This is fascinating, an extended interview with Swiss psychoanalyst Carl Gustav Jung conducted by the BBC’s John Freeman in October of 1959, when Jung was 84-years-old. The format of this program, Face to Face, is fascinating, almost like an interrogation. The camera zooms in on the subject and they rarely cut away.

Face to Face was the first program on British television to unmask public figures and show what lies beneath the surface. Harsh lighting and close-up camera angles were employed to capture each flicker of emotion, a method critics referred to as “torture by television.” Among those who submitted to Freeman’s remorseless scrutiny were Evelyn Waugh, Henry Moore, Bertrand Russell, and Carl Gustav Jung.

When Carl Jung consented to be interviewed, the medical community was surprised that this very private figure was suddenly willing to allow an interviewer into his personal space. When the program was first aired in 1959, Jung himself was taken aback at the unexpectedly positive response from the general public. This strong interest in his work inspired Jung to write his final work, Man and His Symbols, his theory of the symbolism of dreams, explained in lay terms so as to be accessible to all who would come seeking answers.

 
Thank you Jesse Merlin!

 
The great author Robertson Davies felt he never quite belonged. To what? or to whom? he never made quite certain, but he described an itinerant childhood in Canada that made him feel distant which gave him a necessary ruthlessness and watchful quality that made him more agreeable towards the solitary toil of writing.

His father was a newspaperman, a publisher and editor, who became a politician. To escape from under his father’s strong and domineering personality, Roberston decided to focus on his own strengths and ambitions. At first he decided to be an actor. He moved to England, studied at Oxford University. But when he returned to Canada, he worked for twenty years as a newspaperman. He still harbored his own ambitions. At night, he started writing the plays and books that made him one of the twentieth century’s most respected writers.

At the time of this interview in 1973, Davies had completed Fifth Business and The Manticore, the first 2 volumes of his brilliant Deptford Trilogy, and was working on the third World of Wonders. The trilogy hangs on one incident that has dramatic and far-reaching consequences on a group of townspeople at the turn of the 20th century.

Davies was a genuinely learned man. His novels are filled with jokes, allusions, literary references and themes, that give bountiful pleasures to the reader.

In this interview, you will find him gently poking fun at himself and other scribes with this description of his trade: 

‘Writers are curious people, in that they tend to be withdrawn, they tend to be rather grumpy and unhappy, they tend to take offense very readily, and they tend to harbor grievances more than a great many people do, and they tend to be hypochondriacs.’

Davies had a great interest in psychology. He was influenced by Jung, but thought Freud had a dreadful reductive quality. Yet, he felt neither gave a full or satisfactory answer to what is experienced in life.

This interview wanders around its subject, encompassing his acting, his father, his childhood, his writing, his journalism, and his academic life. It is a rare look at one of fiction’s most intelligent writers.
 

Oscar Wilde
 
Handmade miniature character dolls of famous artists, authors, historical figures and actors by Etsy seller Uneek Doll Designs. Each doll measures around 4 1/2 inches tall; all the clothes and costumes are handmade and they retail for $30.00 - $36.00. I never thought in my life I’d stumble across a Noel Coward doll or Harper Lee doll!

Pablo Picasso
 

Edith Head
 
More dolls after the jump…

 
Gary Valentine (birth name Gary Lachman) was a founding member of Blondie, playing bass with the group from 1975 to ‘77. He wrote one of the band’s defining songs ‘X Offender’ and one of their biggest hits, ‘(I’m Always Touched by Your) Presence, Dear’.  He went on to form his own band The Know in 1978 and briefly played guitar with Iggy Pop in 1981. 

Valentine became a dedicated writer in 1996 and published his first book ‘Turn Off Your Mind: The Mystic Sixties and the Dark Side of the Age of Aquarius’ in 2001. His memoir ‘New York Rocker: My Life in The Blank Generation’ is one of the few accounts of the NY punk scene that gets it right. Since then he’s published a series of books on the occult, philosophy, psychology, suicide and politics. In this interview with Cherry Red Records’ Iain McNay, Gary discusses his musical past and his life long interest in the inner workings of the human psyche.
 

 
Last month, the NYT Magazine cover-featured an article about Carl Jung‘s infamous Red Book, or, as the Times called it, The Holy Grail of the Unconscious:

This is a story about a nearly 100-year-old book, bound in red leather, which has spent the last quarter century secreted away in a bank vault in Switzerland.  The book is big and heavy and its spine is etched with gold letters that say ‘Liber Novus,’ which is Latin for ‘New Book.’  Its pages are made from thick cream-colored parchment and filled with paintings of otherworldly creatures and handwritten dialogues with gods and devils.  If you didn?