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In speaking about this televised programme on Jung, and the two previous series which he produced and directed for Channel 4, Stephen Segaller said, ‘The channel was established to serve the interests of minorities or sections of society not served by other networks’; this runs parallel with Jung's concern to find out, ‘what was being neglected and oppressed within the psyche’. And certainly The Wisdom of the Dream did bring out much of Jung's perception and thought about types, synchronicity, the collective unconscious, archetypes (some closely examined), myths, and, centrally, the reality of the psyche. These aspects of analytical psychology are basic, so well-known to analysts and analysands through personal and professional experience that it is salutary to be reminded that there is still a huge job to be done in presenting them on the small screen.
A proper poll of interested viewers who had no previous contact with Jungian psychology would have been a good basis for this review, since the targeted audience was not that of initiates. A small straw survey produced the following: ‘It was quite good, but fragmented. Just as one thought one was getting down to some interesting fact or theory it flitted off to another scene. Although seeming to be informative, on reflection we felt it was rather scatty. For us, not knowing much about Jung, it was rather incoherent and it skated over the surface. But it was very watchable!’
A small ad hoc viewer group of analysts from The Society of Analytical Psychology also liked the series in many ways and enjoyed Howard Goodall's music, but thought that the ordinary person can concentrate longer than present-day producers seem to believe. One of them disliked ‘the small gobbets’ of information confusingly combined with both idealisation of American Indians and a simplistic theory of mythology. But the concept of teamwork, with which Segaller and Berger clearly agree, involves giving some pieces of knowledge to as many people as pos