William James occupies a foundational position in the depth-psychology corpus, appearing not as a marginal precursor but as a substantive intellectual force whose work on religious experience, the stream of consciousness, and the somatic basis of emotion shaped the entire field. The corpus registers James along several distinct axes. First, his Varieties of Religious Experience (1902) is treated as a generative text for understanding spiritual transformation, most prominently in the literature on Alcoholics Anonymous, where Wilson’s reading of James is shown to have furnished the conceptual architecture for the Twelve Steps — deflation, conversion, the ‘gift from the blue.’ Second, James figures as the counterpoint to Freudian reductionism: where Freud dismissed religious experience as illusion, James granted it empirical legitimacy and psychological efficacy. Third, the corpus tracks the personal intellectual bond between James and Jung, cemented at the 1909 Clark University conference, where Jung reportedly found in James both a model and a kindred spirit. Fourth, James’s somatic theory of emotion — that bodily changes constitute rather than merely express the emotion — appears as a pivot point in neuroscientific discussions by Damasio and LeDoux. Tension runs throughout: James’s pragmatism and pluralism made him an ally of depth psychology without making him a depth psychologist, and the corpus negotiates this distinction with varying degrees of precision.