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In this article Hillman, in a dialogue with Kugler, presents his reactions to Goodheart's paper, ‘C. G’ Jung's first “patient”’, published in this Journal in January, 1984.
While Hillman reacts with intense indignation, indeed with rage, Kugler takes a more rational, even-handed part, attempting to clarify issues and to impose some order on the discussion. The differing approaches of the two discussants exemplify a problem which continues to bedevil this debate: polarisation, splitting, and the tendency to be driven to extremes. Hillman asserts that Goodheart ‘denies the primacy of Jung's ideas' (p. 143). Perhaps it would help us all, on both sides of this Jungian divide, to remember Jung's concept of enantiodromia, and the consequences when we allow ourselves to be swung too far in one direction.
Hillman's emotional reaction is only too understandable in the light of the threat to his belief-system, his ‘faith’ in the autonomous psyche (p. 146). His idealisation of Jung's concept of the autonomous psyche, let alone of the entity in itself, is such that he cannot bear to think of it as having originated anywhere. Hence his reaction to Goodheart's suggestion that the concept evolved for Jung, partly as a defensive measure, out of his relationship with his cousin, Hélène Preiswerk. Hillman searches for certainties, for absolutes—for ‘primary texts’ which are immune from being considered as ‘derivative communications’; querying the existence of ‘primary texts’