We've Had a Hundred Years of Psychotherapy: And the World's Getting Worse

James Hillman · Michael Ventura

Mar 2009 · Harper Collins

About this ebook

The #1 New York Times–bestselling author of The Soul’s Code engages in a wide-ranging dialogue that “bursts with vigorous ideas, tangents, and humor” (Library Journal).

This furious, trenchant, and audacious series of interrelated dialogues and letters takes a searing look at not only the legacy of psychotherapy, but also practically every aspect of contemporary living—from sexuality to politics, media, the environment, and life in the city. James Hillman—controversial renegade Jungian psychologist and the man Robert Bly called “the most lively and original psychologist we’ve had in America since William James”—joins with Michael Ventura, cutting-edge columnist for the L.A. Weekly, to shatter many of our current beliefs about our lives, the psyche, and society. Unrestrained, freewheeling, and brilliant, these two intellectual wild men take chances, break rules, and run red lights to strike at the very core of our shibboleths and perceptions.

“All sorts of fresh ideas.” —Los Angeles Times

“Thought-provoking, fun, and not quite like anything else.” —Library Journal

“Range[s] energetically over such subjects as psychotherapy, politics and aesthetics, method acting and postwar ideas of the self, child abuse and inner child theory, romantic love, and America’s tradition of anti-intellectualism . . . Seductive precisely because if offers two live voices actively engaged.” —The Washington Post

About the author

James Hillman was born in Atlantic City, New Jersey on April 12, 1926. He attended the School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University for two years before joining the Navy's Hospital Corps in 1944. He studied English literature in Paris at the Sorbonne and graduated with a degree in mental and moral science from Trinity College in Dublin. In 1953, he moved to Zurich and enrolled at the C. G. Jung Institute. In 1959, he became the director of studies at the institute and stayed in that position for the next 10 years. He wrote over 20 books including Suicide and the Soul, Re-Visioning Psychology, and The Soul's Code. He died due to complications of bone cancer on October 27, 2011 at the age of 85.