James Hillman

James Hillman (Atlantic City, 1926 – Thompson, Connecticut, 2011) was an American psychologist and Jungian analyst who led the development of archetypal psychology, a current that reworks Carl Gustav Jung's legacy in a more poetic direction and loosens the central role of the ego. He trained at the C. G. Jung Institute in Zurich, where he earned his analyst's diploma and a doctorate in 1959, and then directed its studies until 1969.

In 1970 he became editor of Spring Publications, a press devoted to archetypal psychology, and in 1975 he published Re-Visioning Psychology, his major work, which was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize. After helping to found the Dallas Institute for Humanities and Culture in 1978, he published The Soul's Code in 1997, which reached the New York Times bestseller list. His ideas were later popularized by writers such as Thomas Moore.

Hillman proposed a polytheistic psychology in which the psyche is populated by fantasies and myths, and the ego is only one of them. He criticized approaches that studied the mind with the methods of the natural sciences, arguing that they left out the soul. For him, the soul appears in imagination, myth and symptoms, and dreams tell us where we are rather than what to do. His influence reaches psychotherapy, cultural criticism and current thinking about vocation.