On 22 October 1959, the BBC's Face to Face hosted the legendary Swiss psychiatrist Carl Gustav Jung in one of the most famous interviews in the history of psychology. Jung, then 84 and still active, spoke with New Statesman editor-in-chief John Freeman about education, religion, consciousness, human nature and his differences with Freud. Jung, who is regarded alongside Freud as a founder of modern analytical psychology, introduced concepts such as collective consciousness and the distinction between introverted and extroverted personalities, laying the foundations for the well-known Myers-Briggs test.
In the interview, however, he makes it clear that a fixed personality is a myth: “Psychological type is nothing static—it changes over the course of life,” he says, echoing Anaïs Nin's thinking about the fluid self.
One of the interview's most striking moments is his warning about our ignorance of human beings themselves: “We need more understanding of human nature, because the only danger that exists is man himself—he is the great danger, and we know this all too painfully. We know almost nothing about man—very little.” For Jung, psychology is the most powerful tool for understanding human nature and thus saving humanity from itself.
The most relevant moment comes with the closing question, when Freeman asks whether humanity's highest development might involve submerging individuality in a kind of collective consciousness as the world becomes more technically efficient.
Jung's answer reaches the same conclusion as Viktor Frankl's: “That is hardly possible. I think there will be a reaction—a reaction will emerge against this communal dissolution. Man cannot endure his own annihilation forever. All my patients are seeking their own existence and trying to safeguard it against complete atomization into nothingness or meaninglessness. Man cannot endure a life without meaning.”
His differences with Freud, described in the interview, were precisely what prompted him to study personality types. Unlike the more pessimistic Freud—who was accused of having lost his soul—Jung had a much more encouraging view of human nature and wrote that “the sole purpose of human existence is to kindle a light in the darkness of mere being.”
The interview's significance is captured in editor R. F. C. Hull's observation in the anthology C.G. Jung Speaking: the interview “brought Jung to more people than any other piece of journalism and any of Jung's own writings.”
Face to Face was an unusual series of incisive, almost interrogative interviews that sought to “unmask public figures,” making the honesty and depth of Jung's answers all the more remarkable.
Almost sixty years later, Jung's words remain relevant in an age when technical efficiency pushes toward collectivism and uniformity: his warning that a backlash against alienation would emerge, and that people would seek their own meaning again, seems to describe an enduring human need—the need not to disappear into insignificance.
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