Slaying the Dragon

Name: Slaying the Dragon
Author: William L. White

Slaying the Dragon is a work by William L. White (1998).

Core claims

William White’s Slaying the Dragon reveals that America’s addiction treatment history is itself a story of repetition compulsion—cycles of moral crusade, institutional forgetting, and rediscovery that mirror the relapse patterns of the disease it seeks to cure.
The book demonstrates that the professionalization of addiction treatment did not emerge from medical enlightenment but from the political co-optation of mutual-aid movements, making the tension between lived experience and clinical credentialing the central unresolved wound of the recovery field.
White’s historical method exposes how each era’s dominant metaphor for addiction—sin, disease, moral weakness, brain pathology—functions less as a diagnostic advance than as a cultural projection, revealing more about the society’s shadow than about the condition itself.

How does White’s account of cyclical institutional forgetting in addiction treatment compare to Neumann’s model of the ego’s repeated encounter with the uroboric unconscious in The Origins and History of Consciousness—and does the cultural field ever achieve the equivalent of Neumann’s “second dragon fight”?
In what ways does Hillman’s critique of the hero myth in The Great Mother, Her Son, Her Hero, and the Puer illuminate the failures of America’s “war on drugs” as documented by White—specifically, the insistence on combat metaphors for what may require an entirely different mythological stance?
How does the displacement of the wounded healer by the credentialed professional in White’s history relate to Edinger’s account of mortificatio in Anatomy of the Psyche—is the professionalization of addiction treatment an avoidance of the blackening that genuine transformation requires?