William Willeford (1929-2015)

William Willeford was born on 28 October, 1929 in Detroit, Michigan, and passed away in Atlanta, Georgia, on 19 November, 2015. He participated in the larger life of the world through continuing unstrained attention to and interest in what the moment was giving. On his father's shoulders in Detroit one day, he heard his father say ‘Look and remember’, and he saw Franklin Delano Roosevelt addressing the crowd. Later, he and his parents moved to Tulare, a small California town he loved for its sparsity, and which he looked back to, writing to a high school friend years later. Recordings, friends, bands drew him into live music at Berkeley as he was studying anthropology and English literature; he played trombone, became friends with Dave Brubeck, entered the blues, sought mother, felt abandonment. He fell into the whirling of Kenneth Burke's philosophical questioning, later wrote The Fool and His Scepter: A Study in Clowns and Jesters and Their Audience, and much later studied Hegel's dialectic.

He lived in London; taught in Lahore, Pakistan; experienced analysis in Zürich with Jolande Jacobi, with Marie-Louise von Franz as supervisor; and then experienced analysis with Heinrich Fierz, medical director of Ludwig Binswanger's Sanatorium Bellevue in Kreuzlingen, where he joined Fierz in working. Heinrich had a twin brother, Markus, an atomic physicist conferring with Wolfgang Pauli and Jung on synchronicity in physics and psychology; the twin brothers at one point got together and decided not to be twins. Willeford's last article in JAP (, 59, 421-28) shows his interest in quantum physics late in life, while he nevertheless maintained the primacy of feeling he had begun to describe much earlier in three JAP articles (, 20, 18-40; , 21, 115-133; , 22, 1-16), aware all along that psychology was no twin to physics.

Having earned a doctorate at the University of Zürich, he became Professor at the University of Washington in Seattle, teaching English and comparative literature