Correspondence

Dear Sir,

Hillman's letter in the last issue of the Journal raises a number of reflections which may be of interest.

In 1911 Jung wrote Chapter Two in The psychology of the unconscious. There he differentiated directed from undirected thinking. Much of his later work was, as Hillman correctly implies, an investigation of the latter and pervades his writing. Now Hillman has discovered a number of ‘Imagist’ writers who know about it too—somewhat belatedly it seems. Among them is T. S. Eliot, who writes lucidly on the matter. I would only like to add this: it may be of interest that Eliot was a close friend of Herbert Read. Did Eliot derive his formulations from what he heard about Jung in private discussion? That is a matter which we may hope that Hillman's interest will illuminate.

Then there is the subject of the footnote in Psychology and alchemy. It will be recollected that this was the first volume of the Collected works to be published in English, and so it was in this issue that editorial policy was being defined. One of the considerations was Jung's view about the text and his attitude to possible editorial revisions. I brought forward the footnote to test Jung's position, for I knew he was concerned about the editor's altering the Swiss edition. There was besides the official editors a powerful team in New York reputed to be longing to lay their hands on the Collected works. Read in particular had no love for American methods of editing, and I recollect him once wryly remarking that one of his carefully constructed metaphors had been ‘corrected’. Jung's refusal to have anything altered, except at his instigation, was well tested on this and on other occasions and he understood my approaches in this light. His position was wise and his firmness contributed to the edition becoming definitive. Only in a very few instances (the article on synchronicity for instance) were any alterations made, though there were occasional energetic efforts on the part of R. F. C. Hul