I have now experienced nearly eight good years of continuously sober and active membership in the Fellowship of AA. Never during this time have I hesitated to express my heartfelt gratitude for the program and the many positive (and necessary) changes it has helped make possible in my life–a life including many years of active, progressive, debilitating alcoholism that finally (and mercifully) drove me to my state of absolute human bankruptcy.
Recently, however, I have grown weary and more than a little irritated with those well-intentioned but misinformed fellow members who clamor during group discussion meetings for the diminution (or even the total demise) of the human self. Careful reading of our Big Book informs me that not self but rather selfishness (“the root of our troubles”) is the enemy in my quest for continuing recovery from alcoholism. I must not, in a manner of speaking, throw out the baby with the bath water. Selfishness (“in a hundred forms”) must be conquered and riotous self-will must be quelled, but the self must be strengthened and enhanced in the process.
Concern for self is not only a legitimate human pursuit, it is also an innately human tendency that is essential to the mental, emotional, and spiritual growth and well-being of the individual. An individual is not selfish because he pursues his own legitimate good, but rather because he lacks concern for the well-being of his fellows. The selfish individual lives and cares only for himself with no regard for the welfare and concern of others.
One of our Fellowship’s early champions, psychiatrist Dr. Harry M. Tiebout (who was also friend and psychoanalyst to our co-founder, Bill W.), believed that the alcoholic’s immature and greatly inflated ego had to be surrendered to permit the humility he felt necessary for alcoholism recovery.
Dr. Tiebout carefully distinguished between his own concept of the greatly inflated ego, which he labeled the “capital E, the big Ego,” and that of the “ego without a capital,” which Freud had postulated as one dimension of personality in his classic three-part personality construct.
The ego, according to Freud’s model of the psychic apparatus, was construed to be part conscious, part unconscious, with the self representing the conscious aspect. Thus, according to Dr. Tiebout, the ego (including the self) would be redeemed as the “capital E, big Ego” factors in the alcoholic personality became deflated and were made humble through surrender.
Bill W. provided the standard definition of humility for the recovering alcoholic when he wrote in the “Twelve and Twelve”: Humility is “a word often misunderstood. To those who have made progress in Alcoholics Anonymous, it amounts to a clear recognition of what and who we really are, followed by a sincere attempt to become what we could be.” Bill W. clearly recognized the crucial importance of a developing sense of self-worth and self-respect, an honest acceptance of who and what we are and what we might become. True humility is not the absence of pride or self-concern. True humility, for the recovering alcoholic, means the substitution of a new, authentic pride and legitimate self-concern for the old alcoholic false pride and concern for self alone.
Bill W. once wrote that there is “a right and necessary kind of self-concern.” As a recovering alcoholic I choose to believe that our Fellowship’s co-founder would have agreed that self should be served–with proper humility.