growing list of social dysfunctions.
The book consists of two parts: the first part is the basic text written by Bill Wilson and critiqued by the ôfirst hundredö members of A.A.; and the second part is the ôstories,ö brief autobiographical essays by A.A. members recounting the experiences of their addiction and their recovery, much like what they would say when speaking live at an A.A. meeting. The first part is considered to be virtually untouchable, editing errors and all; but the stories have been revised, replaced, and supplemented in the later editions of the book, primarily to reflect the experiences of the increasingly diverse membership.
The greatest difficulty that A.A. faces as an approach to treatment of an illness is that it does have a strong religious flavor. This is understandable, since A.A. grew out of Frank BuchmanÆs Oxford Groups, and used the New Testament as its text for its first few years, until the crucial occasion, described at various places in A.A. literature, when the members decided that A.A. was not and could not be an exclusively Christian organization and broke free from the Oxford Groups. The key to A.A.Æs success is its focus on inducing a deep change in the personalities of its members, so that the problems that produced the problem drinking can finally be resolved. This approach resulted in fact from a suggestion by Carl Jung to a patient, Roland, who communicated it to Bill Wilson, that sometimes a religious conversion can enable a person to change enough, deeply enough, to overcome alcoholism. By the time Alcoholics Anonymous was published, however, Wilson and the others had discovered that a slow process of personality reform could work as well. Wilson wrote (Alcoholics Anonymous, 3d ed., 569) in the second edition of the book, ôMost of our experiences are what the psychologist William James called the `educational varietyÆ because they develop slowly over a period of time.ö
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