Atom and Archetype:
The Pauli/Jung Letters, 1932-1958
Edited by C. A. Meier
With a new preface by Beverley Zabriskie
Translated by David Roscoe
PAULI AND JUNGIAN ANALYSIS
In his physics, Pauli sought a
unified field. But his personal life was one of fragmentation and
dissociation. Within one year, his mother poisoned herself in reaction
to his father's involvement in an affair, and Pauli plunged into a brief
marriage with a cabaret performer. At thirty, he turned to Jung for
help.
Jung, in his 1935 lectures at the Tavistock, offered the following example of dreams effecting change:
I had a case, a university man, a very one-sided intellectual. His
unconscious had become troubled and activated; so it projected itself
into other men who appeared to be his enemies, and he felt terribly
lonely because everybody seemed to be against him. Then he began to
drink in order to forget his troubles, but he got exceedingly irritable
and in these moods he began to quarrel with other men. . . and once he
was thrown out of a restaurant and got beaten up.16
Jung saw that "he was chock-full of archaic material, and I said to
myself: 'Now I am going to make an interesting experiment to get that
material absolutely pure, without any influence from myself, and
therefore I won't touch it.'" He referred Pauli to Dr. Erna Rosenbaum,
"who was then just a beginner . . . I was absolutely sure she would not
tamper." Pauli applied the same passionate brilliance to his unconscious
as to his physics. In a five-month Jungian analysis, Pauli recorded and
spontaneously illustrated hundreds of his dreams. "He even invented
active imagination for himself He worked out the problem of the
perpetuum mobile, not in a crazy way but in a symbolic way. He worked on all the problems which medieval philosophy was so keen on."
17 For
three months, "he was doing the work all by himself, . . . for about
two months, he had a number of interviews with me . . . I did not have
to explain much." Jung believed Pauli "became a perfectly normal and
reasonable person. He did not drink any more, he became completely
adapted and in every respect normal . . . He had a new center of
interest." Jung had thirteen hundred of Pauli's dreams as the basis for
his research into alchemical symbolism in a modern psyche. "At the end
of the year I am going to publish a selection from his first four
hundred dreams, where I show the development of one motif only."
18
The physicist F. David Peat believes Jung's assessment of Pauli's state
after his termination with Dr. Rosenbaum was too positive. Pauli's new
"reasonableness" didn't last, and later he again drank excessively.
While Pauli's work aimed toward a "psychophysical monism," his intense
inner tensions seemed to manifest physically in the so-called Pauli
Effect, when his mere presence caused laboratory equipment to explode or
fall apart.
19 His internal "monotheism" and his sharp
critical acumen and tongue earned him the titles "scourge of God," "the
whip of God," and "the terrible Pauli." Even in the midst of personal
disarray, Pauli kept his stance as a scientist of such rigor that he was
called "the conscience of physics." Asked whether he thought a
particular physics paper was wrong, he replied that was too kind--the
paper was "not even wrong."
20 Heisenberg's account of a 1927
conversation reveals that, in his youth, Pauli was concerned about the
distinctions between knowledge and faith.
21 Heisenberg saw that behind Pauli's
outward display of criticism and skepticism lay concealed a deep
philosophical interest, even in those dark areas of reality or the human
soul which elude the grasp of reason. And while the power of
fascination emanating from Pauli's analyses of physical problems was due
in some measure to the clarity of his formulations, the rest was
derived from a constant contact with the field of the creative and
spiritual processes for which no rational formulation as yet exists.
22
For Pauli, the creativity of science included considerations of the
psyche. In science, he subscribed to the quantum uncertainty theory that
the position and presence of the observer changes the perception and
reality of what is observed. To that thesis--that one cannot measure the
wave and the particle at the same time--he added a psychological
dimension, observing that insofar as the scientist must opt to know
"which aspect of nature we want to make visible . . . we simultaneously
make a sacrifice, . . . [a] coupling of choice and sacrifice."
23 Pauli demonstrated the value of intuition to science's empiricism. As Weinberg recounted,
physicists in the early 1930'swere worried about an apparent violation
of the law of conservation of energy when a radioactive nucleus
undergoes the process known as beta decay. In 1932 Wolfgang, . . . Pauli
proposed the existence of a convenient particle he called the neutrino,
in order to account for the energy that was observed to be lost in this
process. The elusive neutrino was eventually discovered experimentally
over two decades later. Proposing the existence of something that has
not yet been observed is a risky business, but it sometimes works.24
In a metaphysical leap, Pauli referred as well to "forms belonging to
the unconscious region of the human soul" and stated that "the relation
between a sense perception and Idea remains a consequence of the fact
that both the soul and what is known in perception are subject to an
order objectively conceived."
25 He acknowledged that he had
realized in a dream that the quantum-mechanical conception of nature
lacked the second dimension, which he found provided by the archetypes
of the unconscious.
It seems, however, that he could not find
his way to the uncertainty, the "choice and sacrifice" that allows for
reparation within analysis. While Pauli knew "that a truly unified view
must include the feeling function, since without feeling there is no
meaning or value in life, and no proper acknowledgment of the phenomenon
of synchronicity," M.-L. von Franz said that he later sought only a
"philosophical discussion of dreams":
He wrote to me .
. . [and] made it clear that he did not want analysis; there was to be
no payment. I saw that he was in despair, so I said we could try. The
difficulties began when I asked him for the associations which referred
to physics. He said, "Do you think I'm going to give you unpaid lessons
in physics?" . . . He wanted something, but he didn't want to commit
himself. He was split.26
Van Erkelens
speculates that Pauli would have had to submit to a transference and to a
deeper Eros than "his inner urge to develop a unified view of matter
and spirit." For whatever reasons, von Franz and Pauli were not able to
achieve the relational bond that holds and contains explosive emotional
material and so allows surrender to one's unconscious and to a suffered
analytic relationship.
Jung and Pauli corresponded and later
met, not for analysis but for a comparison of ideas--Pauli pursuing
Jung's synchronicity thesis and Jung fostering Pauli's understanding of
the archetypal and collective factors in the psyche. Through their
contact, William James's two fields, to which both Jung and Bohr had
been attracted, come together again. Von Franz writes that the
notion of complementarity introduced by Niels Bohr to provide a better
explanation for the paradoxical relationship between waves and particles
in nuclear physics can also be applied to the relationship of conscious
and unconscious states of a psychic content. This fact was discovered
by Jung, but it was particularly elaborated by Wolfgang Pauli.27
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