Aa history Lovers 2004 moderators Nancy Olson and Glenn F. Chesnut page

God. And he also understood the world of Platonic philosophy which lay behind

Kant and the Transcendentalists.

~~~~~~~~~~

NOTE 6. Dr. Abraham A. Low established his own movement, called Recovery Inc.,

in 1937, which began spreading all across the United States and is still a

very strong movement today. One may consult their website at

http://www.recovery_inc.com/ for current information on where and when

meetings are held in various cities. One well-known writer on this movement is

Professor Linda Farris Kurtz, who believes (as do many other of the best

modern mental health professionals) that Recovery Inc. is an extremely useful

group to which they can send patients with certain types of emotional problems

such as anxiety attacks, phobias, and inability to handle even relatively

minor everyday social conflicts. Among her publications one could read Linda

Farris Kurtz, DPA, Self-Help and Support Groups: A Handbook for Practitioners,

Sage Sourcebook for the Human Services, vol. 34 (Thousand Oaks, CA, Sage

Publications, 1997). This work deals prominently with Recovery, Inc., among

other organizations. She also co-authored another work, Linda Farris Kurtz and

Adrienne Chambon, Ph.D., "Comparison of Self-Help Groups for Mental Health,"

Health and Social Work, Vol 12 (1987): 275-283, which compares Recovery, Inc.,

Emotions Anonymous, and GROW International.

================================

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++++Message 1930. . . . . . . . . . . . The Akron Reading List Part 2 of 5

From: Glenn Chesnut . . . . . . . . . . . . 7/21/2004

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[The Akron Reading List Part 2 of 5]

BRUCE BARTON, The Man Nobody Knows: A Discovery of the Real Jesus (235 pages

long, copyright 1924, 1925). Some of his images -- Jesus as successful modern

American businessman and corporate executive taking charge of the situation!!

-- are amusing, and would be easy to ridicule and make fun of, but the

presence of this book on the Akron List is nevertheless important. It helps to

establish something I have already argued in earlier pieces that I have

written, namely that the "center of gravity" within A.A. in its earliest

stages (the center of the bell-shaped distribution curve) lay for the most

part with the kind of classical Protestant liberalism which we see in Adolf

Harnack's What Is Christianity?, Horace Bushnell's Christian Nurture (he was a

New England Congregationalist), and the meditational book (produced by the

Southern Methodists) called the Upper Room.

Barton was particularly following the spirit of the enormously influential

Harnack [Note 3] in tossing aside most of the traditional complex doctrines of

the Trinity, the Chalcedonian Definition of the union of the divine and human

in Christ, the substitutionary doctrine of the atonement, and so on, and

concentrating on producing a very human picture of Jesus as a real live human

being with a teaching which was very simple but which also provided the key to

living a truly good life. If Barton mentions a traditional Christian doctrine

about Christ's person and work -- for example, the "divinity" of his mission

-- he tries to explain it, not in terms of ancient Greek and medieval Catholic

philosophy and metaphysics, but as a kind of extension of rather commonplace

things that would make sense to an everyday American (in this case, total

conviction about the sacredness of his mission). In other words, Barton was

enthusiastically doing (from his own

businessman's perspective) exactly what Harnack said that we should do.

And Barton also helped to make it clear to early A.A.'s that they were not to

seek an other-worldly spirituality where they walked around two feet off the

ground with their hands folded piously in front of them and tried to achieve

the perfection of a plaster saint gazing soulfully upwards towards heaven.

They were to seek a kind of spirituality which gave them to ability to take

action, even forceful action if necessary, and learn how to deal with the real

world on real world terms -- but nevertheless not falling prey to petty

vengefulness, trying to over-control, exploding in out-of-control rage, or

other counterproductive kinds of responses. A good A.A. sponsor sometimes

bluntly gives orders to his or her pigeon, and Barton's book explains the

spiritual foundation of this.

~~~~~~~~~~

ERNEST M. LIGON, The Psychology of Christian Personality (1935, in its 18th

printing by 1950, 407 pages long). In this book, Ligon analyzed the Sermon on

the Mount and its relationship to modern psychology. Ligon was deeply

influenced by the Neo-Freudians: the goal was to fully "integrate" the

personality, and deal with problems in the individual's socialization, and so

on. In the bibliography at the back of his book, he mentioned two books by the

Austrian psychiatrist Alfred Adler (1870-1937), but one can see the influence

of other Neo-Freudian psychiatrists as well. F. H. Allport's Social Psychology

was also listed in his bibliography (he was the brother of the psychologist

Gordon W. Allport). The citing of this fundamental work on social psychology

indicated the special importance of social factors in Ligon's psychological

thought.

The term Neo-Freudian refers to a group of psychiatrists including Alfred

Adler, Karen Horney, Harry Stack Sullivan, Eric Fromm, and Erik Erikson. Carl

Jung is sometimes also included in this group, but his ideas had no role in

Ligon's thought. The Neo-Freudians whom we are talking about here modified

orthodox Freudian doctrine by talking about the importance of other issues

such as social factors, interpersonal relations, and cultural influences in

personality development and in the development of psychological illnesses and

disorders. They believed that social relationships were fundamental to the

formation and development of personality. They tended to reject Freud's

emphasis on sexual problems as the cause of neurosis, and were more apt to

regard fundamental human pscyhological problems as psychosocial rather than

psychosexual.

The two great dangers to spiritual and psychological health, Ligon said, were

inappropriate (1) anger and (2) fear - - the same basic position as the Big

Book. He defined what was meant by the "natural instincts" in ways closely

similar to the chapter on the Fourth Step in Twelve Steps and Twelve

Traditions. My feeling here is that Bill W. must have either read this book,

or read somebody closely similar, or picked up some of Ligon's ideas from

talking to people who had read this book.

Ligon came from Texas and did his B.A. and M.A. at Texas Christian University,

which is connected with the Disciples of Christ (Christian Church). He did

both a graduate seminary degree (a B.D., normally a three-year program) and a

Ph.D. in psychology at Yale, so he had an excellent grounding in both theology

and psychology. At the time he was writing this book, he had links to

Westminster Presbyterian Church in Albany, New York. But he knew things about

John Wesley which normally only a Methodist would know about, so it is not

totally clear what his religious background was: Disciples of Christ?

Presbyterian? Methodist? It was clearly a Protestant background of some sort.

The crucial thing at any rate is that he had his graduate theological training

at Yale, so that he would have been trained in the best Protestant theology

and biblical studies of that period. So Ligon accepts modern biblical

criticism to some degree -- not all the sayings of Jesus in the Sermon on the

Mount were genuine words of Jesus, he says, or may not have originally been

stated verbatim in those exact words -- but as far as I can see so far, Ligon

went no further than most classical Protestant liberals of that period,

including Harnack. [Note 4]

Like Emmet Fox, he was most definitely NOT part of what is called the

Fundamentalist movement. This is important, because the Fundamentalist

movement had gotten started in the United States at the beginning of the early

twentieth century, and even though it still had relatively little influence

during the 1930's, it could in theory have been an influence on early A.A.,

just in terms of the time frame. Nevertheless, Fundamentalism seems to have

had little if any effect on early A.A. as far as I can see from my own

researches. I have found no A.A. writings from the early period arguing for

the verbal inerrancy of scripture or defending the doctrine of the Virgin

Birth or the physical resurrection of Jesus, or any other of the "Christian

Fundamentals" which this movement was dedicated to defending.

On the other hand, Ligon was NOT a representative of the sometimes almost

insane world of the later radical Bultmannian form critics who began

"demythologizing" the New Testament and ultimately denying that Jesus said

much of anything at all that he is credited with having said. By the 1960's,

this kind of radical scholarship began taking over many of the Protestant

seminaries, and some of their more notoriety-seeking leaders still enjoy

getting their names and ideas into the newspapers and magazines so they can

scandalize the pious. To repeat, this kind of silliness is not what Ligon was

doing at all.

Probably the most important thing to note about the inclusion of Ligon's book

on The Psychology of Christian Personality in the Akron list of recommended

books, is that the notion that early Akron A.A. was totally hostile to talking

about the psychological aspects of the twelve step program is simply a myth.

When Dr. Bob spoke to the A.A. First International Convention in Cleveland in

1950, just a few months before he died, what he actually said was:

"There are two or three things that flashed into my mind . . . . One is the

simplicity of our program. Let's not louse it all up with Freudian complexes

and things that are interesting to the scientific mind, but have very little

to do with our actual A.A. work. Our Twelve Steps, when simmered down to the

last, resolve themselves into the words 'love' and 'service.' We understand

what love is, and we understand what service is."

Let us put Dr. Bob's words in historical context. He was warning about the

dangers of getting too much complex psychological theory into A.A., like

Sigmund Freud's insistence that the Oedipus complex lay at the bottom of every

male's subconscious mind, so that he subconsciously wants to kill his father

(and all other authority figures) and force himself sexually on his mother

(and all the other females whom he encounters).

Or let us give another example. The psychiatrist Eric Berne gave an orthodox

Freudian psychoanalytical interpretation of alcoholism in a book he wrote in

1964, in which he stated that its dynamics were based on oral deprivation (not

getting enough time at the mother's breast when an infant), and that its

internal psychological advantages lay in rebellion and in self-castigation in

an attempt to relieve the inner guilt complex. Its external psychological

pay-offs came in the form of avoidance of sexual and other forms of intimacy.

No psychiatrist was ever able to have much if any success at all in getting

alcoholics to stop drinking using this kind of approach. Berne defends his

theory in that book and then blames the alcoholics for not getting well under

his care! This was not uncommon among psychiatrists at that time: it was

somehow the alcoholics' fault that their psychiatric theories did not work.

This is the kind of thing that Dr. Bob was warning A.A. people to stay away

from. But to see how psychiatry and psychology could be used in the proper

kind of way, the Akron List suggested reading Ernest Ligon's book The

Psychology of Christian Personality instead. Both Ligon and Sgt. Bill S. (the

early A.A. member who wrote the most about the psychological aspects of

alcoholism) were Neo-Freudians who rejected that kind of esoteric talk about

Freudian sexual complexes and breast deprivation and so on, and talked about

psychological issues that made a good deal more common sense in language that

could usually be understood by anyone who read books regularly.

It is also probably true that quoting this off-the-cuff remark by Dr. Bob,

made when he was dying and barely able to stand up in front of the audience,

points us in the wrong direction anyway. The real issue for A.A. was that most

psychologists and psychiatrists of that time were staunch atheists who tried

to get their patients to toss away all that superstitious guilt-inducing

nonsense (as they regarded it) that religious teachers had loaded them down

with. But A.A. people eagerly praised psychologist William James and

psychiatrist Carl Jung, two respectable professionals who both acknowledged

the importance of the spiritual dimension. They praised Yale-trained

psychologist Ernest Ligon who argued that Jesus' spiritual teaching in the

Sermon on the Mount was in fact good psychology of the best sort. That is what

I believe was the real issue: A.A. could not make use of any psychological or

psychiatric theory which attacked the necessary

spiritual dimension of recovery.

~~~~~~~~~~

WINFRED RHOADES, The Self You Have to Live With, seems to still be available,

even though it has not been studied by us yet.

~~~~~~~~~~

So far, no one has been come up with much information on the series called The

Unchanging Friend which was published by the Bruce Publishing Co. in

Milwaukee. Mel B. says "Bruce now seems to be out of business, although there

are a couple of smaller publishing firms listed under that name. They

published considerable Catholic-related material and some of it can still be

found in libraries."

~~~~~~~~~~

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++++Message 1931. . . . . . . . . . . . N.M.Olson is in the hospital

From: Glenn Chesnut . . . . . . . . . . . . 7/24/2004 2:10:00 AM

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Dear AAHistoryLovers,

I am very sorry to have to pass on this news, but N.M.Olson, the moderator of

our group, is in the hospital and is very ill. I talked with her over the

phone Friday morning, and she is very weak but says to tell everyone, "I am

O.K. with this."

She gave a speech to a standing ovation Monday in Louisiana. She went out on

stage, she said, like the "ol' show horse that I am," and in spite of how weak

she was, summoned up the energy somehow to get through it successfully. Then

Friday morning I got a phone call from one of her friends and got the news

that she had had to be hospitalized, and a request to call her there.

I have fielded e-mails and things for her before for short periods, such as

the time she went to Bristol in England to speak to the people at their fine

conference on AA history. So when she asked, I immediately agreed to try to

take care of things in the present situation as best I could.

She may be able to return to doing some small part of the moderator's duties

for a while after she gets out of the hospital, but I could tell that she was

so very tired this past week and found even simple things very difficult.

I hope everyone will bear with me while I try to figure out how to do what

needs to be done at this point to take care of the group account at Yahoo and

get messages posted and so on. Some of these things I did not have to do on

previous occasions, when she was only away from the computer for a few days,

so I am still trying to thread my way through the maze of computer commands

involved. It may be slow going for a while, so I apologize in advance. It took

me most of this past day to figure out how to log in to one part of the

system, because I have a different kind of browser and internet connection

than she has.

Please pray for her to God who loves us. Her soul is walking in the Light.

Glenn Chesnut, South Bend, Indiana

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++++Message 1932. . . . . . . . . . . . ***IMPORTANT***Dr. Silkworth Birthday

Celebration, postponed until 7/31/04

From: Lash, William (Bill) . . . . . . . . . . . . 7/23/2004 2:22:00 PM

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Due to storms coming through, the following event will be delayed one week.

Please help spread the word so that people don't go there on the wrong day.

Thanks!

Just Love,

Barefoot Bill

You are cordially invited to the first annual Dr. Silkworth birthday

celebration!

Postponed from July 24, 2004, and changed to Saturday, July 31, 2004 at 3:00PM

At his gravesite in Glenwood Cemetery, Route 71 (Monmouth Rd.), West Long

Branch NJ.

Speakers:

Barbara Silkworth (a family member) and Ruth O'N. (who got sober on April 14,

1948 & knew Silky).

Dr. William Duncan Silkworth is the author of the "Doctor's Opinion" in the

Big Book "Alcoholics Anonymous" and is known as a friend to millions of

alcoholics worldwide. He worked with Bill Wilson, AA's co-founder in N.Y.C.,

after Bill finally got sober in 1934. He gave deep understanding and great

encouragement to an infant society in the days when a lack of understanding or

a word of discouragement might easily have killed it. He freely risked his

professional reputation to champion an unprecedented spiritual answer to the

medical enigma and the human tragedy of alcoholism. Without his blessing, our

faith might well have died in its birth. He was a luminous exception to the

rule that only an alcoholic understands an alcoholic. He knew us better than

we knew ourselves, better than we know each other. Many of us felt that his

medical skill, great as that was, was not at all the full measure of his

stature. Dr. Silkworth was something that it is difficult even to mention in

these days. He was a saintly man. He stood in an unusual relationship to

truth. He was able to see the truth of a man, when that truth was deeply

hidden from the man himself and from everyone else. He was able to save lives

that were otherwise beyond help of any kind. Such a man cannot really die. We

wish to honor this man, a gentle doctor with white hair and china blue eyes.

Dr. Silkworth lived on Chelsea Avenue in Long Branch, attended Long Branch

High School where he has been inducted in that school's Hall of Fame,

graduated from Princeton University, and lived for a while in Little Silver.

He was born on July 27, 1873 and died on March 22, 1951.

PLEASE BE SURE TO BRING A LAWN CHAIR OR SOMETHING TO SIT ON.

If you have any questions please call Barefoot Bill at 201-232-8749 (cell).

Directions:

Take the Garden State Parkway (north or south) to Exit 105 (Route 36),

continue on Route 36 approximately 2.5 to 3 miles through 5 traffic lights

(passing Monmouth Mall, two more shopping plazas, and several automobile

dealerships). Watch for green road signs stating "Route 71 South, West Long

Branch and Asbury Park" (this is before the sixth light). Take this turnoff to

the right, past Carriage Square and bear right onto Route 71 (Monmouth Road.)

Glenwood Cemetery appears very quickly on the left. The entrance is marked by

two stone pillars and the name. Once inside the cemetery, bear left, go up the

hill and make the first right (a hard right). The gravesite is near the first

tree on the right.

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++++Message 1934. . . . . . . . . . . . old preamble

From: Lee Nickerson . . . . . . . . . . . . 7/24/2004 7:15:00 AM

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Does anyone know the origin of this?

"We are gathered here because we are faced with the fact that we are

powerless over alcohol and unable to do anything about it without

the help of a Power greater than ourselves. We feel that each

person's religious views, if any are his own affair. The simple

purpose of the program of Alcoholics Anonymous is to show what may

be done to enlist the aid of a Power greater than ourselves

regardless of what our individual conception of that Power may be.

In order to form a habit of depending upon and referring all we do

to that Power, we must at first apply ourselves with some diligence.

By often repeating these acts, they become habitual and the help

rendered becomes natural to us.

We have all come to know that as alcoholics we are suffering from a

serious illness for which medicine has no cure. Our condition may be

the result of an allergy which makes us different from other people.

It has never been by any treatment with which we are familiar,

permanently cured. The only relief we have to offer is absolute

abstinence, the second meaning of A. A.

There are no dues or fees. The only requirement for membership is a

desire to stop drinking. Each member squares his debt by helping

others to recover.

An Alcohoiics Anonymous is an alcoholic who through application and

adherence to the A. A. program has forsworn the use of any and all

alcoholic beverage in any form. The moment he takes so much as one

drop of beer, wine, spirits or any other alcoholic beverage he

automatically loses all status as a member of Alcoholics Anonymous

A.A. is not interested In sobering up drunks who are not sincere in

their desire to remain sober for all time. Not being reformers. we

offer our experience only to those who want it.

We have a way out on which we can absolutely agree and on which we

can join in harmonious action. Rarely have we seen a person fail who

has thoroughly followed our program. Those who do not recover are

people who will not or simply cannot give themselves to this simple

program. Now you may like this program or you may not, but the fact

remains, it works. It is our only chance to recover.

There is a vast amount of fun in the A.A. fellowship. Some people

might be shocked at our seeming worldliness and levity but just

underneath there lies a deadly earnestness and a full realization

that we must put first things first and with each of us the first

thing is our alcoholic problem. To drink is to die. Faith must work