L.P. In your book The Myth of Analysis you wrote that Freud behaved like the founder of a religion, or a sect. You are a Jungian who has stepped out from Jungian orthodoxy and founded a new school, archetypal psychology. Don't you think you are in the same myth in which Freud was, the myth of the founder?
j.H. No. Not a founder in that sense. My way of working is to take something already in place and twisting it, turning it, give it your own turn. They say about Bach, "He left no form as he found it," and what I want to do with Jung or with Freud is to leave no form as I found it. Therefore, people say I'm twisting Jung—I think that the spirit in Jung's work gets another shape each time you pick it up, and different people pick it up differently. I picked it up my way. Some have never put their own hands on it, really . . . they have played it back like a gramophone. Without Jung I would not have been able to think any of the things I thought. Pupils make a founder. Pupils take you literally and turn you into a founder. They take your thought and write theses about it, explanations, interpretations, and they want to practice it according to rules; they read what you said and they say, "That is what he said and I am going to do it that way"; and they stop twisting it!
L.P. So you are neither a pupil of Jung nor a heretic; nor are you an individual thinker since you say you are simply "twisting" Jung or Freud. What then do you consider yourself to be?
J.H. This twisting may be the way to be both a Jungian and an individual thinker. At least that's how I imagine what I do. I am blamed for not being independent enough. . . .Why do I hide behind the mask of being a Jungian, why don't I call my school what it is, why do I always say, "I'm just working further from Jung's thought"? Either you start being one of them or get out! But I don't think that's the way to do it. My tradition is more Jewish: you stay in the schul and you write a commentary below the line, you just go on commenting, and you add a new midrash on the text, and your originality is in the midrash. If you stay in the depth psychological tradition, then you stay as an Adlerian, a Jungian, Freudian, and you go on doing what they did, departing from, breaking with, commenting on, reacting to each other. They did their original thinking within the same terrain, that's the way I want to do it. And, this is very important—they did not integrate each other (though Jung claims he does with his type theory). They were not eclectics: taking a bit of this and a bit of that, like supermarket shopping or something. Eclecticism is the devil. It's better to be a Jesuit, very, very strict for a long time and think your way through. Descartes, you know, went to a Jesuit school, and he thought his way out, at least partly.
L.P. Your midrash fantasy doesn't feel convincing. For instance, I didn't come here because you are a commentator. You have taken new steps, opened new perspectives that are original enough for me to want to do this interview, and there is a public, readers, who want to hear what you have to say. You are quoted, invited to speak. You have a following and pupils: they buy your books, they travel to hear your lectures, they come to your seminars and to your practice, and they write about archetypal psychology— like this interview.
j.H. Well, there is another fantasy besides the commentator one which was, anyway, in regard to Jung and Freud, how I view myself relative to the traditional schools. But as to followers, as you call them, the fantasy is more that I feel myself a member of a body, a community ... a kinship with people who work with similar ideas or at least are trying to re-vision things. It can be therapy, it can be philosophy, it can be religion. It can be in criticism or classics and mythology. These people are not followers, not "my students"—they're often way ahead of me. Some are even older than me. And I doubt if psychology is their main focus. They are friends . . . there is nothing else to call them. Friends. We are all sort of in love with each other. There's an emotion, an intensity, even though we are spread all over everywhere. It's an active demonstration of what Alfred Adler called Gemeinschaftsgefiihl, fellow feeling.