C. G. Jung Speaking: Interviews and Encounters

By C.G. Jung

Book Overview

A collection of journalistic interviews which span Jung's lifetime. This book captures his personality and spirit in more than 50 accounts of talks and meetings with him. They range from transcripts... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0500011958
• ISBN13: 9780500011959
• Release Date: January 1978
• Publisher: Thames & Hudson
• Weight: 1.35 lbs.

Customer Reviews

Kinda disappointed.

I purchased this book for my dad because he kept talking about it, and while the shipping was fairly quick, I didn't expect half the pages to be water stained to the point of turning yellow. My dad is someone who really treasures books, so while he was excited when he saw the cover, after flicking through the pages and seeing them ruined, some crinkled and bent, his face fell. I also found someone's old bill for a Cactus Carwash😑??? I guess you get what you pay for.

MORE THAN FIFTY INTERVIEWS WITH JUNG, SPANNING HIS ENTIRE LIFE

The lectures in this volume were given on radio, television, and film between 1912 to 1961 (the last was one month before his death). Here are some representative quotations from the book: "Why is it so difficult to believe that each of us has two souls? When a man is fifty years old, only one part of his being has existed for half a century. The other part, which also lives in his psyche, may be millions of years old." (Pg. 57) "Out of my experience with those thousands of patients, I have become convinced that the psychological problem of today is a spiritual problem, a religious problem." (Pg. 68) "Ten percent of the German population today are hopeless psychopaths." (Pg. 152) "For fifteen years I studied alchemy, but I never spoke to anyone about it; I did not wish to influence my patients or my fellow workers by suggestion." (Pg. 227-228) "I am not interested in anything that transcends the psychological content of human experience... But on the psychological level I have to do with religious experiences which have a structure and a symbolism that can be interpreted. For me, religious experience is real, is true." (Pg. 229) "Man's soul is a complicated thing and its takes sometimes half a lifetime to get somewhere in one's psychological development." (Pg. 255) "Every disease has a psychological accompaniment, and it all depends ... on whether you treat such a patient psychologically in the proper way or not." (Pg. 333) "It makes little difference what I call it: God, Tao, the Great Voice, the Great Spirit. But for people of our time God is the most comprehensible name with which to designate the Power beyond us." (Pg. 419)

THE HORSE'S MOUTH

C.G. Jung Speaking is a classic. It is superbly edited by William McGuire and R.F.C. Hull, the former was the executive editor of the Collected Works of C.G. Jung and editor of The Freud /Jung Letters, the latter was translator of the Collected Works until his death in 1974. C.G. Jung Speaking is a chronological series of interviews and encounters including several kinds of testimony from Jung and about him. Each segment is introduced and given a context ranging from a boyhood memoir of his friend Albert Oeri to six months before his death on June 6, 1961 when he met with the diplomat Miguel Serrano. Topics range from a Cosmopolitan article Diagnosing the Dictators to a discussion with Charles Lindberg on Flying Saucers. The following is a sample from an informal talk titled Is Analytical Psychology a Religion? "We all must do just what Christ did. We must make our experiment. We must make mistakes. We must live our own vision of life...People call me a religious leader. I am not that. I have no message, no mission; I attempt only to understand. We are philosophers in the old sense of the word, lovers of wisdom." Much misunderstood and maligned, Dr. Jung has been described elsewhere as atheist, a mystic, occultist, prophet, poet, polygamist, misogynist, con-man, anti-Semite, racist, psychotic, guru, Gnostic, and American spy. As my Zurich training analyst, A.R.Pope remarked: "It is always better to get information from the horse's mouth rather than the other end."

Prophetic & Profound

In this most interesting volume, Jung explains many of his concepts/models in response to interviews, questions, etc. giving the information a different slant & providing needed context on the spot. Topics include: psychological types, anima/animus, the value of artistic expression, the value of education, discipline of children (p. 58 "It is not a rare occurrence for a somewhat severe reprimand administered to a child in his playpen or his bed to affect him during his entire lifetime"), the nature of neuroses, the faults of nations & mobs, the psychological value of land vs. urban living (p. 204 "I am fully committed to the idea that human existence should be rooted in the earth"), individuation vs. therapy, non-politically correct views on the differences between men & women (p. 245 "Women are much tougher than men underneath. To call women the weaker sex is sheer nonsense"), music & analysis, the persona (societal image/roles), mandalas as images of the Self, psychosomatic illnesses, Rorschach tests, mythology & archetypes, psychotherapy & the transference, the nature & value of marriage, Plato, astrology, & more. I took over 70 quotes for my collection. Some of the most important quotes concern knowledge of self & others despite considerable resistance to it: p. 244 "Men are inclined to resent any interference with their way of thinking and their hidebound convictions" & p. 248 "We must begin to learn about man until every Jekyll can see his Hyde." Further, pp. 129-130 "you always become the thing you fight the most...When you fight a thing you have to get very close to it, it is likely to infect you." Others address differences: p. 194 "different nationalities and different races have different outlooks and different psychologies" & p. 413 "It [Christianity] goes wrong in so far as it believes itself to be the only truth." Jung's wisdom shines through & it's timeless: PAST: pp. 271-2 But do you know who anticipated my entire psychology in the 18th century? The Hasidic Rabbi Baer from Meseritz whom they called the Great Maggid. He was a most impressive man. PRESENT: p. 389 All statements we make about God are statements about the unconscious. FUTURE: p. 374 The great problem before us is over-population, not the atom bomb.

I second Griebel....

...you must have this; there are treasures here you won't find anywhere else. One of the finest collections of Jung and Jungiana I've seen.

A must! if you are interested in Jung.

A must! if you are interested in C.G. Jung and his psychology.Why is "C.G. Jung Speaking" a must?FIRST OF ALL, simply because the Collected Works doesn't include the information found here. These are not works of Jung, but the works of others--interviews, characterizations etc. In other words, you will find some information here which you could only dig out with great difficulty, scattered in numerous works.SECOND, in the interviews Jung is sometimes caught off-guard by a surprise question, and so, forced to develop on the aspects of his theories that he may perhaps have though self-explanatory.THIRD, you see Jung through the eyes of others -- Esther Harding, Charles Baudoin, Michael Fordham, Charles Lindbergh, and others.Some subjects, touched upon in this book:- Jung's own type, according to his typology (Introvert. And Thinking, Intuition, Sensing/Perception, and Feeling, in that order)- Freud's type (extravert--hence his pleasure principle)- Adler's type (introvert--hence his power complex)- The psychology of dictators (Hitler, Mussolini, Stalin, and, yes, Roosewelt)- The nature of intuition- introvert vs. extravert intuitives- Creative achievement- Jung's breaking with Freud.- Jung and Nazism/anti-Semitism (Jung defends himself in December 1949)And the somewhat transcendent questions:- God- death and life after death- astrology and alchemyEdited by William McGuire, executive editor of the Collected Works (CW), in collaboration with R.F.C. Hull, translater of CW, it is no surprise to find that this excellent book contains numerous references to CW, as well as a comprehensive index.