Hysteria and the Big Book: The Repression of the Feminine in Alcoholics Anonymous

Plato was the first to define hysteria. In the Timaeus, he writes that the womb is an animal within an animal, desirous of procreation, and that unless it is put to its proper use, it causes all manner of psychosis and disease. Hippocrates, the father of medicine and Plato’s contemporary, agreed: the wandering womb was the root of women’s emotional and physical disturbances. The Greek word hystera means womb. Hystericos means suffering in the womb. And this conception of women’s inner life as fundamentally disordered does not change from the time of Hippocrates through two thousand years of Western thought, all the way into the nineteenth century.

This matters for anyone in recovery because the book that millions of alcoholics treat as sacred scripture was written squarely within this tradition. Bill Wilson was a visionary, one of the top one hundred thinkers of the twentieth century by some accounts, a self-taught intellectual and an accomplished author. But he was also a man of his time. And his time still considered the feminine body as soulless, sexually materialistic, and mentally inferior.

From the Wandering Womb to the Consulting Room

Jean-Martin Charcot, the father of modern neurology, died in 1893. At the Salpetriere hospital in Paris, he made a spectacle of studying hysteria, bringing in audiences of other doctors to observe women in the throes of hysterical episodes. Freud studied under Charcot and was influenced deeply by the idea that hysteria was an actual disorder. In the 1880s and 1890s, Freud began treating women whose symptoms of paralysis, convulsion, fainting, and loss of speech had no organic cause. This led him to postulate the existence of the unconscious itself. Western psychology’s founding insight, the discovery that there is something beneath conscious awareness that shapes our behavior, emerged from the pathologizing of women’s emotional expression.

Jung built on Freud’s work but took a different route, turning toward schizophrenia and the images that psychotic patients described. This allowed him to resurrect the Platonic concept of archetypes. But the underlying structure remained: psychology as a discipline was born from the diagnosis of hysteria, and hysteria was always gendered. As James Hillman writes in The Myth of Analysis, during the first two decades of the twentieth century, the medical profession, including psychiatry and psychology, considered the female body as soulless, sexually materialistic, and mentally inferior. The Greek root hystera carries meanings of coming too late, lagging behind, failing, exhibiting shortcomings, inferiority.

Dr. Esther Fischer Homburger, whom Hillman cites, puts it plainly: where hysteria is diagnosed, misogyny is not far away.

Three Uses of the Word in the Big Book

Bill Wilson uses the word “hysteria” or “hysterical” three times in Alcoholics Anonymous. All three are revealing.

The first appears on page 69, in the fourth step discussion of the sex inventory. Wilson is writing to men about how to handle infidelity. The instruction is practical enough on its surface: “We avoid hysterical thinking or advice.” But consider what “hysterical” meant in the cultural air Wilson was breathing. Hysteria was still thought of as a woman’s illness, a disorder of nerves and emotion bound to the feminine body. When Wilson warns against hysterical advice, he is warning men not to listen to their wives on the subject of their own infidelity. The women are too emotional, too unstable, too disordered in their thinking to offer useful guidance. He is repeating an age-old script from Plato to Charcot to Freud: the feminine is equated with disorder, and the masculine spirit enthroned is the solution.

The second use is the most damning. In “To the Wives,” Wilson writes in the voice of a woman: “We have been hysterical.” Lois Wilson wanted to write this chapter herself. Bill told her it would not be proper. So he impersonated a woman, and in his impersonation, he put the word “hysterical” in her mouth. Bill knew that a woman needed to say something in the book. But he did not know a woman whom he trusted enough to let speak for herself. This is the essence of misogyny as a psychological structure: the inability to take the risk of letting the feminine speak and then engaging with what she has to say.

The third use appears elsewhere in the text and follows the same pattern: the word functions as a dismissal of the emotional, the embodied, the feeling dimension of experience.

Bill’s Betrayal of the Feminine

Bill Wilson was a womanizer his entire life. He had a girlfriend until the day he died. Ten percent of the book’s royalties went to that woman. Lois never said anything publicly. She bore it.

This is not offered as judgment. Half the men in AA have struggled with the same thing. The point is structural. Bill’s betrayals of Lois are, at a deeper level, a betrayal of the feminine itself. The cultural wound of the repression of the feminine repeats in Alcoholics Anonymous because the psychology of the founder filters into the psychology of those who follow him. Hillman observed this: the psychology of our founders tends to filter down into the culture they create.

There is an unspoken code among old-timers in AA. Sponsors rarely tell a man to go make amends for infidelity. Not directly. There is a tacit understanding, inherited from the early twentieth century, that men can do what they want in this department. The projection works like this: I misbehave because I perceive my wife as hysterical, and then I refuse to make amends because she responds hysterically. But the hysteria is my projection. Her emotional response is legitimate, and it is a response to my behavior. If men can get to this, they have cracked the code. But it is almost impossible to see, precisely because the cultural inheritance makes it feel like common sense.

Lois Wilson did more for Alcoholics Anonymous than practically anyone, because she did the emotional labor that the program was not equipped to handle. The twelve steps gave Bill a spiritual framework. They did not give him a feeling function. For that, he needed a woman, and the woman who bore that burden was Lois.

Misogyny as a Metaphysical Problem

Misogyny is not social prejudice or personal hatred. It is a psychic structure inherited by anyone born or raised in Western culture. At its core, misogyny is the mistrust of grief, vulnerability, eros, embodiment, and the feeling function itself. When the spirit represses these inner dimensions, they do not vanish. They get projected outward. Women become the symbolic carriers of disorder, temptation, and hysteria.

Marion Woodman writes that addiction is not a love affair with the substance itself but a rejection of the feminine. To reject the feminine is to reject the component in us that wants us to feel: to feel our emotions, attend to our moods, pay attention to our dreams, and live within what Pascal called the reason of the heart. The addict rejects this. The spiritual program designed to treat the addict often reinforces the rejection by offering transcendence as the solution. Step three asks us to turn our will and lives over to the care of God as we understood Him. That is not a neutral statement. It is loaded with millennia of repression of the feminine, repression of feeling, and the equation of the masculine spirit with salvation.

This is why Alcoholics Anonymous does not touch depression. It does not have the tools. It is a spiritual program, and the Latin word for alcohol is spiritus. We still call it spirit. If the word “alcoholic” existed in ancient Latin, it would mean an addiction to spirits. AA works as well as it does precisely because it operates on the same religious function as spiritual intoxication. But it cannot reach what lies beneath the spiritual surface, because what lies beneath is feminine, and the feminine has been pathologized for three thousand years.

The Feeling Function and Emotional Sobriety

The projected anima is what gets called hysteria. When a man’s feeling function is undeveloped, the anima begins to feel through him. She takes possession and starts feeling on his behalf, and it comes out distorted. He starts projecting hysteria onto the women around him, and simultaneously, his own decisions become driven by the very emotional chaos he accuses them of. The underdeveloped feeling function lives through the anima. It takes over the whole system. This is the psychological mechanism behind infidelity, behind the dopamine-fueled risky behavior that so many men in recovery struggle with long after they put down the drink.

Emotional sobriety, then, is not serenity. It is not detachment. It is the development of the feeling function, which Jung defined as a rational function oriented by value rather than by ideas. Value is to feeling what ideas are to thinking. The thinking function reflects on ideas; the feeling function reflects on values. To develop the feeling function is to take the risk of turning toward one’s partner rather than turning away. It means having the difficult conversations, coming clean about the infidelity, sitting with the projection rather than acting on it.

Hillman says the end of misogyny marks the end of the need for psychotherapy. In personal terms, the end of misogyny is when the woman, both within and without, is allowed to speak. Not to explain her position or justify herself, but simply to state her reality the way men do, without the need for translation. The soul work, if there is a purpose in it, is simply to let the feminine speak.

When Wilson wrote his 1958 essay “The Next Frontier: Emotional Sobriety,” he admitted that the twelve steps had not fixed his problems with emotions. He did not say much about the relational dimension, but psychologists know that projections of hysteria and failures of emotional sobriety show up most clearly in intimate relationships. Wilson’s honesty about emotional sobriety was a crack in the door. Walking through it requires a confrontation with the misogyny that the program inherited from its founder, from the Western philosophical tradition, and from the very structure of the psyche as the West has understood it.

The moment we stop distrusting the feminine, both within and without, is the moment we stop needing to spiritually bypass. Where hysteria is projected, spiritual bypass is fully underway. The formula does not have many variations.

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Cody Peterson is the author of The Shadow of a Figure of Light (Chiron Publications, 2024) and a contributor to Jung Journal: Culture & Psyche.

Sources Cited

• Hillman, James (1972). The Myth of Analysis: Three Essays in Archetypal Psychology. Northwestern University Press.
• Jung, C.G. (1921). Psychological Types. Collected Works, Vol. 6. Princeton University Press.
• Plato. Timaeus. Trans. Benjamin Jowett.
• Wilson, Bill (1939). Alcoholics Anonymous: The Story of How Many Thousands of Men and Women Have Recovered from Alcoholism. AA World Services.
• Wilson, Bill (1958). “The Next Frontier: Emotional Sobriety.” AA Grapevine, January 1958.
• Woodman, Marion (1982). Addiction to Perfection: The Still Unravished Bride. Inner City Books.