On 30 January 1961, four months before he died, Carl Jung wrote a letter containing two Latin words that Alcoholics Anonymous still quotes today: spiritus contra spiritum. Spirit against spirit.
The letter was a reply. Bill Wilson, AA’s co-founder, had written to Jung a week earlier to thank him for something Jung had likely forgotten: a consultation, three decades earlier, with a wealthy American alcoholic named Rowland Hazard — a conversation that fed, through a chain of people Jung never met, into the spiritual framework of the Twelve Steps.
The chain, in order
| When | What |
|---|---|
| 1931 (some AA historians say 1926) | Rowland Hazard, 50, travels to Zurich and consults Jung; treatment continues for close to a year |
| 1931 | Jung tells Hazard conventional psychiatry has nothing further to offer him — that only a genuine spiritual conversion offers a real chance |
| Early 1930s | Hazard joins the Oxford Group in New York, under Rev. Samuel Shoemaker at Calvary Episcopal Church |
| August 1934 | Hazard and a fellow Oxford Grouper teach the group’s conversion-based principles to Edwin “Ebby” Thacher, at Thacher’s sentencing hearing in Bennington, Vermont |
| Late 1934 | Thacher carries the message to his old drinking friend, Bill Wilson |
| 1939 | AA’s founding text, Alcoholics Anonymous (the “Big Book”), recounts the chain anonymously as the story of “a certain American businessman” (pp. 26–27) |
| 23 January 1961 | Wilson writes to Jung, naming Hazard and thanking him directly |
| 30 January 1961 | Jung replies with the letter containing spiritus contra spiritum |
| 6 June 1961 | Jung dies |
What the letter actually says
Jung’s reply reframes Hazard’s drinking as a distorted version of something real rather than a simple weakness: “His craving for alcohol was the equivalent, on a low level, of the spiritual thirst of our being for wholeness, expressed in medieval language: the union with God.” He then supplies the pun the letter is remembered for — that the Latin word for alcohol, spiritus, is the same word used for the highest religious experience: “You use the same word for the highest religious experience as well as for the most depraving poison. The helpful formula therefore is: spiritus contra spiritum.”
Read plainly, Jung is not offering a treatment method. He is confirming, in a private letter written a few months before his own death, that the direction Wilson and AA had taken — treating alcoholism as something a spiritual reorientation could address, rather than purely a matter of willpower or medicine — matched his own thinking about Hazard’s case thirty years earlier.
What the record doesn’t actually show
It is worth being precise about what is, and isn’t, independently documented here. Nobody transcribed Jung’s 1931 sessions with Hazard. What survives is Wilson’s 1961 letter, recounting what he had been told about that consultation by others, years after the fact — and Jung’s reply, written from his own memory of a single patient he had treated three decades before. AA historians themselves do not agree on the exact year Hazard travelled to Zurich, with some placing it as early as 1926. The story is well-attested as a piece of AA’s own institutional memory. It is not a clinical record.
How much of the Twelve Steps is actually Jung’s
Less than the letter’s fame suggests. The explicitly spiritual language of AA’s Twelve Steps — and Step Twelve’s “having had a spiritual awakening as the result of these steps” specifically — comes far more directly from the Oxford Group, the Christian revivalist movement Hazard belonged to and passed on to Ebby Thacher, than from Jung himself. Jung’s role is best described as an early, distant validation of the idea that alcoholism could require a spiritual rather than purely medical answer — transmitted secondhand, through Hazard, years before Wilson had founded anything. The 1961 letter is Jung confirming that chain after the fact, not Jung authoring the Steps.
Where to check this for yourself
- The full text of Jung’s 1961 letter, as reproduced by AA Central Office of Salt Lake.
- A detailed biographical account of Rowland Hazard, presented at a 1998 AA history roundtable, including the disputed dating of his time in Zurich.
- The connection from Hazard to Ebby Thacher and, through him, to Bill Wilson, documented on Silkworth.net’s AA history archive.
What is still unclear
The exact year of Hazard’s consultation with Jung — 1926 or 1931 — is disputed within AA’s own historical scholarship and is not resolved by the sources this article draws on. Nor is there an independent, contemporaneous record of what Jung actually said to Hazard in session; everything usable comes from later recollection, on both sides.
Where this site cannot verify something, it says so rather than filling the gap.
This article is a historical account, not medical or treatment advice. If you or someone you know is dealing with alcohol dependence, that is a matter for a doctor or a qualified treatment professional, not a biography website.
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