The Nostalgic Poison of Euphoric Recall

Lead Outline 

1. Sobriety is an on-going, or interminable, process of developing capacities for active living. AA’s mission is best summarized by the chapter title from the Big Book “Into Action.” Previously passive and reactive alcoholics must become spirited and active in a program of recovery while at the same time learning what at first seems to contradict proactivity, which is the radical acceptance at the base of the program. Active alcoholics are reactionary because they lack any capacities for much beyond their repetition compulsion to self-anesthetization. The term “Becoming-Active” comes from the French philosopher Giles Deleuze, and it means to shift from reactive and reactionary to active and creative. The sober alcoholic’s leap “Into Action” opens possibilities by creating new capacities for love and grace in the life of the alcoholic and those around her. 
2. Becoming-active is the basic nature of desire, which is to continually renew ourselves and the world around us; however, the alcoholic’s desire has gotten stuck in a closed repetition of the same. This stagnation is caused by the reactionary fear that something we never had, and couldn’t hold on to if we did, has been lost, which leads to a passive, fatalistic disposition of vain resistance to life through anesthetization. The sense of “ease and comfort” that we imagine during our “euphoric recall” of the “good times” can no longer be given to us by drinking, but we cannot give up the deception of the “alcoholic dream.” The alcoholic seeking his wholeness in alcohol is expressing his incapacity for the fullness of life. “Recovery” cannot be the recovery of anything that was, but a discovery of new capacities for creativity and deep love, which means the capacity to love beyond what is instrumental for us, and love what is for itself. 
3. We don’t look for trouble, but we don’t shy away from it either because we know that trouble comes with a full life, especially with a life led in active love. We don’t judge our life as worthy because it was without struggle, but because we choose to struggle rather than to sit it out. The point of sobriety is not to obtain or to return the thing that will fill our lack. That is the poison of nostalgia, which is the same poison that kept us looking for fulfillment in the bottle. No-thing can complete us or make us whole, except the activity of love, which is not a thing but a process of making a clearing for what is other within us. We make this clearing for the other by the arduous reduction of self through working the steps and service to others. 
4. Sobriety is building the capacity to do difficult things with grace without retreating to the cheap grace of the easy and comfortable. 
5. Genius is often associated with quick pattern recognition, accurate memory recall, and the novel synthesis of relevant information. However, another definition of genius is simply a willingness, even a desire, to struggle. Geniuses enjoy the strenuous, especially when it is unenjoyable, rather than the easy and the comfortable. 
6. For example, artistic production no longer sufficiently challenged Michelangelo. Artistic endeavors had become too easy for him, and true geniuses do not enjoy the easy and the comfortable. To the great frustration of his wealthy patrons, especially the Church, he all but quit sculpting and painting to pursue scientific inquiry, especially anatomy. He desired something more than the fame and adulation that the Pieta, and David, and The Last Judgement brought him, he was not content to rest on his laurels. He endeavored to map the mysteries of human anatomy because it was a formidable task.  
7. Albert Einstein’s “Miracle Year” was 1905, in which he published his three most important papers, which were on special relativity, Browning Motion, and his quantum hypothesis. He struggled but failed for the rest of his life to develop a unified field theory of gravity and electromagnetism. One of the most brilliant years in the history of science and then nothing but trying and failing for the rest of his life. Success plays a very small role in the life of a genius, because genius is defined by arduous striving rather than completion. 
8. The AA lead was formulated to follow two practices from the history of religions: confession and testimony, also known as “bearing witness.” The first written confessional was St. Augustine’s Confessions, and it became the model for all other confessionals that have proceeded from it. A testimonial often included a confessional, but its emphasis is on deliverance from what has been confessed. The first records of testimonies were not about redemption but about legal witness before magistrates. The Biblical Book of Job may contain the first account of the format of a legal testimonial being used for a “religious” purpose. The Hebrew word for “Satan” means something like “prosecuting attorney.” Satan’s first appearance is as a member of YHWH’s heavenly court, or retinue, whose job seems to be to test God’s human creations from the position of a prosecutor proving a case. 
9. Bill W formulated the 12 steps from a Christian predecessor to AA called, “The Oxford Group.” The basic format of AA follows the Oxford Group’s Six Tenants of “deflation, dependence, inventory, confession, and restitution.” The AA lead follows the basic pattern of the 12 Steps broken into three main components. The confession is an account of “What it was like,” the surrender is “What happened,” and the redemption is "What it's like now.”  
10. However, Bill W also used William James’s Varieties of Religious Experience to formulate some of the programmatic elements of AA. In the Varieties James catalogues various religious practices that Bill W incorporated into the steps. However, Bill looked for the general structures of these practices and not to their specific content. He wanted the program to be spiritual but not of a particular religious tradition, so as not to exclude those alcoholics of a denominational affiliation, or those of no religion. The program might be thought of as Bill W’s greatest hits of religion, which was sort of what James’s Varieties is as well. 
11. AA is a spiritual solution for a spiritual condition that manifests in physical symptoms, which is why most people make it their last resort, and even then, leave before step three because of its overtly religious articulation. There has been a continual proliferation of psycho-biological solutions to alcoholism and addiction in general hocked since the medicalization of human psychology. And before the history of “scientific,” medical treatments began, there was the history of religions, in which alcoholism was either characterized as a “moral” problem, or a demonic one.  
12. The innovation of AA was to take elements of both classical, religious practices, which are the steps stripped of specific religious language, and combine them with psycho-biological understandings of alcoholism, which are the medical articulations of alcoholism as a “disease” rather than as a moral failing, or as a demonic possession, to create a spiritual program of recovery.  
13. AA is criticized for being too secular from the perspective of the religiously pious, and too spiritual for the scientific materialist. However, for those who have tried but cannot find any other solution, AA has been their way out of alcoholism since the first meeting between two alcoholics on June 10, 1935. 
14. Addiction is structured like all other “normal” pursuits of one’s desires. However, it is considered a medical symptom because it repeats the same, impotent failure ad nauseum. We desire what we imagine will fill our lack. However, once we obtain our ambition, that target doesn’t fulfill us in the way that we had hoped, which then causes us to repeat the cycle. The cycle of desire, acquire, and disillusionment is familiar to alcoholics. 
15. All so called “drunkalogues,” which is the what-it-was-like part of the lead, are the same no matter how different they may seem. All drunks are “garden variety” because they invariably follow the pattern of desire, acquire, and disillusionment into destitution, insanity, imprisonment, and death, even if they’re not there yet. An alcoholic’s inability, or unwillingness, to identify as an alcoholic is called, “terminal uniqueness,” because it is his imagined difference between him and other alcoholics that will kill him. After a lead gives a particularly gnarly drunkalogue, it is often the inclination of the terminally unique alcoholic to think that he might be bad, but he’s not that bad, or to remember all the times when he drank and didn’t have any negative consequences. 
16. Alcoholism is often referred to as the disease of “more” within the AA community because of the irony that the alcoholic’s seemingly inexhaustible desire for more results in a lifetime of less. This is the paradox of alcoholism’s association with excessive desire, but its correlation with a severely diminished life. The problem is not too much desire, but too little. Desire is weak and impotent when it's for more alcohol. 
17. Carl Jung called alcoholism a “low level” searching for God in his famous letter to Bill Wilson. Jung noticed that in many languages that one common name for alcohol was “spirits,” but whatever alcohol offers spiritually, it is too low level for the alcoholic’s actual spiritual needs. 
18. In the womb we lack nothing. The first time we know want is when we are birthed into a cold delivery room upon leaving the birthing canal, and we lack warmth and nourishment. 
19. The second time we know lack is the first time that we are hungry, and our mother is not near. Freud thought of this moment of panic and dismay as the first time the infant must theorize about lack and what to do about it. Thinking, and subjectivity itself, is born of lack. And this basic, infantile thought is something like, “How do I lure my mother over here. And what is it that has turned my mother’s attention away from me? And how can I make myself like whatever it is that has her attention?” 
20. From this initial, desperate realization of not-having comes our many disparate attempts to fill our lack with what others have, or with what is outside of ourselves and out of our direct control. Jacques Lacan put it this way, “Our desire is the desire of the Other,” which has two meanings: one, we learn what to desire from what others desire, and two, our desire is to be desired by the Other. 
21. Our desire lacks a direct object, but it seems that others know what to do about their lack. And so, we imitate them, this is called “Mimetic Desire” by Rene Gerard. We lack what others seem to have. St. Augustine called our constitutive lack, the “God-Shaped-Hole,” and Fredrick Nietzsche called it the void, and Bill Wilson thought of lack as the “Hole in the Doughnut.” 
22. Lack not only causes our desire for things, but also causes our desire to be desired, or to be an object desired by others. This is because starting with our first caregivers, we depend on the desire of others for our survival. The infant’s first theory is how to lure the mother attention to itself. This theorizing is thinking about what others desire, which is formulated something like, “How do I become an object of desire for the Other.” This is the thought that begins a lifetime of anxiously imagining how others imagine you, which is the social anxiety that began a lot of alcoholics drinking. 
23. Everything that we desire, whether it is imagined as something for us, or it is imagined as a lure to the desire of the Other, are imaginary projections of wholeness and completeness. However, all of us, not just alcoholics, fail to satisfy our desire, or to fill our constitutive lack.  
24. This continual failure of our desire to be led to any lasting satisfaction, causes our desire to take on a strange dual aspect for us. On the one hand, our desire comes to define us to such an extent that it seems like what is most intimate to our sense of self, and on the other, it is like a monstrous, undead presence within us because it is an interminable compulsion to repeat, and also because we cannot figure out what it wants. 
25. The dissatisfaction inherent to the cycles of desire is something akin to a horror movie’s depiction of demonic possession because one’s addiction feels like an invading force compelling one to act against oneself. Alcoholics often say something like, “I don’t know why I keep doing this.” Obtaining the object of desire but not the satisfaction of desire, produces a sense of unknowability about one’s desires, so that it seems that one’s desires are not one’s own, especially for the addict because the cycles of desiring and dissatisfaction produce not only dissatisfaction but destruction.  
26. Horror movies either posit the unknowability of the other’s intentions towards us or the unknowability of the drive within us as the object-cause-of-anxiety. Our desire feels both intimate and foreign to us at the same time. Freud thought of the “Pleasure Principle” as governing human behavior when activity was directed towards the reduction of the buildup of tension. The alcoholic experiences a sense of “ease and comfort” after taking the first drink, which is the reduction of tension that Freud thought defined pleasure seeking behavior. 
27. However, after the initial sense of pleasure is lost, the experience of drinking becomes a vain obsession with getting it back. This is the deadly nostalgia of alcoholism sometimes called “euphoric recall.” The alcoholic pines after the sense of ease and comfort that he imagines he has lost, so that the alcoholic’s desire for “more” is actually a desire for a return to a lost mental state of ease and comfort that becomes what Freud called a “repetition compulsion.” 
28. The repetition compulsion comes to define not only the addict's behavior, but it becomes his identity as well, which is why the first step is to identity oneself as an “Alcoholic.” Addiction is a determination of one’s behavior, which means that one is not free to choose whether to drink or not. 
29. The term “addiction” was first used when sentencing a defendant in ancient Rome. “Ad” means “towards” in Latin and “dict” means “speak,” specifically the speech of the judge’s binding sentence in a second century trail, which was usually enforced labor. It came to mean the binding of, or determination of, the repetition compulsion only within the last two centuries of the medicalization of human psychology. 
30. How does an addict get out of the binding sentence of alcoholism? The liar’s paradox may be a helpful way to think about how we can sperate our free selves from our addicted selves. Jacques Lacan showed how there are two subjects in the classic lair’s paradox, which is the sentence, “I am lying.” The subject of the sentence is lying, but the subject of annunciation is telling the truth. When the alcoholic introduces himself at the beginning of the meeting by saying, “I’m an alcoholic,” he splits himself in two in the same way as the liar’s paradox splits the liar. The subject of the sentence is determined by alcohol to repeat his compulsion, but the subject of annunciation is at a meeting, working the steps, and above all not drinking. 
31. Hegel called this ability to split the subject in two “self-alienation,” and is it our only freedom, or what Hegel called, our “spirit,” as opposed to the binding of our material determinations. 
32. Sobriety is a chance to change a repetition compulsion from a determinate symptom to an indeterminate repetition of difference. Freedom is defined by the repetition of structure and the difference that structure supports. When we change what we repeat from drinking to the structure of the AA program, our repetition supports new inflows of difference rather than more of the same. 
33. Sobriety builds capacities for creative, loving responses to difficult situations. The most important new activity that AA members build capacities for is service to others, which is to build the capacity for ingressing love into more and more actual occasions. It is only active love that addresses the original lack that alcohol failed so profoundly to fill. 
34. There is a strange episode in the New Testament in which Jesus tells his disciples that when they cast out a demon, it’ll come back. And because the demon’s home has been swept clean, and there is less clutter, the demon will go and get seven of his demon friends to live there with him. There has been a lot of speculation by Biblical scholars and laymen about this passage, but the consensus seems to be that leaving the void that has been swept clean open is the problem that Jesus is pointing out. The void within us can only be filled with the struggle for active love.