Carl Jung: ‘The world,’ said Jung, ‘hangs by a thin thread, and that thread is the human soul.

“The old gentleman with the white hair and the knowingly flashing eyes leaned back in his armchair and thoughtfully smoked his pipe.

Seeming not to notice the microphone around his neck and the camera lens pointed at him, C. G. Jung spoke through the cloud of smoke that wreathed his head. His voice was loud and powerful.

‘The world,’ said Jung, ‘hangs by a thin thread, and that thread is the human soul.

It is not the reality of the hydrogen bomb that we need to fear, but what man will do with it.

If certain people in Moscow lose their nerve, then the world will be plunged into fire and flames.

As never before the world depends on the soul of man.’

This, the old wise man explains, is why the exploration and understanding of the human soul is more important than ever.

Gently guided by his interviewer Richard Evans, Jung wandered through the whole wide realm of his convictions and theories of the psyche.

Jung’s presentation was as incomparable as it was fascinating.

It was the first time he had ever been in front of a television camera, the first time he had spoken to American listeners since his lectures on “Psychology and Religion” at Yale in 1938, and apart from a few lectures in Zurich, it was his only public appearance in ten years Jung scintillated and joked, the whole thing seemed to give him the greatest enjoyment.

In the studio his eyes sparkled behind his steel-rimmed spectacles, and his bristly white mustache moved when he laughed. “And Jung’s laugh spoke for itself. ~Gerhard Wehr, “Jung” by Gerhard Wehr, Pages 438-439