James Hollis

Hollis was born in Springfield, Illinois. He graduated from Manchester College (now Manchester University) in Indiana in 1962 with a Bachelor of Arts (BA) degree, and went on to obtain a PhD from Drew University in Madison, New Jersey in 1967. For the first 26 years of his career, he taught Humanities at various colleges and universities, but between 1977 and 1982 he also retrained as a Jungian psychoanalyst at the C. G. Jung Institute, Zürich in Switzerland.

Depth psychology understands that the goal of life is not happiness, which is only transiently possible anyhow, but meaning, which abides.

– Living Between Worlds.

He was Executive Director of the Jung Educational Center in Houston, Texas for many years and Executive Director of the Jung Society of Washington (JSW) until 2019. He also worked as a Senior Training Analyst for the Inter-Regional Society of Jungian Analysts, as a Director of Training of the Philadelphia Jung Institute, and is Vice-President Emeritus of the Philemon Foundation.

Hollis has written 17 books since 1993, and his work has been translated into many languages.

He still runs a private practice as a Jungian psychoanalyst, and he lives and works in Washington, D.C. with his wife Jill, an artist and retired therapist, with whom he has three living children and several grand-children.