Spirituality and Religiousness and Alcohol/Other Drug Problems: Treatment Issues and Reviews

Operationalizing the Numinosum Kills It: The Central Contradiction of Empirical Spirituality Research

Brent Benda’s 2006 edited collection assembles clinical researchers, social workers, and treatment specialists to examine how spirituality and religiousness interact with substance use disorders and their treatment. The project is straightforwardly empirical: contributors review instruments for measuring spiritual and religious variables, assess treatment outcomes where faith-based components are included, and attempt to disentangle religiousness (institutional affiliation, attendance, doctrinal adherence) from spirituality (subjective sense of connection, meaning, transcendence). The ambition is taxonomic—sort the variables, measure the outcomes, advance the evidence base. Yet the volume’s deepest contribution is unintentional. It lays bare a structural contradiction that haunts addiction research: the very act of converting spiritual experience into measurable constructs evacuates the transformative potency that makes those experiences clinically relevant. Cody Peterson, drawing on Jung’s analysis of Rowland Hazard’s case, identifies this potency as the numinosum—“the energy that comprises all religious archetypes and which generates the impetus within the psyche necessary for us to change.” Jung told Rowland that his “religious convictions were good” but “did not spell the vital, spiritual experience.” Benda’s contributors, in effect, study the convictions and skip the vitality. The collection documents robust correlations between spiritual engagement and positive recovery outcomes, yet it cannot explain why those correlations hold because its methodology is constitutionally unable to register the qualitative rupture—ego collapse, encounter with the Self—that depth psychology identifies as the mechanism of lasting change.

Survey Items Cannot Replace Symbols: Why the Metaphysical Approach Persists in Empirical Clothing

A recurring motif across Benda’s chapters is the effort to distinguish “intrinsic” from “extrinsic” religiosity, drawing on Gordon Allport’s framework and its many descendants. Contributors deploy scales—the INSPIRIT, the Daily Spiritual Experiences Scale, the Brief RCOPE—designed to capture whether a person’s spiritual engagement is genuinely internalized or merely performative. This is a legitimate clinical concern, but it inadvertently replicates what Peterson, following Jung, calls the metaphysical approach: treating religious content as a fixed object to be assessed at face value rather than as a living symbol whose power depends on subjective encounter. Jung proposed instead the psychological approach, which holds that a symbol “exerts the formative influence natural to it” only when engaged authentically, from within. Wilson operationalized this insight not through surveys but through the Twelve Steps themselves—a structured descent into the unconscious designed to forge a personal myth. Benda’s researchers measure church attendance and prayer frequency; Wilson asks the alcoholic to make a fearless moral inventory and arrive at a conception of a Higher Power that is genuinely one’s own. The difference is not merely methodological but ontological. As Peterson notes, Wilson learned that his readers would be “jaded by religious dogma” and therefore built a program around subjective encounter rather than doctrinal compliance. Benda’s volume, despite its sophistication, keeps circling back to the doctrinal frame because that is what scales can capture.

The Missing Archetype: What Empirical Reviews Cannot See About Addiction’s Spiritual Structure

Richard Tarnas, mapping the broader epistemic problem, observes that depth psychology “subverted the naïve orthodoxies of traditional religion while extending the range of spiritual inquiry,” but that its insights remained confined to the subjective universe because “the objective universe known by natural science was still materialistically opaque and purposeless.” Benda’s collection sits squarely inside this impasse. Its contributors want spirituality to matter clinically—and the data suggest it does—but the scientific framework they inhabit cannot grant ontological weight to archetypal encounter, ego death, or numinous experience. These remain, at best, “subjective factors” to be controlled for. James Hillman, approaching from yet another angle, argued that depth psychology is itself a religious activity whether it admits it or not: “there is always a God in what we are doing.” The treatment programs reviewed in Benda’s volume—faith-based residential programs, spiritually integrated cognitive-behavioral therapy, Twelve Step facilitation—are each, in Hillman’s terms, “practising religion” while speaking the language of outcomes research. The God in what they are doing goes unnamed because naming it would violate the methodological contract. Peterson’s work makes the God explicit: the archetype of the Alcoholic, the Self demanding proper relationship, the Trickster who dismantles the inflated ego through the very substance that poisons it. These are not metaphors decorating clinical realities; they are the clinical realities that Benda’s contributors detect statistically but cannot articulate structurally.

What the Evidence Base Needs Is a Mythology, Not More Instruments

The volume’s most useful chapters are those that honestly confront the measurement problem—acknowledging that existing instruments capture religiousness far more reliably than spirituality, and that the most clinically significant spiritual phenomena (sudden conversion, ego deflation, surrender) resist quantification entirely. This admission, buried in methodological caveats, is the book’s most important finding. It points toward a conclusion that the collection cannot draw but that the depth psychological tradition has articulated for a century: the alcoholic’s recovery depends on an encounter with something that cannot be operationalized because it is, by definition, that which exceeds the ego’s capacity to categorize. Jung called it the Self. Wilson called it a Higher Power. Peterson calls it the numinosum working through the archetype of the Alcoholic. Benda’s collection matters today not for its answers—the specific studies are dated, the instruments have been superseded—but for the shape of the question it cannot resolve. Anyone working at the intersection of addiction treatment and spiritual care needs to understand why the empirical approach keeps finding that spirituality helps without being able to say what spirituality is. The answer lies not in better scales but in the tradition running from William James through Jung through Wilson—a tradition that Benda’s volume circles without entering, and that Peterson’s Jungian reading of the Twelve Steps finally makes psychologically explicit.