Some talks, pulled out of the archives, are very eloquent and still relevant, like the interview with psychologist and psychotherapist Carl Jung. The interviewer asks if he, Carl Jung, remembered the occasion when he first felt consciousness of his individual self. Jung says that it was in his 11th year, “On my way to school, I stepped out of a mist…it had been as though I had been in a mist, walking in a mist…and I knew I am. I am what I am and then I thought what had I been before and then I found I had been in a mist…not able to differentiate myself from things. I was just one thing among many things.” Jung refutes the belief that this awareness came from any event that explains or caused this sudden coming of consciousness.
Jung says his parents, “…belonged to the later part of the middle ages. My father was a parson and you can imagine how people were in the 70s of the past century. They had convictions in which people had lived since 1800 years. My father was very tolerant and understanding. Of course one is always more intimate with the mother but in terms of personal feelings I had a better relationship with my father who was predictable…I knew my father was very fallible…perhaps when I was 11 or 12 years old. It was hanging together with the fact that I knew I was and from then on I knew my father was different. I realized I had fear of my mother, not during the day but at night…”
Jung turns the kaleidoscope on his childhood, “In the beginning I was very happy going to school. I found companions because I had been very lonely…my sister was born very much later when I was nine years old…but soon…I was far ahead in class and started getting bored… Originally I wanted to be an archaeologist…I hadn’t the money. My second love was for zoology. I began my study in the natural sciences. But then I soon saw that the career that was before me would make a school master of me…that did not suit my expectations. ..Teaching was not just what I was looking for. My grandfather had been a doctor…the idea of doing something useful with human beings appealed to me…”
Jung had problems with some teachers who did not believe he had the capacity to write a decent thesis. Once his teacher thought he had copied a paper and called him a liar. “I hated that fellow…that was the only man I could have killed…I was very strong and big…I would have been capable of violence, I was a bit afraid of it (of my capacity for violence) so I tried to avoid such situations…”
Asked why he chose psychology, Jung says, “I saw one great chance to unite certain contrasting things in myself. Besides natural science, I had also studied history of philosophy. Suddenly two streams were joining…I finished my studies in 1900 and I met Freud in 1907…” Jung says Freud had no philosophical education, “…I was studying Kant and seeped in it…we had temperamental difference…that led me into later investigation of psychological types…I could not agree with his purely personal approach and disregard to human history…I do not believe man will ever deviate from his original being…for instance if you do not believe in a personal redeemer as was the case with Hitler or hero worship as in Russia, then it is an idea, a symbolic idea… I did believe in God…now? Now I do not need to believe, I know.”
He asserts his knowledge when he says, “Death is psychologically as important as birth but we are not quite certain about the design…” What after death or is there something after death? Jung says, “…there are peculiar faculties of the psyche which are not confined to space and time…only ignorance denies these…When the psyche is not under obligation to live in space and time alone then to that extent we have to accept a practical continuation of life beyond time and space…”
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