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This book is the second edition of a volume first published in 1964 under the title Conversations with Carl Jung. It contains both the edited version and the original transcript of four one-hour interviews filmed at the Federal Institute of Technology in Zürich in August 1957 when Jung was 82. The interviewer is Richard I. Evans, Professor of Psychology at the University of Houston.
Professor Evans explains what led him to approach Jung to ask him to give these filmed interviews. Houston University had received a grant from the Fund for the Advancement of Education to explore new dimensions in university teaching. For some years Evans and other professors had been aware of the tendency among large numbers of students to become less interested in reading the original writings of great thinkers, and more interested in reading ‘predigested’ secondary sources which often did not do justice to the intentions of the original authors. For example, it very much surprised Evans to discover that many advanced psychology students had never actually ready any of Freud's work, but instead had read about him through the words of other writers.
Evans and his colleagues decided that there was a need to find a way to stimulate students to look directly at the original writings of the great innovators. The filmed lecture was considered, but discarded; in Evans's view the intellectual, in lecturing as in writing, tends to become somewhat pedantic, thereby losing the interest of his audience.
One way to deal with this dilemma emerged in the idea of the filmed interview. Here, the contributor could present his ideas in an atmosphere of spontaneity which it was hoped would ‘humanise’ him, thus providing for the student a more pleasant and stimulating experience than is often allowed by the neutrality of the formal lecture.
For many years Evans had been running a course on ‘Approaches to personality’, and it was into this course that he decided to slot the outcome of his experiment, the filme