Personal Accountability in Chaos - AN INTERVIEW WITH JAMES HOLLIS, PhD

“Central to the agenda of the second half of life is the recovery of permission to really own your own life: to truly feel what you feel, desire what you desire, and to pursue whatever your soul wants you to pursue. For most people, that permission is still very conditional and very remote, and you can’t get it from someone else. It takes a realization: I have to seize my life because it is short—and I’m here to place my energies where my values really are. The current crisis presents an enormous opportunity for encountering oneself and granting that permission—if we can bear it.”

- STEPHEN KIESLING

After 26 years as a humanities professor, James Hollis, PhD, entered training at the Jung Institute in Zurich in 1977 and became an analyst and then a professor of Jungian studies. Now 80, he continues his private practice and his teaching. Along the way, he has written 16 books that have been translated into 19 languages. Stephen Kiesling spoke with him about his latest book, Living Between Worlds: Finding Personal Resilience in Changing Times, via Zoom as he sheltered in place at his home in Washington, D.C.

You’ve written many well-received books. Where do they come from?

My books have come out of my work with clients. Sometimes, even my own dreams will speak about those individuals, and I have to ask myself, “What was going on there? How do I understand that? How do I approach that?”

For example, when I wrote my first book, The Middle Passage, I was freshly back from training in Switzerland and was seeing people with different issues and different histories. But one thing they all had in common was that their understanding of self and world had played out. It was no longer effective—if it ever was. Their roadmap was no longer applicable to the territory in which they found themselves, and I thought, that’s what happens during a passage: Something has to die, and something else wants to emerge. You’re caught in that difficult in-between.

Now, years later, that theme has come back.