Here’s an extra­or­di­nary film of the great Swiss psy­chol­o­gist Carl Gus­tav Jung speak­ing at length about some of his key con­tri­bu­tions to psy­chol­o­gy. Jung on Film (above) is a 77-minute col­lec­tion of high­lights from four one-hour inter­views Jung gave to psy­chol­o­gist Richard I. Evans of the Uni­ver­si­ty of Hous­ton in August of 1957. In “Sit­ting Across From Carl Jung,” an arti­cle for the Asso­ci­a­tion of Psy­cho­log­i­cal Sci­ence, Evans explains how the inter­views came about:

I was teach­ing a grad­u­ate sem­i­nar called Approach­es to Per­son­al­i­ty when it seemed like an inter­est­ing idea to have the grad­u­ate stu­dents in the sem­i­nar role-play in front of the class and pre­tend to inter­view the var­i­ous per­son­al­i­ty the­o­rists that I was pre­sent­ing. Carl Jung was one of those the­o­rists, and dur­ing the sem­i­nar, I learned that he had nev­er agreed to an exten­sive record­ed inter­view except for a brief exchange on the BBC. I wrote a let­ter to Dr. Jung to request an inter­view because I believed that filmed inter­views of emi­nent psy­chol­o­gists would encour­age stu­dents to read their work.

Jung, who was 82 years old at the time, agreed to the inter­view and set aside an hour a day over a four-day peri­od. Evans met with Jung in Zurich at the Fed­er­al Insti­tute of Tech­nol­o­gy, or ETH. In the excerpts above, Jung talks about his ear­ly asso­ci­a­tion with Sig­mund Freud and how he came to dis­agree with Freud’s fix­a­tion on the sex dri­ve as the pri­ma­ry influ­ence in men­tal life. He talks about his the­o­ry of per­son­al­i­ty types and about uni­ver­sal arche­types, includ­ing the ani­ma and ani­mus. He talks about the inter­play between instinct and envi­ron­ment, and about dreams as man­i­fes­ta­tions of the uncon­scious. At one point he stress­es the urgency of under­stand­ing psy­chol­o­gy in a world where man-made threats, like the threat of the hydro­gen bomb, are greater than those posed by nat­ur­al dis­as­ters. “The world hangs on a thin thread,” says Jung, “and that is the psy­che of man.”

Note: You can down­load sem­i­nal works by Carl Jung as free audio­books if you sign up for a 30-Day Free Tri­al with Audible.com. Find more infor­ma­tion on that pro­gram here.

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Relat­ed con­tent:

Carl Gus­tav Jung Pon­ders Death

Face to Face with Carl Jung: ‘Man Can­not Stand a Mean­ing­less Life’

Sig­mund Freud Speaks: The Only Known Record­ing of His Voice, 1938

Here at Open Cul­ture, we can’t resist the RSA Ani­mate video series, cre­at­ed by the Roy­al Soci­ety for the Encour­age­ment of Arts, Man­u­fac­tures, and Com­merce. Its twitchy but super­nat­u­ral­ly pre­cise hand has illus­trat­ed talks by Daniel Pink, Sir Ken Robin­son, Bar­bara Ehren­re­ich, Slavoj Žižek, Steven Pinker, and Dan Ariely. This newest RSA Ani­mate pro­duc­tion may pro­vide you an intro­duc­tion not just to a ris­ing thinker, but to a new con­cept. “Writer on the art of liv­ing” Roman Krz­nar­ic, accom­pa­nied by the quick draw­ing of Andrew Park, wants to tell you about some­thing called “out­ro­spec­tion.” Con­sid­er it less an entire­ly new prac­tice than a fresh way of think­ing about how to devel­op an old human capac­i­ty: empa­thy. He finds empa­thy not a “nice, soft, fluffy social con­cept,” but some­thing pow­er­ful and poten­tial­ly dan­ger­ous, a fuel for rev­o­lu­tions of all kinds.

For an exam­ple of empa­thy that looks to him pro­to-out­ro­spec­tive, Krz­nar­ic cites George Orwell, author of 1984 and Ani­mal Farm. His plunge into the world of urban pover­ty — the deep­est kind of first-hand research — to write Down and Out in Paris and Lon­don, com­ing to know, befriend, and work along­side the down-and-out them­selves, makes him “one of the great empath­ic adven­tur­ers of the 20th cen­tu­ry.” This line of thought con­nects Orwell’s active social curios­i­ty to empa­thy as a poten­tial­ly col­lec­tive force; we even hear a call for new, empa­thy-ori­ent­ed social insti­tu­tions like a “human library” with actu­al peo­ple avail­able for illu­mi­nat­ing con­ver­sa­tions. Empa­thy, to Krz­nar­ic’s mind, will only become more impor­tant in the 21st cen­tu­ry, and those of us who can mas­ter out­ro­spec­tion, the skill of “dis­cov­er­ing who we are by step­ping out­side our­selves and explor­ing the lives of oth­er peo­ple and cul­tures,” will fare best there. If after the video you still find your­self con­fused about how best to engage in out­ro­spec­tion, don’t wor­ry: Krz­nar­ic writes an entire blog on the sub­ject.

via Sci­ence Dump

Col­in Mar­shall hosts and pro­duces Note­book on Cities and Cul­ture. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.