A LIFE OF DREAMS
In this first film, as throughout the series, unprecedented access to Jung’s family house near Zurich, with his library and consulting room, and to his famous retreat, the lakeside Tower at Bollingen on Lake Zurich, have enabled the producers to refer Jung’s biographical story with exactly appropriate visual references.
In addition, a major English-language interview with Jung, recorded in 1956 and never previously transmitted on television, forms a substantial element within the series; besides various previously undiscovered ‘home-movies’ shot during Jung’s travels in Africa and elsewhere.
INHERITANCE OF DREAMS
This film prominently features the culture, religion and mythology of the North American Indian Pueblo and Navajo tribes which Jung visited. In Taos, Jung was immensely impressed by a Pueblo elder named Mountain Lake, whose grand-daughter is interviewed – as is Jung’s grandson, who followed his grandfather’s journey to New Mexico sixty years later in 1963.
It became Jung’s conviction that a culture which has lost touch with its abiding mythology – a fate which he believed had befallen ‘technological man’ – is a culture in danger. Among the Pueblo Indians, “their religion is their culture”.
Finally, Jung believed that the power of symbols in living mythology had a curative power – and comparison is made on film between a Navajo medicine man’s healing ceremony and the healing method of analysis where the symbols come in patients’ dreams.
A WORLD OF DREAMS
In the last film of the series, viewers are invited to see how Jungian psychology provides a framework for understanding themselves and the contradictions of life a little better, for detecting the meaning of their own dreams, for seeing the importance and creativity of emotional difficulties, for gaining a new understanding of the dynamics and problems of relationships and for realising the basic human need for play.
Jung always insisted he was a doctor first and foremost. For him, what proved the value of an idea was that it cured a patient. His sense of the reality of the psyche, which inexorably changed human perception in this century, began with his own inner life.
