That Laurens van der Post should have chosen to write about Jung will come as no surprise to the millions of people who saw the three television programs that he devoted to the story of Jung's life and work. Indeed, part of the compulsion for putting the experience of his extraordinarily fruitful friendship with Jung into book form was precisely that the limitations of a single film sequence left him with the insistent feeling of a challenge only partially met.

To present Jung as he knew him, not Jung the psychologist but rather Jung the man, the discoverer and explorer of a new dimension in the human spirit, was the task which Laurens van der Post set himself and which has taken his special gifts to accomplish.