Carl Jung's life and ideas open this PBS series with archival photographs, his own writings read in voiceover, and interviews with Jungian analysts who worked with him or studied under his followers. Part one traces Jung's childhood in Switzerland, his early fascination with dreams and the unconscious, and his fateful collaboration and eventual break with Sigmund Freud. Scholars and analysts describe how Jung came to see dreams not as disguised wishes but as messages from a deeper layer of the mind he called the collective unconscious, populated by archetypes shared across cultures. Footage of Jung's home at Bollingen and the tower he built by hand grounds the theory in the man's own life, showing how his ideas about symbol and myth grew out of a personal crisis of visions and dreams he underwent in midlife. The film treats Jung's break from orthodox psychoanalysis as the hinge of the whole story, the moment his psychology stopped explaining the mind through sex and started explaining it through meaning.