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David E. Schoen
David E. Schoen
David E. Schoen is the American Jungian analyst whose The War of the Gods in Addiction: C. G. Jung, Alcoholics Anonymous, and Archetypal Evil (2009) — later retitled and expanded as The Dark Night of Recovery — provided the most disciplined contemporary articulation of the archetypal reading of addiction: addiction as the takeover of the ego by an autonomous archetypal complex that operates with religious intensity and cannot be met at the ego’s own level.
Schoen reads addiction through the 1961 letter of Jung to Bill Wilson — the letter in which Jung identified spiritus contra spiritum, the craving for alcohol as a low-level equivalent of the spiritual thirst for union with the divine — and through the complex theory as elaborated by Edinger and Kalsched. The thesis: the Addiction-Shadow-Complex is a genuinely autonomous psychic agency, archetypal in its power, demanding surrender rather than mere behavioral modification. The clinical implication — that recovery is, structurally, a religious movement — is the argument the Seba tradition receives and extends. See schoen-war-gods-addiction.