Writing the Big Book

Name: Writing the Big Book
Author: William H. Schaberg

Writing the Big Book is a work by William H. Schaberg (2019).

Core claims

Schaberg’s meticulous reconstruction of the Big Book’s composition process inadvertently reveals that the text most AA members treat as received scripture was in fact a contested, collectively negotiated document — a finding that reframes the Twelve Steps less as divine dictation and more as what Hillman would call a “healing fiction” whose power lies precisely in its collaborative, mythic construction.
By documenting Wilson’s claim that the Twelve Steps “flowed out” of him without conscious deliberation, Schaberg provides primary-source evidence for what Jungian psychology identifies as the transcendent function at work — the ego stepping aside so that archetypal material can organize itself through a human vessel.
The book demonstrates that the Big Book’s creation was shaped as much by political conflict, financial desperation, and interpersonal suspicion among early members as by spiritual inspiration, establishing that the birth of a transformative myth always carries a shadow — a truth depth psychology insists upon but hagiographic AA history routinely suppresses.

How does Hillman’s concept of “healing fiction” in Healing Fiction illuminate the status of the Big Book as a text that is neither literally true nor false but operates as a transformative myth — and what does Schaberg’s archival evidence add to that reading?
In what ways does the senex-puer dynamic that Hillman theorizes in Senex & Puer map onto the conflict between Wilson and the Akron Oxford Group members that Schaberg documents during the Big Book’s creation?
Peterson argues in The Shadow of a Figure of Light that Wilson’s writing of the Twelve Steps exemplifies Jung’s transcendent function — how does Schaberg’s account of the material conditions surrounding that composition complicate or deepen the Jungian interpretation?