Dr. James N. Butcher was born in West Virginia. He enlisted in the army when he was 17 years old and served in the airborne infantry for three years, including a one-year tour in Korea during the Korean War. After military service, he attended Guilford College, graduating in 1960 with a BA in psychology. James received an MA in experimental psychology in 1962 and a PhD in clinical psychology from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He was awarded Doctor Honoris Causa from the Free University of Brussels, Belgium, in 1990 and an honorary doctorate from the University of Florence, Florence, Italy, in 2005. Dr. Butcher is currently professor emeritus in the Department of Psychology at the University of Minnesota. He was associate director and director of the clinical psychology program at the university for nineteen years! He was a member of the University of Minnesota Press’s MMPI Consultative Committee, which undertook the revision of the MMPI in 1989. James was formerly the editor of Psychological Assessment, a journal of the American Psychological Association, and serves as consulting editor or reviewer for numerous other journals in psychiatry and psychology.

He was actively involved in developing and organizing disaster response programs for dealing with human problems following airline disasters during his career. Dr. Butcher organized a model crisis intervention disaster response for the Minneapolis-St. Paul Airport and organised and supervised the psychological services offered following two major airline disasters: Aloha Airlines on Maui and Northwest Flight 255 in Detroit, Michigan. Dr. James Butcher is also a fellow of the Society for Personality Assessment. He has published sixty books and more than two hundred and fifty articles in the fields of personality assessment, abnormal psychology, and cross-cultural psychology.