A Response to David Tacey's ‘James Hillman: The Unmaking of a Psychologist’

There are major problems with David Tacey's long, complex tirade regarding Hillman's life and work. Here are my thoughts:

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 critique offered in this paper is the work of yet another Oedipus intent on murdering 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.

A Moral Condemnation Disguised as an Argument

The author's rage is presented as an