The War of the Gods in Addiction: C.G. Jung, Alcoholics Anonymous and Archetypal Evil

Name: The War of the Gods in Addiction: C.G. Jung, Alcoholics Anonymous and Archetypal Evil
Author: David E. Schoen

The War of the Gods in Addiction: C.G. Jung, Alcoholics Anonymous and Archetypal Evil is a work by David E. Schoen (2009).

Core claims

Schoen’s central innovation is treating addiction not as a failure of will or a neurochemical accident but as a theomachic event—a literal war between archetypal powers within the psyche—thereby relocating the etiology of addiction from the medical model to the problem of evil itself.
The book demonstrates that Jung’s 1961 letter to Bill Wilson is not a peripheral curiosity but the Rosetta Stone for understanding why the Twelve Steps work psychologically: they ritualize the ego’s surrender to the Self in a culture that has systematically severed the dark side of the God-image.
By naming addiction as the site where archetypal evil forces its way into consciousness, Schoen bridges Jung’s Answer to Job and the pragmatic spirituality of AA, revealing that the alcoholic’s “bottom” is structurally identical to Job’s confrontation with Yahweh’s shadow.

How does Schoen’s argument that the privatio boni fuels addiction compare with Edinger’s analysis in The New God-Image of Jung’s key letters on the evolution of the Western God-image?
In what ways does Hillman’s claim in “Revisioning Psychology” that “the gods have become diseases” support or complicate Schoen’s thesis that addiction is a theophany of archetypal evil rather than a medical condition?
How does Schoen’s reading of ego-surrender in the Twelve Steps align with or diverge from Kalsched’s account in The Inner World of Trauma of archetypal defenses that simultaneously protect and imprison the personal spirit?