Addiction, Spirit, and Transformation: A Commentary on Faith-Based Recovery, Jung, and the Limits of a Purely Medical Model
U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. recently announced a policy shift that has stirred both interest and controversy. The announcement was that faith-based organizations that meet evidence-based standards will now be eligible for federal funding to support addiction recovery. This was accomplished in coordination with the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA). It includes a new $100 million initiative called STREETS which is focused on outreach, treatment, crisis intervention, and housing, alongside expanded funding for Assisted Outpatient Treatment for individuals with serious mental illness.¹
What caught many people’s attention wasn’t just the funding, but Kennedy’s framing. He described addiction as a disease that affects individuals physically, mentally, emotionally—and “above all, spiritually.”²
That word, spiritually, is doing a lot of work here.
It raises immediate red flags for many people. Red flags that include concern about church–state separation, fears of replacing science with ideology, or worries about coercive religion in care. Those concerns deserve to be taken seriously; however, dismissing the idea outright also risks throwing away something clinically and psychologically significant.
Because the notion that addiction has a spiritual dimension is not new. And it didn’t originate in contemporary politics.
Jung and the Spiritual Hunger Beneath Addiction
Long before modern debates about recovery models, Carl Jung offered a striking insight. The alcoholic is not merely chasing intoxication, but is often seeking wholeness.³
In his correspondence with Bill Wilson, co-founder of Alcoholics Anonymous, Jung suggested that addiction reflects a profound spiritual longing or what earlier eras might have called a thirst for God, and what modern psychology might describe as a hunger for meaning and integration.⁴
One of Jung’s most cited formulations comes from a Latin phrase he used, spiritus contra spiritum translated as “spirit against spirits.” Jung’s idea was not moralistic. It wasn’t about sin or weakness. It was symbolic and psychological: alcohol (“spirits”) becomes a substitute for something deeper the psyche is craving. In the absence of a genuine experience of meaning, connection, or transformation, the person reaches for a chemical proxy.⁵ So Jung is saying that someone struggling with addiction is reaching for something deeper. I also think that, in a society that is often described as “spiritually dead” or “soulless” by philosophers, people have difficulty finding meaning and purpose, so they also turn to substances as a way to fill a dark hole.
It is important to note that Jung did not mean that people need religion in a narrow or doctrinal sense. He was explicit that spirituality, psychologically speaking, refers to the psyche’s innate drive toward meaning, coherence, and individuation.⁶ When that drive is blocked, distorted, or unmet, especially in the context of trauma, deprivation, or alienation, it can reappear in compulsive, self-destructive forms.
Addiction, in this view, is not just a brain disease.
It is also a crisis of meaning.
Where the Medical Model Falls Short
Modern addiction science has given us indispensable tools that include neurobiology, pharmacology, behavioral interventions, harm reduction, relapse prevention. None of that should be abandoned.
But there is a growing recognition, even within evidence-based practice, that biology alone does not explain why recovery sticks for some and not others.⁷
Two people can receive the same medication, the same therapy, the same relapse-prevention plan—and one finds lasting recovery while the other cycles repeatedly. Often, the difference is not insight or compliance, but whether the person develops a sense of purpose, beliefs that support enduring discomfort, connection to community and something “higher” than themselves, a coherent story about who they are becoming.
In other words, meaning.⁸
When Kennedy calls addiction a “spiritual disease,” the phrase may be clumsy (I wish he would have used different words), but it gestures toward a real clinical observation that addiction erodes purpose, fractures identity, and isolates people from value-based living. Recovery requires more than abstinence. It requires rebuilding a life that feels worth staying sober for. For many people it feels like giving their life “soul.”
Faith-Based Organizations: Potential and Pitfalls
Faith-based recovery programs have long operated in this space, often filling gaps left by underfunded public systems. At their best, they offer:
Community and belonging
Structure and accountability
Moral frameworks that support behavior change
Narratives of redemption and transformation
Opportunities for service and contribution
These are not trivial factors. They map closely onto what we know supports long-term recovery.⁹
At the same time, Jung’s work reminds us of an important caution: spirituality cannot be imposed. A spiritual framework that is coercive, shaming, or rigid can be just as psychologically damaging as a purely mechanistic medical approach that ignores meaning altogether.¹⁰ It is my hope that different spiritual communities become involved in recovery—Christian, Muslim, Hindu, Pagan—we need them all.
The real question, then, is not whether spirituality belongs in recovery, but how it is defined, delivered, and integrated.
A More Nuanced Way Forward
As stated above, and I want to be explicitly clear, Jung did not argue that addicts need religion, they need a spiritual mechanism for transformation.
Sometimes that transformation is expressed through religious language. Sometimes through service, community, creativity, or deep psychological integration. Sometimes through confronting trauma and reclaiming agency. What matters is not the label, but whether the person finds a way to orient their life toward meaning rather than compulsion.¹¹
In that sense, the current conversation, however politically charged, reopens an important clinical truth:
Recovery is not only about stopping something.
It is about BECOMING SOMEONE.
If we want addiction treatment to work, we cannot ignore the spiritual dimension—not as dogma, but as the human need for meaning, connection, and purpose. Jung saw this clearly decades ago. The challenge now is whether our systems can honor that insight without turning it into ideology.
The tension between science and spirit that we see, doesn’t have to be there. Whether you use the world spirituality or religion I think we all can agree that the human longing for meaning isn’t going anywhere.
Footnotes
U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, “HHS Announces New Recovery-Oriented Funding Initiatives,” press release, 2026.
Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA), remarks by Robert F. Kennedy Jr., public address, 2026.
C. G. Jung, The Psychology of the Transference, Collected Works of C. G. Jung, vol. 16 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1966).
Carl Jung, letter to Bill W. (William G. Wilson), January 30, 1961, reprinted in Alcoholics Anonymous Comes of Age (New York: Alcoholics Anonymous World Services, 1957).
Ibid.
C. G. Jung, Psychology and Religion: West and East, Collected Works of C. G. Jung, vol. 11 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1969).
George E. Vaillant, The Natural History of Alcoholism Revisited (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995).
Viktor E. Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning (Boston: Beacon Press, 2006).
William L. White, Recovery Management and Recovery-Oriented Systems of Care (Chicago: Great Lakes Addiction Technology Transfer Center, 2008).
Edward J. Khantzian, Treating Addiction as a Human Process (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2014).
C. G. Jung, Modern Man in Search of a Soul (San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1933).
Bibliography
Frankl, Viktor E. Man’s Search for Meaning. Boston: Beacon Press, 2006.
Jung, C. G. Modern Man in Search of a Soul. San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1933.
———. Psychology and Religion: West and East. Collected Works of C. G. Jung, vol. 11. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1969.
———. The Psychology of the Transference. Collected Works of C. G. Jung, vol. 16. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1966.
Khantzian, Edward J. Treating Addiction as a Human Process. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2014.
Vaillant, George E. The Natural History of Alcoholism Revisited. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995.
White, William L. Recovery Management and Recovery-Oriented Systems of Care. Chicago: Great Lakes ATTC, 2008.
