32 Facts About James Hillman

James Hillman founded a movement toward archetypal psychology and retired into private practice, writing and traveling to lecture, until his death at his home in Connecticut.

James Hillman was the third child of four born to Madeleine and Julian Hillman.

James Hillman was born in Breakers Hotel, one of the hotels his father owned.

James Hillman served in the US Navy Hospital Corps from 1944 to 1946, after which he attended the University of Paris, studying English Literature, and Trinity College, Dublin, graduating with a degree in mental and moral science in 1950.

James Hillman began his career as associate editor for the Irish literary review, Envoy.

James Hillman met there and became friends with the maverick young Swiss doctor and psychotherapist, Adolf Guggenbuhl-Craig.

In 1970, James Hillman became editor of Spring Publications, a publishing company devoted to advancing Archetypal Psychology as well as publishing books on mythology, philosophy and art.

James Hillman then helped co-found the Dallas Institute for Humanities and Culture in 1978.

James Hillman's published works, essays, manuscripts, research notes, and correspondence reside at OPUS Archives and Research Center, located on the campuses of Pacifica Graduate Institute in Carpinteria, California.

James Hillman was married three times, lastly to Margot McLean-James Hillman, who survived him.

James Hillman died at his home in Thompson, Connecticut, in 2011, from bone cancer.

James Hillman's influences include Friedrich Nietzsche, Martin Heidegger, Henry Corbin, John Keats, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Petrarch, and Paracelsus, who share a common concern for psyche.

James Hillman in turn influenced a number of younger Jungian analysts and colleagues, among the most well known being the popular author Thomas Moore and Jungian analyst Stanton Marlan.

Accordingly, James Hillman's work has been an attempt to restore psyche to what he believes to be "its proper place" in psychology.

James Hillman sees the soul at work in imagination, fantasy, myth and metaphor.

James Hillman sees soul revealed in psychopathology, in the symptoms of psychological disorders.

James Hillman equates the psyche with the soul and seeks to set out a psychology based without shame in art and culture.

James Hillman stresses the importance of psychopathology to the human experience and replaces a medical understanding with a poetic one.

Therefore, James Hillman is against the traditional interpretive methods of dream analysis.

For example, James Hillman discusses a patient's dream about a huge black snake.

James Hillman argues against the "nature and nurture" explanations of individual growth, suggesting a third kind of energy, the individual soul which is responsible for much of individual character, aspiration and achievement.

James Hillman argues against other environmental and external factors as being the sole determinants of individual growth, including the parental fallacy, dominant in psychoanalysis, whereby our parents are seen as crucial in determining who we are by supplying us with genetic material, conditioning, and behavioral patterns.

James Hillman suggests a reappraisal for each individual of their own childhood and present life to try to find their particular calling, the seed of their own acorn.

James Hillman has written that he is to help precipitate a re-souling of the world in the space between rationality and psychology.

James Hillman's arguments are considered to be in line with the puer aeternus or eternal youth whose brief burning existence could be seen in the work of romantic poets like Keats and Byron and in recently deceased young rock stars like Jeff Buckley or Kurt Cobain.

James Hillman rejects causality as a defining framework and suggests in its place a shifting form of fate whereby events are not inevitable but bound to be expressed in some way dependent on the character of the soul of the individual.

James Hillman talked about the bad seed using Hitler, Charles Manson and other serial killers as examples.

From a classical Jungian perspective, James Hillman's Archetypal Psychology is a contrarian school of thought, since he has applied Occam's razor to a few of what he refers to as unnecessary theoretical encumbrances of Jungian psychology.

Yet, Walter Odajnyk argues that James Hillman should have called his school "imaginal" psychology, since it is really based on James Hillman's understanding of the imagination.

Wolfgang Giegerich argues that James Hillman's work exists in a "bubble of irreality" outside time.

James Hillman considers his work as an expression of the puer aeternus, the eternal youth of fairy tale who lives in an eternal dream-state, resistant to growing up.

Against this, James Hillman has argued that the puer is not under the sway of a mother complex but that it is best seen in relation to the senex or father archetype.