Experience taught Alcoholics Anonymous that the root of the addiction to alcohol lay essentially in his misunderstanding and denial of the spiritual. The active alcoholic was attempting to attain the spiritual, the unlimited, by means of the material. He was trying to achieve a quality of living by the mere adding up of quantities of or experiences with alcohol. This insatiable craving for “more” and “again,” a veritable addiction to addition that was indeed an addiction to addiction itself, contained its own perverse ironies. The first was that the addictive drinking of more alcohol became progressively less fulfilling.
The perception of this irony further impelled Alcoholics Anonymous to present itself as a “spiritual program” for “quality sobriety.” From the beginning, Alcoholics Anonymous intuited that a deep root of addiction lay in the denial of the reality of the spiritual. It is only in the realm of the spiritual, as Western thought has understood it, that transcendence—going beyond—is not achieved by mere addition, that quality is not improved by the mere increase of quantity. The reality of the spiritual—that something could be real without being tangible—was indeed A.A.’ s first and only advertisement. It was not the number of drinks left undrunk but “living the program” that constituted the evident sobriety of its members.
Also related to the spiritual was A.A.’ s intuition and use of the second irony inherent in the phenomenon of alcoholism, the irony that linked its presentation of the threefold disease of alcoholism as “obsession-compulsion” and as distorted dependency. In searching for fulfillment as qualitatively human—a spiritual search—but seeking this fulfillment in increasing quantities of alcohol, the drinker trapped himself in a contradiction. The drinking alcoholic demanded a control that was inappropriate and so impossible. This demand for control involved a claim to the absolute; it strove to reach beyond the limits of human finiteness. The alcoholic attempted to achieve by the drinking of alcohol what reality would give only by living as fully human. Reality does not grant to humans absolute control over moods and feelings; emotions are meant to be responses to reality, and mainly to realities outside the self. Absolute control over emotion, in the sense of absolutely autonomous self-determination of moods and feelings, involved a claim to unlimitedness, and so a claim beyond any human.
This striving demand for such absolute control led, with all the perverse irony characteristic of deeply religious thought, to its very opposite—absolute dependence upon a most finite and tenuous limited creature, spiritous liquids. The First Step of the A.A. program pointed out to the alcoholic this frustrating irony. His refusal to accept dependence upon ultimate reality—the refusal implicit in the claim to inordinate control—had led to a perverted dependency upon the virtually unreal.
A.A. proposed and indeed operated on the assumption that this denial of dependence upon ultimate reality was at root a denial of the reality of the spiritual. It was this denial of the spiritual that A.A. found underlying all the other denials so characteristic as to be pathognomonic of alcoholism. The alcoholic’s first denial was of the reality of his finiteness: by “playing God,” he denied that he was not God. In his solipsistic claim to be the ultimate reality (“ self-centeredness”), the alcoholic falsely limited his acceptance of what was “reality.” The self-centered alcoholic accepted as real only that which was subject to his own rationalization and control. This limitation of “the real” cut off the alcoholic from “the spiritual,” from that by definition beyond human manipulation. The use of the chemical ethyl alcohol for its mood-changing effects marked the alcoholic’s insistence upon absolute control over faculties that related him to reality outside himself. Such an insistence was an abuse that resulted in lack of ability to use properly. Emotions controlled absolutely by the self eventually no longer related the self to outside reality, and so perversely issued in lack of control of even the self. Reality comprised of only the controllable effectively excluded not only “the spiritual” but also other human beings insofar as they participated in the spiritual. Thus the alcoholic imposed upon himself the alienation and isolation characteristic of alcoholism.
The alienation that resulted from the alcoholic’s denial of dependence upon spiritual reality led to a more demeaning dependence upon the material substance alcohol and the unreality that it provided. This process ironically led, in an ever-tightening vicious circle, to even more alienating denials. The alcoholic’s first denial of his own limitation as finitely dependent, his denial that there could be reality beyond his rationalization and control, ended in his absolute dependence upon the very means of control that he had chosen precisely because it was supposedly controllable—his drinking of alcohol.
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