Not God: A History of Alcoholics Anonymous

Name: Not God: A History of Alcoholics Anonymous
Author: Ernest Kurtz

Not God: A History of Alcoholics Anonymous is a work by Ernest Kurtz (1979).

Core claims

Kurtz’s Not God establishes that the radical therapeutic power of Alcoholics Anonymous derives not from any positive doctrine but from the sustained acceptance of personal limitation — a “not God” identity that functions as the precise psychological inverse of ego-inflation as described in Jungian individuation.
The book reveals that A.A.’s deliberate refusal to codify theology or centralize authority was not organizational pragmatism but an enacted epistemology — a Jamesian pragmatism translated into communal spiritual practice, making A.A. the most successful institutional application of The Varieties of Religious Experience ever attempted.
Kurtz demonstrates that the tension between “surrendered limitation” and “grandiose self-sufficiency” within the alcoholic psyche mirrors the fundamental polarity that depth psychology identifies at the core of all neurosis, positioning A.A. as an inadvertent laboratory for studying the ego-Self axis under extreme conditions.

How does Kurtz’s concept of “essential limitation” in Not God compare with Edward Edinger’s account of ego-Self separation in Ego and Archetype, and does A.A.’s First Step represent a ritualized form of what Edinger calls “the wounding of the ego”?
In what ways does William James’s pragmatist epistemology, as Kurtz traces it through A.A.’s founding, diverge from or converge with Jung’s concept of the “psychological approach” to the God-image as articulated in Peterson’s Alchemy of the Twelve Steps?
Could Kurtz’s analysis of A.A.’s refusal to centralize authority be read alongside James Hillman’s critique of monotheistic ego-psychology in Re-Visioning Psychology — does A.A.’s “not God” principle enact a polytheistic psychology without naming it as such?