I am very sad to say that Ladson Hinton died late last week with his family in Davis, CA. He was a giant of a person in Seattle, and beyond the psychoanalytic community. Below is a brief accounting of his professional accomplishments. It does not capture the spirit of the man or how so many of us benefited from living in the same era and experiencing the many dimensions of Ladson’s expansive mind, his sense of humor, his Dionysian love of life, his horror of our world’s soul-lessness, and most of all, his humanity. An era has ended leaving a hole in all of us.
Ladson Hinton, MA, MD, was a psychiatrist and psychoanalyst who lived, practiced and taught in Seattle, WA for many years. He trained as a psychiatrist at Stanford University Medical Center and completed his analytic training at the C. G. Jung Institute of San Francisco in 1975. He maintained a clinical practice in Palo Alto for many years, and was on the faculty of the C. G. Jung Institute of San Franscisco, the Pacific Graduate School of Psychology, and the Stanford clinical faculty. After moving to Seattle in 1991, he became the first president of the North Pacific Institute for Analytical Psychology, in Seattle. He is a founding member of the New School for Analytical Psychology. In 2009, he received an Award for the Distinguished Contributions to Psychoanalytic Education, and was nominated for a Gradiva award in 2016 for his Article, “Temporality and the Torment of Time.” He is the co-editor of Temporality and Shame: Perspectives from Psychoanalysis and Philosophy, with Hessel Willimsen, winner of the American Board & Academy of Psychology and Psychoanalysis Book Prize for best edited book. In 2021, Hinton and Hessel co-edited another collection of essays entitled Shame, Temporality and Social Change Ominous Transitions, receiving the International Association for Jungian Studies (IAJS) best edited book award, 2021. Hinton’s final book will be published in 2026 (Hessel, Ed.) entitled Selected Essays of Ladson Hinton: Existentialism on the psychoanalytic realm, Routledge.