Last fall Sher­ry Turkle, an MIT psy­chol­o­gist who explores how tech­nol­o­gy shapes mod­ern rela­tion­ships, pub­lished Alone Togeth­er: Why We Expect More from Tech­nol­o­gy and Less from Each Oth­er. The third in a tril­o­gy of books, Alone Togeth­er tries to make sense of a para­dox. The more friends and acquain­tances we gath­er on social plat­forms like Face­book and Twit­ter, the more we feel alone. We’re con­nect­ed to oth­er peo­ple more than ever, and yet we feel iso­lat­ed in a new soli­tude. If you’re look­ing for a primer on Turkle’s think­ing, you can watch a new ani­ma­tion (above) cre­at­ed by Shi­mi Cohen. It was made as a final project for a course tak­en at Shenkar Col­lege of Engi­neer­ing and Design in Tel Aviv. Anoth­er way to get up to speed on Turkle’s think­ing is to watch Turkle’s own TED Talk record­ed in Feb­ru­ary, 2012. Find it right below. And, of course, you could always read her book, Alone Togeth­er, in print or dig­i­tal for­mat. A nov­el idea that.

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Deities, con­spir­a­cies, pol­i­tics, space aliens: you don’t actu­al­ly have to believe in these to find them inter­est­ing. Just focus your atten­tion not on the things them­selves, but in how oth­er peo­ple regard them, what they say when they talk about them, and why they think about them the way they do. Psy­chother­a­pist and one­time Freud pro­tégé Carl Gus­tav Jung treat­ed UFOs this way when he wrote his book Fly­ing Saucers: A Mod­ern Myth of Things Seen in the Skies, which exam­ines “not the real­i­ty or unre­al­i­ty” of the tit­u­lar phe­nom­e­na, but their “psy­chic aspect,” and “what it may sig­ni­fy that these phe­nom­e­na, whether real or imag­ined, are seen in such num­bers just at a time” — the Cold War — “when humankind is men­aced as nev­er before in his­to­ry.” As what Jung called a “mod­ern myth,” UFOs qual­i­fy as real indeed.

In 1957, with Fly­ing Saucers to appear the fol­low­ing year, New Repub­lic edi­tor Gilbert A. Har­ri­son want­ed to get this Jun­gian per­spec­tive on UFOs in his mag­a­zine. At the top of this post, you can see (via The Awl) a scan of Jung’s response to Har­rison’s query, the text of which fol­lows:

the prob­lem of the Ufos is, as you right­ly say, a very fas­ci­nat­ing one, but it is as puz­zling as it is fas­ci­nat­ing; since, in spite of all obser­va­tions I know of, there is no cer­tain­ty about their very nature. On the oth­er side, there is an over­whelm­ing mate­r­i­al point­ing to their leg­endary or mytho­log­i­cal aspect. As a mat­ter of fact the psy­cho­log­i­cal aspect is so impres­sive, that one almost must regret that the Ufos seem to be real after all. I have fol­lowed up the lit­er­a­ture as much as pos­si­ble and it looks to me as if some­thing were seen and even con­firmed by radar, but nobody knows exact­ly what is seen. In con­sid­er­a­tion of the psy­cho­log­i­cal aspect of the phe­nom­e­non I have writ­ten a book­let about it, which is soon to appear. It is also in the process of being trans­lat­ed into Eng­lish. Unfor­tu­nate­ly being occu­pied with oth­er tasks I am unable to meet your propo­si­tion. Being rather old, I have to econ­o­mize my ener­gies.

Jung, as you can see, dou­bled his own inter­est in the sub­ject by not only con­sid­er­ing fly­ing saucers a social phe­nom­e­non, but as a real phys­i­cal phe­nom­e­non as well. Seri­ous enthu­si­asts of both Jung and UFOs might con­sid­er bid­ding on the orig­i­nal let­ter, now up for auc­tion. Esti­mat­ed sale price: $2,000 to 3,000.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Face to Face with Carl Jung: ‘Man Can­not Stand a Mean­ing­less Life’

Carl Gus­tav Jung Explains His Ground­break­ing The­o­ries About Psy­chol­o­gy in Rare Inter­view (1957)

Carl Gus­tav Jung Pon­ders Death

Col­in Mar­shall hosts and pro­duces Note­book on Cities and Cul­ture and writes essays on lit­er­a­ture, film, cities, Asia, and aes­thet­ics. He’s at work on a book about Los Ange­les, A Los Ange­les Primer. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.

Here’s an extra­or­di­nary film of the great Swiss psy­chol­o­gist Carl Gus­tav Jung speak­ing at length about some of his key con­tri­bu­tions to psy­chol­o­gy. Jung on Film (above) is a 77-minute col­lec­tion of high­lights from four one-hour inter­views Jung gave to psy­chol­o­gist Richard I. Evans of the Uni­ver­si­ty of Hous­ton in August of 1957. In “Sit­ting Across From Carl Jung,” an arti­cle for the Asso­ci­a­tion of Psy­cho­log­i­cal Sci­ence, Evans explains how the inter­views came about:

I was teach­ing a grad­u­ate sem­i­nar called Approach­es to Per­son­al­i­ty when it seemed like an inter­est­ing idea to have the grad­u­ate stu­dents in the sem­i­nar role-play in front of the class and pre­tend to inter­view the var­i­ous per­son­al­i­ty the­o­rists that I was pre­sent­ing. Carl Jung was one of those the­o­rists, and dur­ing the sem­i­nar, I learned that he had nev­er agreed to an exten­sive record­ed inter­view except for a brief exchange on the BBC. I wrote a let­ter to Dr. Jung to request an inter­view because I believed that filmed inter­views of emi­nent psy­chol­o­gists would encour­age stu­dents to read their work.

Jung, who was 82 years old at the time, agreed to the inter­view and set aside an hour a day over a four-day peri­od. Evans met with Jung in Zurich at the Fed­er­al Insti­tute of Tech­nol­o­gy, or ETH. In the excerpts above, Jung talks about his ear­ly asso­ci­a­tion with Sig­mund Freud and how he came to dis­agree with Freud’s fix­a­tion on the sex dri­ve as the pri­ma­ry influ­ence in men­tal life. He talks about his the­o­ry of per­son­al­i­ty types and about uni­ver­sal arche­types, includ­ing the ani­ma and ani­mus. He talks about the inter­play between instinct and envi­ron­ment, and about dreams as man­i­fes­ta­tions of the uncon­scious. At one point he stress­es the urgency of under­stand­ing psy­chol­o­gy in a world where man-made threats, like the threat of the hydro­gen bomb, are greater than those posed by nat­ur­al dis­as­ters. “The world hangs on a thin thread,” says Jung, “and that is the psy­che of man.”

Note: You can down­load sem­i­nal works by Carl Jung as free audio­books if you sign up for a 30-Day Free Tri­al with Audible.com. Find more infor­ma­tion on that pro­gram here.

If you would like to sign up for Open Culture’s free email newslet­ter, please find it here. It’s a great way to see our new posts, all bun­dled in one email, each day.

If you would like to sup­port the mis­sion of Open Cul­ture, con­sid­er mak­ing a dona­tion to our site. It’s hard to rely 100% on ads, and your con­tri­bu­tions will help us con­tin­ue pro­vid­ing the best free cul­tur­al and edu­ca­tion­al mate­ri­als to learn­ers every­where. You can con­tribute through Pay­Pal, Patre­on, and Ven­mo (@openculture). Thanks!

Relat­ed con­tent:

Carl Gus­tav Jung Pon­ders Death

Face to Face with Carl Jung: ‘Man Can­not Stand a Mean­ing­less Life’

Sig­mund Freud Speaks: The Only Known Record­ing of His Voice, 1938