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We should be grateful to David Tacey for opening up a topic that is crucial for the development of Jungian ideas and which we might perhaps describe as the problem of the imitatio Jungi. Tacey, in characteristically robust and straightforward style, has chosen to address these questions in what is an unabashedly personal and (auto) biographical paper. Although this is a perfectly legitimate strategy, given Jung's emphasis upon the importance of the ‘personal equation’, it is not this aspect of the paper that I wish to comment upon.
There is of course no such thing as a view from nowhere. As Jung repeatedly observed, objectivity in psychology is a chimera. What we are getting here is Tacey's reading of Hillman, and behind and within that, inevitably, Tacey's reading of Jung.
Rather like the unhappy diner who complains: ‘What dreadful food! And such small portions!’ Tacey's claim is, on the one hand, that Hillman stole Jung's ideas, and on the other that he got them all wrong.
This dispute takes place in the shadow of what Harold Bloom has called ‘the anxiety of influence’ (Bloom 1997, 2003). For Bloom, all reading is misreading. If so, the important question then becomes not whether we misread Jung but how we misread him. Those who attempt to transmit Jung ‘as he is’ are doomed to what Bloom calls a weak misreading. Such a reading can only ever function as a pallid reconstruction or bloodless facsimile whose sole virtue—simplicity—will inevitably betray the ambiguity and complexity of the original. An example might be Jacobi's The Psychology of C.G. Jung (1973). At best, such a work offers us a finger pointing us back toward its original. Bloom implies that what we should instead be aiming for is a strong misreading, a reading that re-visions the original by striving to ‘see again, so as to esteem and estimate differently’ (Bloom 2003, p. 4, italics in original). However, any reading of this sort ‘must insist upon its own exclusiveness and