Matter of Heart

The film assembles archival footage of Jung, including scenes at his house on Lake Zurich and late interviews, alongside recollections from the analysts and friends who worked beside him. Marie-Louise von Franz, Joseph Henderson, Barbara Hannah and Laurens van der Post describe his consulting room, his correspondence and the last decades of his working life. It follows the break with Freud, the years of inner crisis, and his account of dreams, symbols and the movement toward wholeness.

Reviewers treated it less as biography than as filmed memoir. In the New York Times, Vincent Canby read it as an affectionate account rather than a critical one, and later commentators have valued the same quality: the willingness to let people who sat with Jung speak in their own cadence rather than fit their testimony to a thesis.

For a clinician the value lies in the first-hand material. Accounts of how Jung listened, framed a dream, or held a patient across a long analysis sit beside his own words on the self, individuation and the unconscious. Von Franz on his method gives a sense of a lineage usually met only on the page.