The Jungian Masters Series – James Hillman

JAMES HILLMAN (b. 1926 – d. 2011) was a pioneering psychologist whose imaginative psychology has entered cultural history, affecting lives and minds in a wide range of fields. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Zurich in 1959, where he studied with Carl Jung and held the first directorship at the C. G. Jung Institute for 10 years. In 1970, he became the editor of Spring Journal, a publication dedicated to psychology, philosophy, mythology, arts, humanities, and cultural issues and to the advancement of Arche- typal Psychology. He later co-founded The Dallas Institute of Humanities and Culture in Dallas, Texas. The influences shaping the core of Hillman’s work were not limited to depth psychology. His ideas had firm grounding in the classical Greek tradition and were also deeply influenced by Renaissance thought and Romanticism, encompassing the contributions of psychologists, philosophers, poets, and alchemists. Hillman described his own line of thought as part of a long lineage that ran from Heraclitus and Plato through to Freud and Carl Jung. Throughout his books and articles, Hillman criticized the literal, materialistic, and reductive perspectives that often dominate the psychological and cultural arenas. He insisted on giving psyche its rightful place in psychology and culture, fundamentally through imagination, metaphor, art, and myth.