com).
Jung says that it’s only when a person can fully face their shadow, or in the case of an alcoholic, when he fesses up to his desperate and rock bottom existence, do transformations begin to occur. Ian McCabe, in his book, Carl Jung and Alcoholics Anonymous: The Twelve Steps As a Spiritual Journey of Individuation, says, “Jung describes the confrontation with the shadow as the ‘apprentice piece in the individual’s development’ (C.W. 9i, para. 61). By this, he means that it is the starting point of the individuals’ individuation process” (2015, p. 87). And it’s in winning this battle where lives are changed and transformed potentially permanently. “The most intense conflicts, if overcome, leave behind a sense of security and calm that is not easily disturbed,” Jung adds (https://academyofideas.com).
The final transpersonal element expressed by the approach of The Oxford Group and A.A., at least as far as this paper will cover, is the power of confession. As noted previously, both organizations called on their followers to reveal their deepest held secrets to a group of strangers in some cases. To this day, whenever a person is addressing an A.A. meeting, he or she begins, “Hi, my name is [first name only], and I am an alcoholic,” which sets the tone right from the start that there will be no sugar coating or spin allowed. And Mercadante notes that The Oxford Group’s believed that confession was “prerequisite to change” (2015, p. 616).
As a psychiatrist, Jung understood the value of a patient being able to reveal their “shadows.” He said, “To cherish secrets and hold back emotion is a psychic misdemeanor for which nature finally visits us with sickness–that is when we do these things in private” (Jung, 1929). According to McCabe, Jung’s view of confession was more than just revealing one’s darkest “sins,” it also involved some type of restoration, which are encompassed in A.A.’s Steps 8 and 9. McCabe adds that in Jung’s view, “Making amends involves more than simply apologising, it involves, wherever possible, an attempt at restitution” (2015, p. 87).
Despite my grandfather’s hopes that God would change human hearts to avoid future wars, as the 1930s came to a close, the world plunged itself into a conflict that brought suffering on a scale never witnessed before in history. Mercadante notes that the outbreak of World War II brought with it the decline of the Oxford Group (2015, p. 615), most likely due to the diversion of the culture’s attention to war efforts.
However, Wilson and Smith’s A.A. movement, one focused more on an individual’s as opposed to the culture’s transformation, exploded after the publication of their Big Book. According to a Northpoint Recovery blog post, in 1940, A.A.’s membership was 2,000. By 1950 it had grown worldwide and had reached 100,000 individuals, and today membership stands at 2 million members and 117,000 groups (https://www.northpointrecovery.com). These numbers do not include participation in other “self-help” groups inspired by A.A. According to a SelfGrowth.com article, as many as 15 million Americans attend some type of self-help group in any given week (Smethers, 2008). Under the category of “Heroes & Icons,” Time Magazine includes the name of Bill Wilson and his founding of A.A. as one of the magazines “100 Persons of the Century.” Mother Teresa, Helen Keller, Anne Frank, and the American G.I., are some of those who appear on the list with Wilson (1999).
The reason for the effectiveness of the Oxford Group and its successor A.A. is apparent. It works. Millions of men and women destined for misery, destruction, and death – bringing with them those they’re closest – have plunged the depths of Hell and returned. It’s genuinely transformative and belongs squarely within the field of transpersonal psychology. As Peter Eng puts it, “At a cursory glance, the marriage between A.A. and transpersonal psychology seems appropriate, effective, seamless, and elegant” (2015, p. 198).
Another item I came across as I continued sorting through boxes at my parent’s home was my grandfather’s Bible, the one he used during his time with the Oxford Group. Scrawled in pencil at the top of the page where the first chapter of Genesis begins is, “Started 1st reading May 1937.” I don’t know how many times he read the Bible, and I’m sure it wasn’t as many as Edgar Cayce, who read it in its entirety once for each year he was alive.
I do know, however, that the Oxford Group and its focus on Christian values transformed my grandfather for the better despite never finding the calling he desired. My oldest brother described him as a very kind person who always gave him peppermints, which he kept near his chair for whenever the grandchildren visited. My mother’s lifelong friend and roommate from college recently said he was a loving and generous soul, which wasn’t always the case according to what little my father has shared.
I now keep his Bible next to my desk, and I read it as part of my daily routine. I feel his presence whenever I pick it up. I know that somehow I’ve taken the baton of the transformative efforts he began so many years ago with the help of the Oxford Group and incorporated it into my own spiritual journey.
References
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Brockwell, G. (2018, March 9). Lost for decades, the Alcoholics Anonymous original manuscript will be auctioned for millions. The Washington Post.
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