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Prisms: Reflections on the Journey We Call Life summarizes a lifetime of observing, engaging, and exploring why we are here, in service to what, and what life asks of us. These eleven essays, all written recently, examine how we understand ourselves, and often we have to reframe that understanding, the nature and gift of comedy, the imagination, desire, as well as our encounters with narcissism, and aging.
James Hollis, Ph.D., a Jungian Analyst in Washington, D.C., explores the roadblocks we encounter and our on-going challenge to live our brief journey with as much courage, insight, and resolve as we can bring to the table.
Table of Contents:
1. Archetypal Presences: The Large Forms Rolling Beneath The Surface of Our Lives
2. Reframing Our Sense of Self and World in Plague Times
3. Who Heals the Healer?-The Profile of the Wounded Healer
4. On the Psychology of Comedy: Is the Joke on Us?
5. Permutations of Desire
6. All Is Fire: The Imagination as Aperture into Psyche
7. Narcissus's Forlorn Hope: The Fading Image in a Pool Too Deep
8. Theogonys and Therapies: A Jungian Perspective on Evil
9. The Rag and Bone Shop of the Heart: Yeats's Passage from Puer Aeternus to Wise Old Man
10. The Necessity of Personal Myth
11. For Every Tatter in Our Mortal Dress: Stayin' Alive at the Front Of the Mortal Parade
Afterword
Bibliography
James Hollis
James Hollis, PhD, is a licensed Jungian analyst in private practice in Washington, DC. Originally from Springfield, Illinois, he graduated from Manchester University in 1962 and Drew University in 1967. He taught humanities for 26 years in various colleges and universities before retraining as a Jungian analyst at the Jung Institute of Zürich, Switzerland (1977-82). He served as executive director of the Jung Educational Center in Houston, Texas, for many years. He was executive director of the Jung Society of Washington until 2019, and now serves on its board of directors. He is a retired senior training analyst for the Inter-Regional Society of Jungian Analysts, was first director of training of the Philadelphia Jung Institute, and is vice-president emeritus of the Philemon Foundation. Additionally, he was a professor of Jungian Studies for Saybrook University of San Francisco.
He has written 20 books, available in translations around the world, including Living Between Worlds, What Matters Most, and Living an Examined Life. He lives with his wife, Jill, an artist and retired therapist, near Washington, DC. Together they have three living children and eight grandchildren.
More by James Hollis
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