Within the depth-psychology and adjacent humanistic literature surveyed in this corpus, 'Temperance' operates on at least three distinct registers that rarely collapse into one another. In its oldest philosophical register, inherited from Plato's Charmides and Republic, temperance denotes the ordering and harmonising of desires — a virtue closer to inner symphony than to mere restraint, distinguishable from justice only in degree rather than kind. In the Tarot literature — Nichols, Pollack, Banzhaf, Jodorowsky, Hamaker-Zondag, and Place — the card named Temperance becomes a rich archetypal image: the angel who pours between two vessels embodies the alchemical reconciliation of conscious and unconscious, the integration of opposites after the annihilating passage through Death. Here temperance is emphatically not mediocrity but the dynamic equilibrium that makes psychic wholeness possible. In the addiction and recovery literature — Kurtz, Alexander, Schaberg, the Big Book — the term carries a fraught historical burden: the Temperance Movement had perverted the classical virtue into coercive abstentionism, compelling Alcoholics Anonymous to rename the same underlying ideal 'emotional sobriety' and 'serenity.' Kurtz's argument that A.A. recovered the classical meaning of temperance as balance — while avoiding the movement's own intemperance — constitutes perhaps the most sophisticated rehabilitation of the concept across the entire corpus. The central tension, then, is between temperance as lived psychic integration and temperance as cultural-political programme.
In the library
18 passages
the concept embracing the root virtue that Alcoholics Anonymous proclaims and seeks to inculcate is temperance… A.A. rendered vivid and striking this prescription of the temperance of balance, of the middle between extremes
Kurtz argues that A.A.'s core ideals of 'emotional sobriety' and 'serenity' are, in classical terms, temperance understood as balance between extremes — a concept A.A. rescued from the distortions of the Temperance Movement.
Kurtz, Ernest, Not God A History of Alcoholics Anonymous, 2010thesis
Temperance, I replied, is the ordering or controlling of certain pleasures and desires… the virtue of temperance has more of the nature of harmony and symphony than the preceding.
Plato's Republic defines temperance as harmonic self-mastery — a symphonic ordering of desires — and positions it as the prerequisite for locating justice in the state.
Temperance signifies mixing disparate elements together, blending activities and feelings to produce a sense of harmony and peace… The intemperate person always needs to be doing something, but very often a situation requires a person to simply wait.
Pollack reads the Temperance card as an injunction toward active equilibrium and patient receptivity — the psychological antidote to recklessness and compulsive action.
Pollack, Rachel, Seventy-Eight Degrees of Wisdom: A Tarot Journey to Self-Awareness, 1980thesis
In Temperance, the ritual of the pouring reconnects the hero with the sacred world he had glimpsed before as Hanged Man but has since lost.
Nichols interprets the Temperance card through Eliade's concept of sacred time, positioning the angel's ritual pouring as a rite of reconnection between ego-consciousness and the immortal dimension of the psyche.
Nichols, Sallie, Jung and Tarot: An Archetypal Journey, 1980thesis
temperance makes a man ashamed or modest… temperance is not only noble, but also good… that which has the effect. Think over all this, and, like a brave youth, tell me—What is temperance?
The Charmides stages the Socratic inquiry into temperance as nobility, goodness, and modesty, progressively testing and rejecting each provisional definition on the path toward a deeper account.
the dark neighborhood of Temperance… has nothing to do with mediocrity, halfheartedness, innocuousness, or pale hypocrisy. The tarot places it between Death and The Devil.
Banzhaf insists that Temperance's archetypal meaning is defined by its placement between Death and The Devil — it is radical equilibrium, not pallid moderation, set against the extremes of annihilation and excess.
Banzhaf, Hajo, Tarot and the Journey of the Hero, 2000thesis
The skeleton's Dance of Death is followed by Temperance's ritual dance with the living waters… the fluid movement of this final figure is almost exactly foreshadowed in the body movements of Temperance.
Nichols traces a choreographic continuity between Death and Temperance, arguing that their bodily interrelation forms an alchemical ellipse anticipating the Dancer of The World.
Nichols, Sallie, Jung and Tarot: An Archetypal Journey, 1980supporting
Death, other opposites, such as king and commoner, male and female, are being chopped up and plowed under, preparatory to reorganization and reassimilation, a process that begins in the final card of this row, Temperance.
Nichols positions Temperance as the initiating moment of psychic reassimilation following Death's destruction of fixed opposites, with feminine figures presiding over the entire sequence.
Nichols, Sallie, Jung and Tarot: An Archetypal Journey, 1980supporting
justice and temperance of the Republic can with difficulty be distinguished. Temperance appears to be the virtue of a part only… whereas temperance is also described as a sort of harmony.
The commentary on the Republic observes that temperance and justice are nearly identical in Platonic ethics, temperance being partial harmony while justice is the whole soul's perfect order.
temperance activists preached moderation as the solution, but as the century wore on, they became convinced that universal abstinence was the only way.
Alexander documents the historical drift of the Temperance Movement from moderation to coercive abstentionism, illustrating how the classical virtue was culturally corrupted into its opposite.
Alexander, Bruce K., The Globalisation of Addiction: A Study in Poverty of the Spirit, 2008supporting
the germ of an ethical principle contained in the notion that temperance is 'doing one's own business,' which in the Republic (such is the shifting character of th
The editorial commentary identifies in the Charmides an embryonic definition of temperance as each element performing its proper function — a formulation that migrates into the Republic's account of justice.
a state can only be free and wise and harmonious when there is a balance of powers. There are many words by which we express the aims of the legislator,—temperance, wisdom, friendship
The Laws presents temperance, wisdom, and friendship as interchangeable legislative aims, all resolving into the single principle of balanced power necessary for a free and harmonious polis.
Wilson's final eleven paragraphs in 'Working With Others' are… an attempt to positively describe… the differences he sees between the beliefs and practices of Alcoholics Anonymous when compared to those so widely promulgated by the Temperance and Prohibition movements.
Schaberg shows that Wilson's chapter consciously positioned A.A. against Temperance and Prohibition ideology, rejecting isolation and abolition as failed prescriptions for alcoholism.
Schaberg, William H, Writing the Big Book The Creation of A A , 2019supporting
the son, like his father before him, was known as the richest man in America and he had continued the family tradition of liberally funding the cause of temperance
Schaberg contextualises the Rockefeller family's deep institutional investment in the Temperance cause, illuminating the social milieu from which A.A. had to differentiate itself.
Schaberg, William H, Writing the Big Book The Creation of A A , 2019supporting
Rush (1785/1819) encouraged churches to collaborate in an educational and political effort to increase the stigma associated with drinking alcohol… which became the foundation for the beginning of the 19th century's temperance movement
Dennett traces the medical and ecclesiastical origins of the 19th-century temperance movement to Benjamin Rush's disease model of alcoholism and his call for public stigmatisation of drinking.
Dennett, Stella, Individuation in Addiction Recovery: An Archetypal Astrological Perspective, 2025supporting
the basic quest in Alcoholics Anonymous was to be for balance, for some middle course or happy medium… 'The charting of a safe path between these extremes' thus became the life task
Kurtz demonstrates that A.A.'s psychological programme is organised around the classical temperance ideal of a middle path between the extremes of acting-out and denial.
Kurtz, Ernest, Not God A History of Alcoholics Anonymous, 2010supporting
It is well to make abstinence the rule, but the rule may sometimes admit of an exception… Must there not be a certain proportion between the aspirations of man and his powers?
The Platonic commentary on the Laws endorses moderate wine use for mature persons and frames the temperance question within the broader philosophical problem of asceticism's proper limits.
If to beauty you add temperance, and if in other respects you are what Critias declares you to be
The opening of the Charmides pairs temperance with physical beauty as joint conditions of the ideal Athenian character, introducing the term in its social-aristocratic rather than philosophical sense.