Journal of Analytical Psychology, 2014, 59, 519–523

A response to David Tacey’s ‘James Hillman:

the unmaking of a psychologist’

Ginette Paris, Santa Barbara, USA

There are major problems with David Tacey’s long, complex tirade regarding
Hillman’s life and work. Here are my thoughts:
1 Is this a fair critique of Hillman’s legacy?

This extensive article feels like it is written by a son who was not recognized by
the Father and who, now that Dad is dead, will try to reduce him to a pathetic
failure, a dishonest puer, a traitor to Jung. All the while, Jung (the Good Father)
is elevated to the level of the One and Only God of Individuation Theory, right
about everything. Tacey has the honesty to warn us, ‘It may seem that the cri-
tique offered in this paper is the work of yet another Oedipus intent on murder-
ing the father, but my hope is it may serve as an attempt to understand the reason
why such a brilliant thinker became derailed’ (Tacey 2, p. 500). Sure enough!
Tacey, the long-suffering student, and later the colleague with whom Hillman
would not engage, wants to convince the reader that Hillman failed to individuate,
stole everything from Jung, had nothing original to say and ultimately died an
abject failure. Tacey contrasts Hillman’s lack of individuation to his own successful
maturation: Tacey, contrary to Hillman, had the courage to grow up, become
conscious of his complexes, go beyond imagination, and finally, individuated—
thanks to Jung and von Franz, whose theories are valid—he comes to the realization
that Hillman’s theories are not; in fact following Hillman for all these years was
the biggest mistake of his life. Hillman, he regrets, did not tell him how to live his
life, to fulfill ‘the developmental requirements of masculine consciousness’
(Tacey 2, p. 498). The reasoning here is that if Dad did not tell me how to live,
it means Dad is a failure.
It is Hillman who is made responsible for all the years when Tacey was being
lost in the realm of imagination which, for Tacey, is Neverland: abandonment
to Neverland is laid at Hillman’s doorstep.
2. A moral condemnation disguised as an argument

The author’s rage is presented as an argument, but it is not. Rather, it is a moral

condemnation of Hillman’s personality. I can testify myself that Hillman was no

0021-8774/2014/5904/519 © 2014, The Society of Analytical Psychology

Published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA.
DOI: 10.1111/1468-5922.12097
520 Ginette Paris

angel, and was wrong as often as any other, especially in judging individuals.
He would attack you when defending an idea; he was ambitious, and the busiest
person I ever met, which made him sound rude on the phone. OK. But when
Tacey uses facts from Dick Russell’s (2013) biography to condemn both the
man and his life’s work, I find it intellectually unacceptable. Tacey is very upset
by Hillman’s mother complex, by the fact that little Jimmy’s mother was
extremely ambitious for her son, that while in Europe he wrote to her regularly,
and that the father was rather an absent figure. Tacey concludes from this
clinical portrait that Hillman’s contribution to depth psychology is only the
expression of the pathology of a mother-bound son who never grew up.
Psychologism at its worst!
How about condemning Winston Churchill, one of the greatest wartime
leaders of the 20th century, an exceptionally gifted historian, a writer and a
Nobel Prize winner, because he was so famously attached to his mother, writing
to her often, and asking her advice on so many things? (Kersaudy 2000/2009).
How about discarding any value to Thoreau’s Walden Pond because he cried
when, as an adult, he was told that the time had come to leave the cocoon of the
family house? Thoreau’s unresolved mother complex never was cause to
discredit his work, even though his biographers mention that his mother did
his laundry and sent him gourmet dinners in a basket when he was writing
about the rough life (!) of living alone in nature, although it was only a walking
distance from mom’s house. (Gillyboeuf & Onfray 2012).
How about judging Jean-Paul Sartre’s immense philosophical contribution
because he lived with his mother in her Parisian apartment until well into his
sixties, when she died? She called him ‘my little Poulou’, raised him without a
father, and took care of all his physical needs. He never cooked a meal, never
did his laundry, and never even bought his own clothes. His mother took care
of all that (Janson 1974).
Maybe the most extreme example of how one can write a masterpiece out
of one’s conscious complexes is the case of Marcel Proust. There is no doubt
that Proust’s mother complex was way over the top, maybe the worst clinical
case of a mother-bound son in the history of literature (Tadié 1999). The
year 2013, the 100th anniversary of the first publication of Remembrance
of Things Past, saw many articles about his work. One is a computer analy-
sis of his vocabulary; it reveals that the three words that appear most often in
Proust are 1) Time, 2) Love, and 3) Mommy (not ‘mother’, but maman)
(Tadié 2013). Does that discredit the literary masterpiece? As for being a puer,
Proust is probably the champion. Let’s quote the British (Genette 1972)
humourous Monty Python contest, inviting British audiences to write the
shortest summary of Proust’s massive novel. The winning prize went to the
critic Gerard Genette who suggested: ‘Marcel finally grows up’, a four word
summary for the 3,000 page masterpiece (Tadié 2013). The thing is: Proust
was aware that he was mother-bound, aware that he would die a puer,
aware that the gold came from mining the complex.
The unmaking of a psychologist 521

Hillman, like Proust, knew about being mother-bound, knew the puer was a
strong component of his personality, as Dick Russell’s biography confirms. He
also knew that this was precisely the reason he should write in defence of the
fiery spirit of the puer archetype, leaving the analysis of the dark side of that
archetype to von Franz. Whomever is gifted with Hermes’ mercurial nature
can be grateful for Hillman’s defence of the spirit of youth and opportunity.
Hillman’s seeing through to his complexes is precisely what has value. But
Tacey is accusing Hillman of being only his complexes.
This kind of information about Hillman’s personality is interesting gossip;
after all, ‘Rumour’, also called ‘Gossip’, was a goddess in Rome, and gossip is
important. But relying only on biographical facts, or gossip, is never a good
basis to judge the work.

3. Imagination as dreamland

Tacey accuses Hillman of having seduced him with a theory of the imagination
that made him live in the dreamland of the puer (i.e. imagination). Tacey claims
to have been cured of his projections and complexes by leaving dreamland, and
returning to the true faith of Jungian orthodoxy. He then invites us to trust his
judgment of Hillman as a fake, a pathetic attention grabber who died with the
mentality of an uninitiated 12-year-old—(along with Robert Bly and Michael
Meade, who ‘were trying to do at 60 what they should have done at 12 or
13’(Tacey 2, p. 497)—after having betrayed both the feminine and the masculine.
The author also expresses his disappointment that Hillman has turned
against Christianity, against the image of Christ as metaphor for the Self, and
against monotheism. Hillman became a frivolous pagan, a lost soul who
worshiped dangerous divinities such as Dionysus.

4. The misreading of Hillman’s critique of the notions ofego, hero, and images

Before one writes a critique, I believe one should understand the work correctly.
In this case, I will take only two examples of Tacey’s misunderstanding of some
of Hillman’s basic ideas. The first one has to do with Hillman’s suggestion of a
return to Greece. There was never any suggestion to literally return to the old
gods of antiquity, but rather the idea that a contrast with our pre-Christian way
of doing psychology might reveal how much unconscious monotheistic Christian-
ity still defines our thinking about the psyche. For example, when one discovers
that the Greeks had goddesses as well as gods, one sees that Christianity elimi-
nated the goddesses. One sees that the Greeks did not literally believe in their
divinities (as Christians are asked to do) thus revealing that images don’t ask
for belief to be inspiring, spiritual, and transformative.
Another example of misreading is Tacey’s assumption that Hillman wants
to get rid of the ego and of the hero. Wrong: Hillman is asking for more
awareness of our images behind our imageless concept of ego. He suggested
522 Ginette Paris

we use the term hero rather than ego in order to examine what assumptions
about heroism we hold in our hearts and in our culture. Hillman’s point is that
our images of the hero/ego need regular updating and that we must ask
ourselves what kind of hero we honour. One can be a hero landing a plane
on the ocean, fighting fires, discovering a medication for autism, winning a
war like Churchill or like a brave foot soldier. One can be a hero of human
rights, of gender equality, of nature, like the heroic figures in Avatar. Instead
of the abstract notion of ego, we then have an album of images of heroism.
He never suggested to get rid of hero (the archetypal image for the concept
of ego) but to imagine it further.
Tacey writes that, ‘Hillman wanted us to observe and enjoy images as
aesthetic productions, and not integrate their meaning’ (Tacey 1, p. 470). This is
a misunderstanding: Hillman’s perspective probably offers the most penetrating
critique of Jungian orthodoxy. His point was that too often the translation of
every image into an interpretation (‘this woman in your dream is an anima
figure’) is contrary to Jung’s basic method of letting the image speak all of its
richness and specificity (which is precisely what Jung does in The Red Book
(2000/2009). Jung does not interpret images, he engages them. Of course, Hill-
man wants meaning, but meaning that comes through the careful appreciation
of the image and not through the conceptual jargon of the interpreter.

5. Siding with the wrong allies

Finally, a detail of little importance as compared with the rest, but nevertheless
revealing: the author quotes Odajnyk (1984) as if he were a theoretical enemy
of Hillman’s. Walter Odajnyk, who died in 2013, had long ago changed his
evaluation of Hillman: this became clear when he was interviewed for the
position of core faculty in the Mythological Studies Program at Pacifica
Graduate Institute, where I also happen to have been core faculty since 1995.
As part of the hiring committee, I was the one to ask Walter how he would feel
in a programme that values Hillman’s contribution, given his article from 1984
called ‘The psychologist as artist: the imaginal world of James Hillman’. His
answer was that he was young when he wrote the paper and needed an interest-
ing enemy to cut his teeth on. Odajnyk’s later appreciation of Hillman’s work is
evidenced by his teaching from an archetypal perspective in the Pacifica
programme. Walter Odajnyk appreciated the ideas about the puer in von Franz
(who was his analyst) but also in Hillman.
I do appreciate many ideas in David Tacey’s work and he is correct when he
points to contradictions in Hillman’s long writing career but let’s remember
a similar trajectory of contradictions in Jung’s thought over time. This arti-
cle makes me feel as if I am viewing a disappointing episode in an otherwise
admired and valued BBC series. Something is off-putting about this
particular episode of Tacey’s writing; it really does not fit with the tone
of the series.
The unmaking of a psychologist 523

References
Genette, G. (1972). ‘The All-England Summarise Proust Competition’. Monty Python
broadcast on November 16th, 1972.
Gillyboeuf, T. and Onfray, M. (2012). Henry David Thoreau: Le Celibataire de la
Nature. Paris: Fayard
Janson F. (1974). Sartre dans sa Vie: Biographie. Paris: Seuil.
Jung, C. G. (2000/2009). The Red Book: Liber Novus, ed. S. Shamdasani. New York &
London: W. W. Norton & Company.
Kersaudy, F. (2000/2009). Winston Churchill: Le Pouvoir de L’imagination. Paris:
Taillandier.
Odajnyk, V.W. (1984). ‘The psychologist as artist: the imaginal world of James Hillman’.
Quadrant: A Jungian Quarterly, 17, 1, 39–48.
Russell, D. (2013). The Life and Ideas of James Hillman, Vol. 1, The Making of a
Psychologist. New York: Helios Press.
Tadié, J.Y. (1999). Biographie de Marcel Proust. Paris: Folio.
——— (2013). ‘Les critiques de Proust’. In the magazine Lire, Hors Serie no. 16, p. 22.
Paris, France.