Finding Meaning In Hard Times: A Conversation With Dr.James Hollis

Let's Talk with Che Marville

In today's episode, Che speaks to renowned Psychoanalyst Dr. James Hollis, a Jungian psychoanalyst and best-selling author of seventeen books. Dr. Hollis taught Humanities for twenty-six years in various colleges and universities before completely changing his life and becoming an analyst at the Jung Institute of Zurich in 1982. He is a licensed Jungian analyst in private practice in Washington, D.C. He served as Executive Director of the Jung Educational Center in Houston, Texas, for many years and was Executive Director of the Jung Society of Washington until 2019, and he now serves on the JSW Board of Directors. Che and Dr. Hollis discuss how to find meaning in the pandemic and the profound questions that this transformational time can offer us in finding understanding and uncovering our truest identity. We are meaning-seeking beings according to Dr. Hollis, much of our human distress is from disconnection and a misunderstanding of what is meaningful to us. He is fond of the Carl Jung quote "The least of things with a meaning is worth more in life than the greatest of things without it". In the conversation, they explore healing, dreaming and how to discover our truest nature. Sometimes we have to recover our childhood experiences and the adaptations that take us away from our essential selves and even lead to burnout. Dr. Hollis posits that sleep and dreams are essential to processing our daily life and experience. He believes that nature wastes nothing, dreams are complex and not always literal but an internal processing system that explores the inner psyche. The question we should ask ourselves, he says is what is life trying to express through me in this important and transformational period.

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