David E. Schoen

Sebastian reads Schoen

Schoen arrives at addiction from a direction most Jungian clinicians avoid: not through the symbolic richness of what alcohol or the substance *is*, but through what it *opposes* — and he names that opposition archetypal evil. The argument is genuinely unsettling, which is its virtue. Where standard Jungian readings of addiction reach for the numinous, hearing in the compulsion a misdirected longing for the Self (the pneumatic ratio running at full pressure), Schoen refuses the consolation. He takes evil seriously as a force, not a shadow waiting to be integrated, and reads AA’s founding mythology — Bill W., the white light, the higher power — as a war-narrative rather than a recovery arc. This makes him essential reading when the usual depth formulations feel too redemptive, too certain that the soul is moving somewhere. Turn to Schoen when a clinical or personal encounter with addiction resists the language of transformation and demands, instead, a reckoning with what does not want the soul to survive.