James Hollis

James Hollis is the American Jungian analyst whose dozens of books — written for the serious non-specialist rather than for the clinical literature — have become, in the English-speaking world, the principal pathway by which educated readers enter the Jungian lineage. Trained at the C.G. Jung Institute of Zurich and long the director of the Jung Society of Washington and the Houston Jung Center, Hollis writes in a register that is disciplined, contemplative, and aimed at the person who has come to the midlife question and no longer trusts the first-half-of-life contract.

His signature work, The Middle Passage: From Misery to Meaning in Midlife (1993), frames the midlife passage as the onset of individuation — the moment when the persona-constructed self fails and the larger personality the ego has been defending against begins to claim its hearing. His later volumes — Swamplands of the Soul, The Eden Project, Finding Meaning in the Second Half of Life, Living an Examined Life — elaborate the same Jungian movement across the concrete crises of adult life. His contribution to the Seba lineage is the teaching voice: the register in which Jung is made available to a lay reader without being watered down. See hollis-middle-passage-misery.

Relationships

• carl-jung
• hollis-middle-passage-misery
• midlife-transformation