Lapis Magazine

Return of the Spirit by Thomas Lavin

The emergence from addiction is more a process of discovery than recovery. Within every addiction there lies a vocation awaiting recognition.

Thomas Lavin, a Zurich-trained Jungian analyst, holds PhD’s in clinical psychology and theology. He was chief clinical psychologist for the US Army in Europe, where he was in charge of drug and alcohol addiction programs. He is a founding member of the C G Jung Institute in Chicago. His private practice is in Wilmette, Illinois, and he consults internationally on typology, spirituality and addictions.

Addiction is not a simple thing. We can have positive addictions and negative addictions, but in the process of addiction we are giving over our freedom. We are making choices. So to the idea of, “Well, it’s a disease, it’s not my fault”, I say no. It is my fault. I’m making choices. I can choose to move from one addiction to another addiction. I can be free. Freedom is relative, but as long as I’m human I can still say yes to the creative spirit within myself.

To be addicted comes from the Latin word addicere, to give my voice over to. Someone who is addicted has no voice. Linda Leonard wrote a wonderful book called Witness to the Fire: Creativity and The Veil of Addiction in which she talks about the word “addiction”: What does it mean? Where does it come from? Ad means to or toward. Dicere means to speak. I give my voice to or toward some person, place, thing, or even a process. Process addictions are rigid attitudinal ways of approaching the world.

Addiction need not be limited to alcohol or drugs. I can give myself over—hand over my voice—to anything. In fact, the original meaning of “addictus” was spiritual, in the sense of someone dedicated to the gods, one whose voice was given over to the Divine (e.g. AA’s third step). Thus, inherent in the meaning of addiction is the sense of dedication, or bearing witness to creative energies. Among the Romans, addiction also signified the making over of goods to another by a legal sale. A slave was even known as an addictus, someone who had no voice, who was a slave to a master. Addiction is the act of giving oneself over to something as one’s master.

In this century, people like Carol Gilligan have discovered how important it is for women and men to come to voice, to get their voice back. The process of sobriety is a process of getting my voice back, of finding my voice, awakening my voice, so that I can respond to the presence of the Divine, wherever I find her, him, or it. It is a dedication—a rededication—in a pristine sense.

I can be addicted negatively; I can be addicted positively. We have to understand that addiction is Janus-headed. Almost everything psychological has two faces or sides to it. In our dreams, we regard snakes as something terrible, but then what do we see on the healing wand of Asclepius, what do we see in the caduceus? Snakes. A symbol also of the resurrected Christ in the catacombs of Rome, the snake sheds its skin, representing rebirth.

Not only symbols but also diseases that happen in our lives are Janus-headed. Addiction is terrible, it’s true, but addiction can be transformed. How can the addict get her or his voice back, so that they can respond when they’re called? My hypothesis, having worked for 30 some years with alcoholics and addicts, is that within every addiction there is a vocation, a calling. Addiction is not the end of the line. Someone is addicted. Until I come to voice, I can’t respond. Like Samuel in the night, how do I respond if I don’t have a voice? Samuel went to his guru and said, “I think I hear my name called.” And he’s told by the Prophet Eli, “Say ‘Here I am.’” Saying yes is part of dealing with addiction. The spiritual part of addiction—getting my spirit back, getting my voice back—is to be able to say yes to all of life. No one, no thing, is excluded, precluded, left out. In dealing with addiction, we have to see it as one side. It might be a sad story, maybe generations of sad stories, but we can’t talk about addiction, whether positive or negative, without pain, because people who get their spirit back have to deal with the pain of staying with their own creative spirit.

Anyone who follows her or his creative spirit has to leave the collective, leave the mediocrity of the collective. It’s Eliade’s myth of the eternal return: you leave the collective, you go out into your own desert and have your own religious experience, and then you come back to the collective with something. Each and every addict, each and every alcoholic has something to give to the community. Anyone coming from alcoholic or addicted homes has something to give back to the community. We may not know it yet or, even if we know it, maybe we haven’t come to voice yet, to ask the questions: Where am I a slave? Where have I given up my voice? Where am I mute to the life-force of Creation?

We can lose our spirits in different ways. Very often the models that are given of addiction are male. This is a problem in our culture, because the female addict is left out and not given a paradigm. Apropos of this, an article in AA Grapevine, February 19, 1996, was given the title “No Secondhand Gods”. The writer says:

I came into Alcoholics Anonymous beaten down by gin and depression, barely clinging to a thin and unhappy belief in God, and trying desperately to talk myself back into my childhood faith. It wasn’t working. I was an ex-nun whose faith had fallen apart in the convent, partly because the order’s strict policy on alcohol prevented me for the first sustained period in my adult life from drinking away troublesome doubts and questions. The first thing people in AA told me about spirituality stopped me cold. They told me if I wanted to live, I needed an honest relationship with an honestly envisioned higher power. Ill fitting secondhand gods need not apply.

I found this both liberating and terrifying. Terrifying, because I’d been taught to hang on under my religion like grim death, whether I felt honest doing it or not. Liberating, once I discovered I was genuinely more afraid of drinking again than I was of going to hell for disbelief. The ensuing years were an incredible revelation. My sponsor has an interest in comparative religion, and some of her books introduced me to a marvelous new faith, one that made me exclaim, “So that’s what I’ve been all my life.” I became a practitioner, and eventually a clergywoman of this faith, and it has given me the sort of relationship with my deeper power that I could have only dreamt of.

Nevertheless I have a solid granite derrière on the subject of keeping religion per se out of AA. So I’ve never gone to meetings and tried to preach my religion to anyone. I’ve seen the damage that that can do to groups, the confusion and pain it can cause to newcomers. But I do try to be honest about my deeper power. It isn’t easy. You see, I envision that power as female, and I call her “Goddess”, not “God”, and in some AA meetings you’d think I’d thrown a stink bomb into the circle every time I refer to my deeper power in this way. I was careful where I began saying it. For the most part my home group didn’t mind the new phrasing, so I tried it out at another meeting where I heard various people’s powers referred to as God, Allah, the Tao, the Great Maybe, and Eddy. All had gotten reasonable respect, even Eddy. So I was totally unprepared for the roar of derisive laughter that greeted me when I spoke one evening of the Goddess as I understand her. I was thunderstruck. Tears came to my eyes. I nearly died trying to find a power I could believe in, I told them. I would never laugh at yours. Please don’t laugh at mine. I tried it again at other meetings.

At about the third of the meetings, I got either ridicule, or after the meeting, conversion pitches. I wondered if it was just my area that was unusually closed to the idea, until I began to hear stories from other women of my faith on the Internet. All confirmed my impression that female deity language is the one kind that routinely elicits laughter or hostility at AA meetings. For a while, I tried dancing around the issue with terms like “Creator” and the “Divine”. I didn’t wear my religion symbol around my neck at meetings, even though some Christians and Jews often wore theirs. Eventually, I stopped dancing. That’s one tango not required of the more mainstream believers in our ranks. And I truly don’t understand why it should be required of anyone.

I’ve watched for years now as this problem has driven desperately ill newcomers away from the program. They’ve had to fight the prevailing society so hard for a faith that fits, and it is so hard for them to face being laughed at or scorned for it in what is supposed to be a place of safety when they’re barely out of detox. Please, next time you’re tempted to have a contemptuous, and audible, reaction to somebody else’s deity, think. If it’s what’s keeping her alive, do you really want to knock it down?

Openness to spirit means openness to all forms of spirit. There are many stories of coming to voice, stories of getting one’s spirit back. Our stories are different. Both introverts and extraverts can be drunks and addicts, but we do it in different ways. A subtle but important part of understanding the dry drunk is understanding psychic energy. When we’re in a dry drunk, if we’re extraverts we think we’re introverts. And if we’re introverted, we think we can be the life of the party and tell jokes and do things just like extraverts do. It’s strange but true. Some introverted people, when using mind-altering chemicals, will often extravert, extremely inadequately but extravert nevertheless.

Now 100 introverts don’t make one extravert. I was at a party once in Chicago with a group of Jungian analysts, all introverted. It was Jung’s birthday, June 6, and nobody knew what the hell to do. One person started singing “Happy Birthday, CG”, and I thought: Here I am with all these introverts, I can’t stand it, but that’s how things are. In the same way, people who are introverted, and who are with extraverts, look at them and say, “Will anyone in this room ever sit down and shut-up?” Introverts bug the hell out of extraverts, extraverts bug the hell out of introverts (and of course they marry one another!). There are stories of people who become addicted by going up, by going higher. There are some who become addicted by going down deeper. The extravert has to come back down to the ground, and the introvert has to come up to becoming normal. Both wind up in the same place, but the path, the journey, is different. Treatment programs often ignore typology. We tend to typologically tyrannize people in treatment. You hear stories of people saying, “I got sober, but I wasn’t authenticated. Because they wanted to make me a goddamn extravert or introvert.”

I have this wonderful patient who’s a PhD in theology, and she comes into my consultation room once a week, and she sits down, and I look at her and say, “How do you feel?” And she says, “Damn you.” If I asked her what she thought about Luke’s Gospel, she knows. She thinks very well. That’s why I ask her every week, “How do you feel?” “Sonofabitch. Let me think about it,” she says. “Let me think about it”!

We need to understand that there are different paths to losing our spirit and that there are different paths by which the spirit returns. This is as subtle as understanding that someone has a preference for a deeper power. Jung says extraverts are basically people who flee the center, centrum fugere, are centrifugally energized. Some people get addicted and get intoxicated in order to flee the core, to get away, to get high, to get above it. But you don’t need to drink to get high. You don’t need substances to get high. You don’t need to go shopping to get high. There are other ways of fleeing the wasteland, or the fact that your life is so banal. Other people get high so that they can go underneath the surface and find solace in the center they know they won’t find at home, so they drink in a solitary way, seeking the center, centrum petere. They are centripetally energized. We have to teach these people in treatment, in our homes, wherever we find them, that they don’t need substances to go deeply within. This is why it’s important for us to look at the typology of addiction.

Extraverts can get high without mind-altering chemicals, and they don’t have to become introverts in the process, doomed to a life of staying at home reading books. Introverts need not be condemned to an endless round of AA meetings with people they otherwise wouldn’t talk to. There’s a tremendous difference, and we need a fingertip feeling for the subtleties of introversion and extroversion in the healing process.

The Grimm fairytale, “Spirit in the Bottle”, gives us many insights into the relationship between addiction and spirit.

Once upon a time, according to the Brothers Grimm, there was a poor woodcutter who had only one son. He saved up a little money, and he sent the son to the university. After a semester or two, the son had to come back, because like many of us he ran out of money while studying. He came home to his father and said, “Father, I’ll help you. I’ll go out with you and chop wood.” But the father said, “With those hands you’re going to chop wood? And besides we don’t have an ax.” The son pleaded, “I want to do something. I just can’t sit here. Let’s borrow our neighbor’s ax.” And indeed they were able to do that, and duly set out.

After about four hours of chopping, the father said, “Let’s sit down, have our bread and water, and rest. It’ll go twice as well for us afterwards.” The son said, “Father I’m not tired. I’d like to take a little walk in the woods and look for bird’s nests.” “Don’t be a fool,” retorts the father, “Afterwards you’ll be too tired, and you won’t be able to chop wood.”

The son goes off anyway, looking for birds. Nearing a big oak tree, he hears a sound, a voice screaming, “Let me out, Let me out!” The student looks down at the base of the tree, and there is a bottle, and in the bottle he sees a little man, jumping up and down, screaming, “Let me out! Let me out!” The student pulls the cork, and out comes this little man, who then, like a genie, gets bigger and bigger and bigger, until he’s as big as the oak tree itself. The genie looks down, and says to the student, “Now I’m going to have to break your neck. That will be your reward.” “You should’ve told me that before,” said the student, “I’d have left you in the bottle. But I’ll keep my head on my shoulders all the same. You’ll have a to consult a few more people before I let you tamper with my neck.” The genie says, “I am the mighty spirit Mercurius. I have been shut up for centuries, and when I’m freed it’s my duty to break the neck of the person that frees me.” “Not so fast,” says the student. “First I need to know it was really you in the bottle.” The spirit thinks, fin and goes back in the bottle. The student then puts the cork back on and recaptures Mercurius.

The spirit says, “I’ll be good, let me out.” But the student says, “Uh-uh, sorry, you had your chance.” “No, honestly, I’ll be good, please let me out. I’ll make it worth your while. You’ll have all the riches you want.” “I don’t know,” says the student.

Then he thought about it: he had outsmarted the spirit the first time, so maybe he could outsmart him again. And he said to himself, I’ll take a chance. Maybe he’ll keep his word and, besides, he can’t hurt me. So he pulled the cork, and the spirit came out as he had the first time. He stretched and spread until he was as big as a giant. He handed the student a piece of cloth, very much like a poultice, and said, “This is your reward. With one end, if you rub anything that is broken or wounded it will be healed. And if you rub steel or iron with the other end, it will turn to silver.” “I’ll have to try that,” said the student. He went over to a tree, gnashed the tree with his ax, rubbed the poultice on it, and the tree was healed. He wiped the ax off, and the ax instantly turned to silver. He thanked the genie, and said, “Thank you for the reward. Now we can part.” The spirit said “Thank you for setting me free.” The student went back to his father.

Cutting the story short a bit, the father berates the son and says he’s a blockhead. But the son tells his father the story, and thereafter the student takes care of his parents, who never again want for anything. With the rest of his money, he returns to the university and goes on studying. And seeing that he was able to heal all kinds of wounds with his poultice, he became the most famous doctor in the whole world. He who almost had his spirit strangled out of him, he who was wounded by negative Mercurius, becomes the wounded-healer. Woundedness becomes the foundation for healing.

The idea of venturing forth, “opening up the bottle”, getting in touch with the dangerous spirit that could strangle the life out of you and outsmarting it, outwitting it, is fundamental to staying sober. The daily journey to sobriety must be a risk, an adventure. I remember being at a physicians’ AA group where there was a new physician present, and in the discussion afterwards, this doctor said, “I don’t get it, did someone just say alcohol was cunning, baffling, and powerful? That doesn’t sound like ethyl alcohol to me. I mean, you’re personifying a chemical.” And we all said, “Harry, you’re getting warmer.”

It’s hard to believe—Alcohol: cunning, baffling, powerful? Nietzsche wrote that Christianity has dragged Eros through the mud. I think Christianity has also dragged the virtue of cunning through the mud. We have to be cunning, wise as serpents, like the student with the genie, if we’re to remain sober. We have to be tricksters to stay sober, and if we’re working with people in treatment, we have to be artful dodgers to help them stay sober. There isn’t a damn thing wrong with being a trickster. The question is, who does the trickster energy serve—the drunk/addict or the healer?

It’s the question of the Grail King—who does the grail serve? To be able to go back after you’ve almost lost your life, after you’ve almost been strangled to death, to be able to go back and open the bottle again, to deal with the spirit in another form, and make that which was your downfall bring new life and new meaning to your life and the life of those around you—sounds like a paradox, one of many paradoxes in understanding the multidimensional aspect of spirit and its role in addiction. As human beings we cannot live without breath, and we cannot live without spirit either. In the Grimms’s tale, told in the middle of the last century at the beginning of the process of the industrialization of Europe, there was a loss of spirit. And who comes out? Old Mercurius, Mercury, Hermes, the god of transformations. Is there a goddess of transformations?

Linda Leonard, in Witness to the Fire, recounts the ancient Sumerian myth of Inanna. Inanna was the goddess of heaven and earth, whose sister Ereshkigal was Queen of the Underworld. Ereshkigal’s husband died, and Inanna decided to go down into the Underworld to offer sympathy to her dark sister. She’s met by a gatekeeper, who tells her that she can’t go down into the Underworld, just because she wants to, and now she has to pay the price. There are seven levels in the Underworld, and Inanna is stripped naked, piece by piece, at each of the seven levels—stripped of her crown, stripped of her jewelry, stripped of everything that gave her identity as a queen, until she is naked. Inanna was then judged, and Ereshkigal, staring at her with eyes of death, hung her corpse on a peg until it became a piece of rotting meat.

When Inanna did not return after three days, her aides sought help from the father gods. But most of the father gods were angry that Inana had craved the power of the underworld, and they refused to help her: “She who goes into the dark city stays there.” Only Enki, Lord of the Waters, responded. From the dirt under his fingernails, he created two small asexual creatures who slipped into the Underworld unnoticed and grieved with Ereshkigal, who was moaning with the cries of a woman about to give birth. Ereshkigal was grateful for the empathy and gave them Inanna’s corpse, which they revived with food and the water of life given to them by Enki.

Inanna was told that no one ascends from the Underworld unmarked. Demons from the Underworld clung to her sides, and she was required to send back a substitute to take her place. Refusing to send her faithful feminine aide, she chose instead her husband, Dumuzi, who had been feasting instead of mourning for her. Dumuzi tried to escape the demons but they found him and beat him and stripped him naked and finally took him to the Underworld. The myth ends when Dumuzi’s sister Geshtinanna agrees to share his fate, each spending half the year in the Underworld and the other half above with the living.

In our patriarchal culture, the need, especially for women, to act out our shadow side is often denied. A 12-year-old girl, for example, whose hormones were beginning to kick in, comes downstairs in a bad mood one morning, and her mother says, “Uh, uh, no way. Go back upstairs now and come back down as Suzy Sunshine, or Daddy will be mad.” So down she comes as Suzy Sunshine until she winds up in the hospital with all sorts of psychological problems as a teenager. Such is the price she’ll pay for refusing the call to the underworld. That hospitalized teenager became the famous healer, Dr Christiane Northrup.

All of us in our culture have to go down into our darkness, into our own underworld. For some of us, that’s going to be through alcohol and drugs. We’re going to be bad little boys and bad little girls. And how long do we stay down there? Maybe until we’re stripped naked of our identity. And then the water of life, the life force, will bring us back up to the surface, sadder but wiser.

There are all sorts of books coming out now in Jungian psychology, about “meeting the shadow”, “romancing the shadow”, “dealing with darkness”, “uncursing the darkness”, and so on. People are catching on that individuation is not a Pollyanna trip—it’s not all lightness and archetypal warmth and light. It’s also dealing with the darkness and the cold. So is the journey into sobriety and discovery.

Some of us are going to journey too high. We’re going to get the hell out of Iowa and join the Army and see the world and get to drink like “my father the minister” won’t let me. And then we’ll wind up somewhere like the heroin ward that I directed, in a US Army hospital in Germany, where in the 1970s I had 85 beds for 125 people who were coming down from bad heroin trips. A day never went by that there wasn’t heroin in the ward. It was a locked ward. There were bars on the windows. Two people had the key. But there was always heroin in the ward. Of course, we know that “addicts have no willpower”. No willpower? Then how the hell do you get heroin into a locked ward on the fifth floor where everything is behind bars? These people were truly cunning, baffling, and powerful.

Addiction is a detour on the journey but also a mission—and a driven mission—nevertheless. If we don’t see the spiritual aspects of this disease of addiction, we’re missing it. Jung’s idea of “spiritus contra spiritum” was, if you can help a person to understand the context of their addiction as really a search for the divine in whatever image or form, then you’ve gone about half way in terms of helping a person take what’s available within herself or himself to transform the disease and themselves.

Addiction is a diamond. What needs to be done is to find a new setting for it. As Jung says about spirit: “Do we know, for all of our familiarity with the verbal concept, what spirit really is? Are we sure that when we use this word we all mean the same thing? Is not the word spirit a most perplexing, ambiguous term? The same verbal sign spirit is used for an inexpressible transcendental idea of all-embracing significance, the spirit of the time, for instance. In a more commonplace sense, it’s synonymous with mind. Be of the same spirit: that means mind. Second, it may connote courage, liveliness, or wit, or it may mean a ghost. It can also represent an unconscious complex that causes spiritualistic phenomena, like table-turning or automatic writing. In a metaphorical sense it may refer to the dominant attitude in a particular social group, the spirit that prevails there. Finally, in a material sense, as spirits of wine, spirits of ammonia, spirituous liquors in general, (and this is not just a bad joke) it’s part of the venerable heritage of our language.”

So spirit can mean mind, spirit can mean divine force, spirit can mean ethyl alcohol or spirits of something, and it can mean spiritualistic. Jung says, when I utter the word spirit—no matter how accurately I may define the meaning I intend to convey—the aura of its other meanings cannot be wholly excluded. When we talk about spirit we’re talking about all of these realities.

My hypothesis, my experience—personal as well as professional—is that we are experiencing the subtle return of the spirit in our culture, in our treatment rooms, in our hospitals. Hopefully, we’ll have the courage to let go of what we have to let go of, and welcome this new manifestation of the spirit in our time and in our persons with a whole heart.