Editor’s Note: Today we feature the second response by Glenn C. to his interlocutors in our roundtable. Stay tuned for more this Thursday!
We would be severely disparaging of scholars in American History and American Studies if all they ever published about the period of the American Revolution were biographies of George Washington. This is not to minimize the importance of the first president, but there were many other people who also made major and necessary contributions. And yet AA history studies has at times tended to focus so much on Bill Wilson and his small circle of close associates, that one has to look far for studies on many other people and topics.
Rich Dubiel’s 2004 book The Road to Fellowship: The Role of the Emmanuel Movement and the Jacoby Club in the Development of Alcoholics Anonymous, was however one of the major works which endeavored to significantly broaden the history of the AA movement. [1] I have tried to contribute to the wider history of AA myself in some of the books I have written and in the materials I have posted on the Hindsfoot Foundation website. So I was thrilled when Ernie Kurz had Rich contact me, and I realized that Rich and I were like-minded souls in so many ways. His book expanded my own horizons enormously. I tremendously enjoyed every minute of getting the book ready for print. And it was a book that was going to have an impact.
The first bombshell that Rich’s book dropped was when he proved that the “orthodox” or traditional AA answer to when Rowland Hazard III was psychoanalyzed by Carl Jung — 1931 — could not possibly be correct. He showed from a detailed analysis of correspondence and financial records in the Hazard family papers that there was no time in Rowland Hazard’s busy schedule during 1931 in which he could have spent an extensive period in Switzerland undergoing treatment by Jung. What made this a bombshell was that if Rowland could not have gone to Jung in that year — the date given in all the older AA literature — then did he in fact undergo treatment by Jung at all? Was the whole story only a myth?