137: Jung, Pauli, and the Pursuit of a Scientific Obsession Part 10

Pauli was worried that his reputation might suffer if Jung published material on physics that made no sense and that quoted him as confirmation. But their conversations were far too fruitful to dream of abandoning them. Above all he was gripped by the notion of finding a link between quantum physics and psychology-which surely lay in synchronicity.

The scarab and the birds.

Wrestling with the concept, Pauli discovered that he found it useful to make a distinction between chance occurrences of synchronicity and occurrences of synchronicity brought about by consulting oracles such as the I Ching. For chance occurrences he used the term "meaning-correspondence" rather than "synchronicity," which Jung tended to use synonymously with "simultaneity."

In reply, Jung brought to his attention two examples of synchronism in which he was able to identify "some archetypal symbolism at work...which cannot be explained without the hypothesis of the collective unconscious."

The first concerned a woman patient whose animus (that is, her male aspect, the female equivalent of the male anima) clung to a stubbornly logic-based view of reality. She had already been to two a.n.a.lysts before Jung. He was having no success either until one day she told him about a dream of a scarab she had had. At that same moment Jung heard a tapping on the windowpane. He flung open the window and an insect flew in. Jung caught it. It was of the scarab family. To Jung this was not a chance happening but a meaningful coincidence. The patient had been disturbed by the dream scarab and the sudden appearance of a real one completely shattered her stubbornly rational att.i.tude. The scarab bursting in through the window allowed her animus to burst its logical chains and place her on the path to psychic renewal-entirely appropriate, said Jung, given that the scarab is an ancient Egyptian symbol of rebirth. It was an example of a psychic state in the observer coinciding with an external event that corresponded to that psychic state.

The other example of synchronicity concerned the wife of one of Jung's patients. She told Jung that when her mother and grandmother died, on each occasion a flock of birds had gathered outside the window of the room. Some time later, Jung noticed that her husband had symptoms of an impending heart problem and recommended that he see a specialist. The specialist, however, could find no problem. On his way back the man collapsed in the street. Shortly after he had set off to see the specialist a large flock of birds had alighted on the house. His wife immediately recognized this as a sign of her husband's impending death.

Jung noted that in the Babylonian Hades the soul is adorned with feathers and in ancient Egypt the soul was considered to be a bird. It was an example of a psychic state coinciding with a corresponding, not yet existent, future event.

In Rhine's experiments it was the subjects' determination to achieve the impossible-to show that ESP existed-that caused them to tap into their unconscious. Dunne's dreams showed that the psychic state can coincide with an event (like the volcanic eruption) when the subject is asleep. In both cases quieting or closing down the conscious mind enabled the subject or dreamer to open the unconscious to the external world and to allow archetypes to emerge. Divinatory procedures, such as consulting the I Ching, required this same mental condition. In each instance of synchronicity that Jung observed, an archetype appeared-the scarabs, the birds. "The effective (numinous) agents in the unconscious are the archetypes. By far the greatest number of spontaneous synchronistic phenomena that I have had occasion to observe and a.n.a.lyze can easily be shown to have a direct connection with an archetype," Jung wrote.

Pauli was still doubtful about Jung's use of the term "synchronistic" to mean "at the same time." Surely this held only for experiences in the first category (an external event coinciding with a psychic state, as in the case of the scarab). While he was mulling over this problem, Pauli had a dream. It was October 1949.

The stranger/Merlin appears.

The dream concerns a "stranger" who appeared in earlier dreams as the "blond" man.

In Jungian terms he is the voice of the collective unconscious, the background archetypes given shape-constellated-by twentieth-century scientific concepts, and represents authority. He often comments that modern physics is inadequate and incomplete and is able to move back and forth between the physical and the psychic, the conscious and the unconscious. He is an intermediary, like Hermes in alchemy, a "psychopomp," who moves between the dark and light worlds.

While working on Kepler, Pauli read Romans de la Table Ronde (Stories of the Round Table), containing the legends of the Holy Grail. He was struck by the similarity between the "stranger" and the wizard, Merlin. Emma, Jung's wife, was also interested in the Grail. Pauli wrote to her: [The stranger] is a spiritual light figure with superior knowledge, and on the other hand, he is a chthonic [dark] natural spirit. But his knowledge repeatedly takes him back to nature, and his chthonic origins are also the source of his knowledge, so that ultimately both aspects turn out to be facets of the same "personality." He is the one who prepares the way for the quaternity, which is always pursuing him.... He is not an "Antichrist," but in a certain sense an "Anti-scientist," "science" here meaning especially the scientific approach, particularly as it is taught in universities today.... My branch of science, physics, has become somewhat bogged down. The same thing can be said in a different way: When rational methods in science reach a dead end, a new lease on life is given to those contents that were pushed out of time consciousness in the 17th century and sank into the unconscious. [The stranger] happily uses the terminology of modern science (radioactivity, spin) and mathematics (prime numbers) but does so in an unconventional manner. Inasmuch as he ultimately wishes to be understood but has yet to find his place in our contemporary culture, he is, like Merlin, in need of redemption.

In some ways the "stranger" seems to represent Pauli himself-not surprisingly, for he springs from the collective unconscious, which, according to Pauli, has now been given "a new lease on life."

Of the stranger, he wrote to Aniela Jaffe, Jung's secretary:.

Like Merlin, he knows the future, but cannot change it.... In my opinion, however, man can alter the "future."...I want to recognize [Merlin], talk to him again, bring his redemption a little nearer. That, I believe, is the myth of my life.

For Pauli rational methods had reached a dead end and were no longer the tools that would enable him to change the world. Rather, the magical world of Merlin with its search for the quaternity held the key. If Pauli could only come face to face with him, he could "bring his redemption a little nearer" and so, too, with the "stranger" who could not speak a language that could be understood by everyone. Pauli believed that to move forward in examining the human psyche he needed to fuse physics with psychology. This was the "myth of [his] life," no less heroic than that of Merlin.

In Pauli's dream, an airplane lands and some foreigners step out, among them the stranger. He tells Pauli, "You should not exaggerate your difficulties with the notion of time. The dark girl has only to make a short journey, in order to determine the time!"

Jung's interpretation of this dream was that the airplane represented Pauli's intuition and the foreigners his "not-yet-a.s.similated thoughts." The dark girl is Pauli's anima. She has to "make a short journey," that is, change her place in order to achieve definite time. At present "she has no definite time," meaning that she lives in the unconscious. She has to transplant herself "into consciousness in order to be able to define time." The stranger wants Pauli's anima-the feminine side of his personality-to study the mathematics of whole numbers which are the "archetypes of order," in order to understand synchronicity. In this way, Pauli will be able to move toward a unification of physics and psychology, the reverse of Kepler's materialistic worldview so deplored by Fludd.

Jung concluded his letter with a new quaternary diagram: Jung's response to Pauli's mandala.

In this, Jung takes s.p.a.ce and time as complementary. Opposite the causality of physics he places "correspondentia"-the correspondence between the psychological and the physical view of life, including synchronicity.

Back to Bohr's complementarity principle.

Bohr, too, in his view of complementarity had something to say about causality: The very nature of the quantum theory...forces us to regard the s.p.a.ce-time coordination and the claim of causality, the union of which characterizes the cla.s.sical physical theories, as complementary but exclusive features of the description, symbolizing the idealization of observation and definition respectively.

Cla.s.sical physics combines how a system develops in s.p.a.ce and time with causality (meaning a logical chain of cause and effect). The mathematical structure of Newton's laws of motion permitted the path of an object to be traced in s.p.a.ce and time with, in principle, perfect accuracy, that is, to predict the paths of cannonb.a.l.l.s, falling objects, and planets. This is the law of causality. To use it the scientist needs only two pieces of information: where the object was and how fast it was moving when the process began. Knowing that a stone was six feet off the ground and dropped from a resting position, we can predict where it will be as it is falling and when it will hit the ground.

Yet Heisenberg's uncertainty principle a.s.serts that it is impossible to make exact measurements of an electron's position and its momentum in the same experiment. Thus according to quantum theory it is an impossibility-an idealization, as Bohr puts it-to combine a description in s.p.a.ce and time with causality.

According to Bohr's complementarity principle, the description in s.p.a.ce and time of a physical system (such as a quantum of light hitting an electron in the same way that two billiard b.a.l.l.s strike each other) and causality (predicting where the electron and light quantum will be after they bounce off each other) are complementary and mutually exclusive. But every scientific theory must be causal or else it cannot make predictions, which are essential to science.

So can there be predictability, that is, causality, in quantum mechanics? The conservation laws of energy and momentum state that the amount of energy and momentum in a system cannot change. Scientists can apply these laws to predict the final condition of a system from its initial state.

If a quantum of light striking an electron is like two billiard b.a.l.l.s, then it should be possible to use the laws of conservation of energy and momentum to work out where to set up instruments to detect the light quantum and the electron after they collide. In quantum physics the law of causality of cla.s.sical physics-which requires precise measurements of position and momentum in the same experiment-is replaced by predictions made by the laws of conservation of energy and momentum.

A new mandala.

In response to Jung's a.n.a.lysis of his dream, Pauli commented that he agreed that the stranger conveyed a holistic view of nature quite different from the "conventional scientific point of view." Unlike his colleagues, Pauli wrote, he considered the quantum mechanics as incomplete. What was required was a fusion with psychology. He had "no shortage of 'not-yet-a.s.similated thoughts'," he added wryly.

He disagreed, however, with Jung's mandala primarily because it showed s.p.a.ce and time as separate, whereas scientists understood that they were one-the s.p.a.ce-time continuum. He suggested another one which included s.p.a.ce-time while retaining the psychological element of Jung's: Pauli's suggested improvement to Jung's mandala.

Here he lays out complementary pairs, causality-the chain of cause and effect-against synchronicity; and conservation of energy against the s.p.a.ce-time continuum, in agreement with Bohr's complementarity principle. Cla.s.sical physics pairs causality with a description in s.p.a.ce and time. But this is an idealization. And so Pauli set in its place the law of conservation of energy; to be more precise the law of conservation of momentum should be included too.

Synchronicity in physics and psychology.

The essential question Pauli felt needed to be asked was, "How do the facts that make up modern quantum physics relate to those of other phenomena explained by [Jung] with the aid of the new principle of synchronicity?" How did quantum physics sit in relation to synchronicity and other psychological phenomena. Both types of phenomena, he noted, went beyond "cla.s.sical determinism."

In Pauli's mandala, energy and s.p.a.ce-time, and causality and synchronicity, are complementary but mutually exclusive, like light and dark and life and death. Both arms are necessary. It is the tension between them that gives physical meaning to reality.

Pauli also noted that when Jung used "physical terms to explain psychological terms or findings," to Jung these were "dreamlike images of the imagination." Jung, for example, referred to radioactivity as a physical a.n.a.logy for a coincidence in time-total nonsense to a physicist. Pauli proceeded to explain to Jung the notion of probability in quantum physics using radioactive decay.

In quantum physics there is a law for determining how many of a large sample of nuclei will undergo radioactive decay by emitting particles and light. But it cannot determine at what precise point in time a single nucleus will decay because it is impossible to investigate a single atom and how it develops in s.p.a.ce and time. In other words, individual events are outside of the chain of cause and effect.

On average, half the total sample will decay in the "half-life"-a period of time that is a characteristic property of each radioactive element. After another half-life, another half of the sample will decay. But it is impossible to know when any particular nucleus will decay. To find out, one has to carry out a measurement on the system that causes decay rather than measuring when the decay naturally occurs. The law of radioactive decay is built up out of the probability of each nucleus decaying, that is, it is statistical. Moreover, the statistical regularity-the prediction of when half the sample will decay-is reproducible and has nothing to do with the psychic state of the experimenter. This is the exact reverse of experiments (such as Rhine's) on synchronicity, which turned up a small number of examples of synchronicity that when viewed statistically were so few as to be negligible. The regularity of the half-life period could be ascertained only when there was a large number of cases, whereas in the Rhine experiments synchronicity appeared only in a small number.

Pauli's explanation of probability in radioactive decay was also a reply to a query Jung had raised: what light does synchronicity throw on the "half-life phenomenon of radium decay?" Just as it was impossible to tell whether any one radium nucleus had decayed, similarly it was impossible to identify the precise connection of one individual with the collective unconscious. The moment when an individual nucleus decays is not determined by any laws of nature and exists independently of any experiments. Nevertheless, when someone carries out the experiment this moment becomes a part of the experimenter's time system. The very act of measuring whether an individual nucleus has decayed alters its condition and perhaps even causes it to decay.

Pauli suggested that the state of the individual radium nucleus before the experiment was carried out might correspond to the relations.h.i.+p of an individual to the collective unconscious through archetypal content of which the individual was unaware. As soon as one tried to examine an individual consciousness, the synchronistic phenomenon would immediately vanish.

Pauli's understanding of synchronicity firmly separated it from processes in physics. Jung offered quite a different definition: perhaps "synchronicity could be understood as an ordering system by means of which 'similar' things coincide, without there being any apparent 'cause'.... I see no reason why synchronicity should always just be a coincidence of two psychic states or a psychic state and a nonpsychic state." In opposition to Pauli, Jung suggested broadening the concept of synchronicity to include every sort of coincidence, whether between two psychic states or two elementary particles. He was intrigued by the fact that it is impossible to predict when an individual nucleus will decay, which opens up the possibility of phenomena in individual atoms that are beyond cause and effect.

Jung pointed out that modern physics had shown that the connection between s.p.a.ce and time was crucial. In our daily world of consciousness, s.p.a.ce and time remain two separate ent.i.ties. "No schoolboy would ever say that a lesson lasts for 10 km," wrote Jung. The world of cla.s.sical physics had not ceased to exist-we still use Newtonian science to build bridges, for example. Similarly, despite Jung's and Freud's discovery of the unconscious, "the world of consciousness has not lost its validity against the unconscious." Our commonsense perceptions about the world-of s.p.a.ce and time as separate and consciousness as our preeminent experience-were still valid.

To replace the mandala he had drawn showing the world of consciousness which experiences s.p.a.ce and time as separate, Jung proposed a more complex one that he devised with Pauli's help.

Jung's mandala covering all instances of synchronicity.

This, claimed Jung, satisfied the "requirements of modern physics on the one hand and the psychology of the unconscious on the other hand."

Jung's definition of synchronicity-that is, "inconstant connection through contingency, equivalence (synchronicity)"-Pauli replied, seemed to cover every system that was beyond cause and effect, including quantum physics. Pauli was intrigued because Jung's broadened definition of the archetype seemed to offer a means to develop a unified view of the world. Did this mean that the concept of the archetype, too, could somehow be applied to quantum physics? Perhaps the "archetypal element in quantum physics [was] to be found in the mathematical concept of probability."

Jung enthusiastically agreed that mathematical probability must correspond to an archetype. Bringing archetypes and synchronicity together, he suggested that the archetype "represents nothing else but the probability of psychic events." Although all of us are born with a collective unconscious made up of archetypes, it is not inevitable that any single archetypal image will actually appear in our consciousness. It is only highly probable-not inevitable-that patients recovering from deep depression will draw mandalas.

The law of probability in quantum physics is a law of nature and laws of nature contain the patterns of behavior of the cosmos. Given that the archetype is also a pattern of behavior, does this mean that laws of nature have their bases in psychic premises? And how do archetypes enter our human minds in the first place? Jung suggested that they were "out there," ready to be plucked out of the air, and in this way entered our minds. We are all, after all, merely small elements in one world. The origin of the word is immaterial, Jung insisted; it's what the archetypes can do that is important.

Returning to the ever-fascinating issue of threes and fours, Jung perceived that quantum physics widened the threesome of cla.s.sical physics-s.p.a.ce, time, and causality-to include synchronicity, thereby becoming a foursome. This happy development solved the age-old problem of alchemists, encapsulated in the "so-called axiom of Maria Prophetissa: Out of the Third comes the One as the Fourth.... This cryptic observation confirms what I said above, that in principle new points of view are not as a rule discovered in territory that is already well known, but in out-of-the-way places that may even be avoided because of their bad name."

Jung was delighted to have this unique opportunity "to discuss these questions of principle with a professional physicist who could at the same time appreciate the psychological arguments."

Pauli's Jungian take on Kepler and Fludd.

Pauli finally published his essay on "The Influence of Archetypal Ideas on the Scientific Theories of Kepler" in 1952 in a book ent.i.tled The Interpretation of Nature and the Psyche, which also contained Jung's essay on synchronicity. For Pauli it was a bringing together of all his work-his lectures on Kepler and Fludd, his dreams and conversations with Jung, and his correspondence with Fierz-giving shape to a subject he had been thinking about for twenty-five years.

Pauli's focus was the process of scientific creativity and particularly its irrational side. Though scientific theories are expressed in mathematical terms, the initial discovery of the theory is essentially an irrational-not a rational-process. What role, he wondered, had prescientific thought played in the discovery of scientific concepts and what was the link between the two? He examined the rise of modern science beginning with Kepler, and applying the insights of Jung's psychology. He argued that the process of bringing new knowledge into consciousness involved a matching up of "inner images pre-existent in the human psyche" (archetypes) with external objects. Alchemy had a critical role to play in this process. In Jung's psychology, alchemy offered a way to resolve the tension between opposites. It emphasized the number four (the quaternity) and it also focused on the need to bring about symmetry between matter and psyche.

As Pauli put it, "intuition and the direction of attention play a considerable role in the development of concepts and ideas, generally transcending mere experience, that are necessary for the erection of a system of natural laws (that is, a scientific theory)." This leads him to ask, "What is the nature of the bridge between the sense perceptions and the concepts?" Pauli adds, "All logical thinkers have arrived at the conclusion that pure logic is fundamentally incapable of constructing such a link." At this point Pauli introduces the "postulate of a cosmic order independent of our choice and distinct from the world of phenomena."

He concludes that in the unconscious the place of concepts "is taken by images with strong emotional content"-that is, images of archetypes. Thus, the links between sense perceptions and concepts are archetypes-a word used in a similar sense by both Kepler and Jung. One of the forces driving a person to allow these ideas to bubble up from the collective unconscious is the "happiness that man feels in understanding" nature. Thus Kepler's exuberance over Copernicus's discovery of the sun-centered universe with its mandala-like quality. And thus Pauli also brings in the irrational, or nonlogical, element in scientific creativity, which he had sought for so pa.s.sionately.

To put it in Jungian terms, Kepler understood the relation of the earth to the sun as being equivalent to the ego and Self. The ego is in psychological terms the center of gravity of the conscious with all its imperfections, while the Self, the totality of the conscious and unconscious, is superior to the ego and a.s.sociated with archetypal images such as the mandala. No wonder, Pauli commented, that the "heliocentric theory received, in the mind of its adherents, an injection of strongly emotional content stemming from the unconscious." Just as the mind gropes toward a state in which conscious and unconscious are balanced so, too, science gradually becomes more balanced between logic and feeling.

But full centering and the achievement of the Self can occur only when the mandala can rotate. As we saw in Chapter 5, Kepler's mandala lacked the fourth element and therefore could not.

In psychological terms, Fludd offered a more complete view of nature based on the number four, which enabled him to see the world as more than simply a mechanical system governed by mathematics, as Kepler did. Pauli, an astute historian, was well aware of how difficult it would be to put oneself into the mind of Kepler or Fludd, living, as they did, in times radically different from our own. Jung's work offered a way to understand them as different personality types, "a differentiation that can be traced throughout history," wrote Pauli. Kepler was a thinking type, who focused on the parts rather than the whole, while Fludd was a feeling type who sought "a greater completeness of experience." This meant including emotions and the "inner experience of the 'observer'," which Fludd did by taking into account the "power of this number"-namely four.

In the end, however, Fludd was on the wrong path. It was inevitable that modern science would develop as it did, in a way that did not bring about the fully rounded psyche. As Pauli wrote: "In my own view it is only a narrow pa.s.sage of truth (no matter whether scientific or other truth) that pa.s.ses between the Scylla of a blue fog of mysticism and the Charybdis of a sterile rationalism. This will always be full of pitfalls and one can fall down on both sides."

Certainly, modern scientists could not possibly revert to the archaic and naive view of nature held by Fludd. Yet the current rationalistic view was also too narrow. The only way to broaden it would be "a flight from the merely rational." Science is a product of Western thought. To achieve full understanding of the world about us, it requires an equal input of Eastern mysticism. It is necessary to bring together "the irrational-critical, which seeks to understand, and...the mystic-irrational, which looks for the redeeming experience of oneness." These two forms of knowledge represent the struggle between opposites, which is at the basis of alchemy.

"Modern science," wrote Pauli, "has brought us closer to this goal [with] the concept of complementarity," a notion that went beyond the confines of a theory steeped in rational thought. Complementarity offered a view of irrationality and rationality as complementary aspects of the unity of thought.

Ultimately Pauli disagreed with physicists who considered quantum theory as the most complete and final description of nature. It was certainly complete, Pauli agreed, but only within a very narrow domain, with nothing to say about consciousness or life itself. It is ironic, he wrote, that although we have a highly developed and sophisticated mathematical apparatus to understand the world of physics, "we no longer have a total scientific picture of the world." For the deep meaning of quantum physics is that-by definition-"it is impossible ever fully to understand the totality of nature." As Heisenberg's uncertainty principle makes plain, as soon as one grasps one truth-for example, the location of an electron-another truth instantaneously slips from one's grasp-in this case, how fast it is traveling.

"It would be most satisfactory of all if physics and psyche could be seen as complementary aspects of the same reality," he wrote. "To us, unlike Kepler and Fludd, the only acceptable point of view appears to be one that recognizes both sides of reality-the quant.i.tative and qualitative, the physical and the psychical-as compatible with each other, and [one that] can embrace them simultaneously."

AS CARL A. MEIER, the first director of the Jung Inst.i.tute and editor of the Pauli/Jung letters, recalled, "neither Pauli nor Jung needed much persuading to have their works published jointly," though there had in fact been some pressure on Pauli not to do so. As Pauli wrote to Fierz in 1954: Many physicists and historians have of course advised me to break the connection between my Kepler essay and C. G. Jung.... I am indifferent to the astral cult of Jung's circle, but that, i.e., this dream symbolism, makes an impact! The book itself is a fateful "synchronicity" and must remain one. I am sure that defiance would have unhappy consequences as far as I am concerned. Dixi et salvavi animam meam! [I spoke and thus saved my soul].

Looking back on Pauli's relations.h.i.+p with Jung from a twenty-first-century viewpoint, it is important to remember that Jung, Pauli, and their contemporaries considered Jung's research to be quite as important as Pauli's work in physics. Jung's exploration of the human psyche was just as serious as quantum mechanics' exploration of the physical world. Whereas today we take for granted the conclusions of quantum mechanics, most of us are less ready to accept concepts like synchronicity or archetypes. They are not part of our current currency of belief. But when Pauli and Jung were having their conversations, Pauli took for granted that Jung's research was every bit as weighty and significant as his.

Dreams of Primal Numbers.

A system of morals for a world without G.o.d.

PAULI WAS a frequent dinner guest at Jung's. It was a great honor; Jung did not often entertain. He detested small talk and chose his dining companions with care. Similarly, Pauli often refused dinner invitations.

For Jung the dining room and library were the center of the house. The dining room, on the ground floor, was the largest room. In the center, dominating the room, was a large wooden table and at the far end a fireplace that in winter held a roaring fire. Jung had a pa.s.sion for food, insisting that his meals be exquisitely prepared with only the finest ingredients. After a hearty meal the two friends would sit gazing out at the lawns sweeping down to Lake Zurich, swathed in evening mists, sip an excellent French wine-preferably Bordeaux-and smoke their pipes. Among much else, their talk turned to what seemed to many in those days the growing threat of nuclear war. In the postWorld War II years the Cold War was in full swing, and with the availability of nuclear weapons, Armageddon seemed a real possibility.

In 1951, Jung published Aion: Researches into the Phenomenology of the Self. It is a study of archetypal images, especially those of wholeness and quaternity, and looks into Christian symbolism, Jesus Christ, and the problem of evil-a problem that, Pauli wrote to Jung, "has once again become an urgent necessity for modern man."

Commenting on Jung's new book led Pauli into a discussion of religion, philosophy, and the meaning of life. Pauli was well-read, particularly in Schopenhauer and Lao-tse on the philosophical side. Indian and Chinese philosophy were much read in Pauli's circle and Bohr often mentioned Lao-tse, while Eastern philosophy formed part of the nineteenth-century German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer's view that Pauli admired. But it was Jung who had really sparked his interest in Chinese philosophy and in mysticism. In Pauli's view Bohr's complementarity principle-that the world of elementary particles can be understood in terms of apparently opposing ent.i.ties, such as waves and particles, actually complementing each other-had been discovered centuries earlier by mystics who believed that reality-though it cannot be seen-can be experienced through the meeting of opposing phenomena. Both the Buddha and Lao-tse taught that one could have a mystical experience without the need for any belief in G.o.d. Lao-tse's invisible reality-the Tao (the Way)-possesses neither good nor evil. Pauli approved this lack of duality, which he deemed very un-Western.

He added, "I must confess that specifically Christian religiousness-especially its concept of G.o.d-has always left me emotionally and intellectually out on a limb. (I have no emotional resistance to the idea of an unpredictable tyrant such as Yahweh, but the excessive arbitrariness in the cosmos implied in this idea strikes me as an untenable anthropomorphism.)" To Pauli it was distasteful to attribute human qualities such as consciousness to G.o.d or to postulate a fundamentally evil nature in human beings: "I have a Jewish heritage of psychic capabilities, together with a Catholic sense of ritual and ceremony, together with a definite opinion, that the entire ideology of Judeo-Christian monotheism is of no use to me," he wrote sternly to Jung's a.s.sistant Aniela Jaffe.

Pauli was attracted by Schopenhauer's inclusion of Eastern religion, particularly Buddhism, in his writings, especially in his meditations on suffering and desire. In Aion Jung speaks of the wheel as symbolizing the cycle of life, an idea "akin to Buddhism." He criticizes the Christian notion of privatio boni-of evil as the absence of good. Pauli agreed with this, punningly describing privatio boni as "the hole theory of evil" (alluding to Dirac's early view that antielectrons [positrons] are holes in a sea of negative-energy states). While privatio boni might be acceptable in Catholicism, Jung believed that a.n.a.lytical psychologists had to "take evil rather more substantially...." He points out that "the Christ symbol lacks wholeness in the modern psychological sense...since it excludes the power of evil."

Both Jung and Pauli steadfastly disagreed with people who rejected G.o.d only to replace the concept with another name. Thus Schopenhauer replaced G.o.d by the unconscious Will, while Hegel employed "intellectual juggling" to raise the issue to the level of philosophical criticism, thus opening the arena of discussion to a myriad of ideas framed in "the megalomaniac language of schizophrenics." All this, wrote Jung, led to the hubris of Nietzsche's superman and "to the catastrophe that bears the name of Germany."

"'The world as will and representation' means nothing else to me than the world as complementary pairs of opposites," Pauli wrote to Marie-Louise von Franz. Von Franz was a close a.s.sociate of Jung's who also sometimes worked as Pauli's a.n.a.lyst and became his close friend. What Pauli was looking for was a basis for a system of morals that transcended belief in any deity. He looked to Schopenhauer and Jung for how to proceed. Schopenhauer believed that, at a deep level, all individuals were identical-a precursor of Jung's notion of the collective unconscious. If that were the case surely there could be a theory of ethics and morals that cut across cultures. For both Pauli and Jung this topic was more than academic. It was a matter of urgent concern, fired by the terrible war crimes that had been and were being committed against humanity as well as their horror of the atomic bomb.

Answer to Job.

In 1952, a year after Aion, Jung published Answer to Job. That same year, he published his article, "Synchronicity: An acausal connecting principle," in The Interpretation of Nature and the Psyche, the book he coauth.o.r.ed with Pauli. Answer to Job is a very personal book in which Jung speaks of the emotions aroused in him by the "unvarnished spectacle of divine savagery and ruthlessness" inflicted by Yahweh on Job. He expands this to include the savagery and ruthlessness in us all and reminds his readers that today, more than ever, the four hors.e.m.e.n of the apocalypse are waiting-in the form of the atomic bomb.

Pauli read the first twelve chapters of Answer to Job in one night, September 19, which, as it happens, was close to the equinox. He enjoyed the book; it seemed like light reading. But that night he had a very intense dream.

In his dream he is searching for "the dark girl"-his anima-who for him has always "been the counterpole to Protestantism-the men's religion that has no metaphysical representation of woman." The tension between Catholicism and Protestantism often tormented him in his dreams. It seemed to be a conflict between opposites, one of which (Catholicism) rejects the rational, the other (Protestantism) the anima-the same pairing as Fludd and Kepler, psychology and physics, intuitive feeling and scientific thinking, and Mysticism and Science.

Pauli then dreams of a Chinese woman whom he has seen before and whom Jung interprets as the holistic aspect of the dark girl. She leads him into an auditorium in which "the strangers" await him and gestures to Pauli to go to the rostrum, where he is to give a lecture. As he is mounting the rostrum he wakes up.

Pauli had had similar dreams of a Chinese woman in which he was offered "a new professors.h.i.+p." He interpreted the fact that he had not yet accepted the position as indicating that in his conscious mind he resisted it; but his unconscious meanwhile rebuked him for keeping "something specific from the public." He believed strongly that the tradition of science must be adhered to and the rest of his life kept a private matter. With very few exceptions, he never talked about the conversations and exchanges he had with Jung. The "strangers" in the lecture hall in his dream seemed to expect him to speak not only about science, but also about psychology and even ethical problems.

Marie-Louise Von Franz was Pauli's a.n.a.lyst at the time. Many years later she revealed that "Pauli was afraid of the content of his dreams. It frightened him to draw conclusions from what his dreams said. They said for instance that he should stand up for Jungian psychology in public. And that he feared like h.e.l.l, which I understand. He moved in the higher circles in physics. His colleagues were very mocking and cynical and also jealous of him. If he had stood up for dreams and irrational things, there would have been a h.e.l.lish laughter and he hadn't the guts to face it. So that was really tragic."

In Answer to Job, Jung concludes by saying that man is the focal point around which both science and life revolve. Pauli's comment on this is that the dualities of good and evil, spirit and matter, are all within man. The archetype of the wholeness of man-depicted with the symbol of fourness, the quaternity-is the emotional dynamic that drives all of science. "In keeping with this, the modern scientist-unlike those in Plato's day-sees the rational as both good and evil. For physics has tapped completely new sources of energy of hitherto unsuspected proportions that can be exploited for both good and evil." He is referring, of course, to Einstein's theory of relativity and quantum physics which produced, among much else, the atomic bomb.

Jung respected Pauli's uncomfortable position: "It means a lot to me to see how our points of view are getting closer, for if you feel isolated from your contemporaries when grappling with the unconscious, it is also the same with me." He congratulated Pauli on the effort he put into thinking about a.n.a.lytic psychology "which would give you quite a lot to tell the strangers about."

Numbers as archetypes.

Pauli imagined that being a physicist by day, his psyche would compensate by throwing up images from psychology by night. But to his surprise, his dreams were full of symbols from physics. He noticed that his dreams contained concepts from Kepler's time. Strangely they "did not simply refer to modern, traditional physics but [represented] a sort of correspondentia between psychological and physical fact." Perhaps this was the way to extend terms from physics and mathematics into psychology.

By the early 1950s Jung agreed with Pauli that numbers undoubtedly were archetypes and added that they could "amplify themselves immediately and freely through mythological statements," such as the one attributed to Maria Prophetissa. The common ground between physics and psychology was not to do with parallel concepts "but rather in that ancient spiritual 'dynamis' of numbers.... The archetypal numinosity of number expresses itself on the one hand in Pythagorean, Gnostic, and Kabbalistic (Gematria!) speculation, and the other hand in the arithmetical method of the mantic [divinatory] procedures in the I Ching, in geomancy and horoscopy." This Jung wrote to Pauli in 1955.

Mathematicians might argue over whether numbers were originally invented or discovered, just as psychologists debate whether archetypes are innate or acquired. "In my view both are true," wrote Jung. Jung was interested not in what mathematicians did with numbers, "but what number itself does when given the opportunity. This is certainly the method that has proved particularly successful in the field of archetypal ideas." He was curious, in other words, about whether numbers have mystical powers and what these might be. It was certainly a fresh approach to numbers, evidence of the fruitfulness of the collaboration between the two men.

Pauli also discussed his thoughts on psychology with von Franz. She had helped Pauli with translations from Latin to German for his article on Kepler and Fludd. Part of her work with Jung concerned the dreams of the French philosopher Rene Descartes. She had written an article on the subject and hoped to publish it in Jung and Pauli's joint work, The Interpretation of Nature and the Psyche, in 1952. Pauli spoke at some length with her about the article but in the end it was not included in their book. Von Franz was very disappointed and there was a brief disruption in their relations.h.i.+p. But by the end of 1952 they had resumed their friends.h.i.+p, taking long walks, excursions, and boat trips together on Lake Zurich.

Their relations.h.i.+p was a tumultuous one. The two had very different points of view and regularly argued about Pauli's dreams and Jung's psychology. Pauli's a.n.a.lysis was that they were both thinking types. From their correspondence, it seems clear there was a mutual attraction, though Pauli tried to keep his feelings focused on intellectual matters. Some people have suggested that at some point they had a s.e.xual relations.h.i.+p, but von Franz insists otherwise. As to what really happened, we will never know, for Pauli's widow burned all von Franz's letters to him when she discovered them in a box in Pauli's office at the ETH.

Once-it was in 1952-von Franz pointed out to Pauli that "nothing much has been done on the archetypal meaning of numbers." Inspired by her remark, Pauli turned to a book on the history of mathematics, Science Awakening, by a Dutch colleague of his, B. L. van der Waerden. There he learned that Pythagorean number mysticism was a "further development of Babylonian number mysticism." According to the book, the Chinese originated the idea that even numbers were feminine and odd numbers masculine. The Babylonians took the idea from them. But Pauli considered this line of development "improbable." It was more likely that the notion arose from the "presence of pre-existing (archetypal) images, which are released through numbers." Thus "the archetype of 'oneness' and the archetypes of opposing pairs" might lead directly "to the concepts 'even' and 'odd,'" he wrote. Four being the quaternity denotes a wholeness because it includes the anima.

From these archetypes-of oneness and of opposing pairs-Pythagoreans studied the divisions between even and odd numbers and geometrized certain combinations in the tetraktys, the mysterious equilateral triangle representing the equation 1 + 2 + 3 + 4 = 10.

From whole numbers "emerged such exact abstract concepts" as friendly numbers. In mathematical parlance, a pair of numbers is "friendly" if each of them is the sum of the other's divisors. He told von Franz a story about "friendly numbers": "Someone asked Pythagoras whether he had a friend. He replied I have two. He named the friendly numbers 284 and 220." The numbers 284 and 220 are friendly because the numbers by which 220 can be divided to yield a whole number (1, 2, 4, 5, 10, 11, 20, 22, 44, 55, and 110) add up to 284; and the divisors of 284 (1, 2, 4, 71 and 142) add up to 220. Friendly numbers may be just another fascinating piece of mathematics, or they may have some use. Presently no one knows.

"From a psychological point of view what does this 'I have two' mean to you?" asked Pauli. Plenty, he went on, answering his own rhetorical question, because it is "by no means an easy task to find every pair of 'friendly numbers.'" (A few hundred friendly numbers were known in the 1950s; with the help of high-speed computers, twelve million have now been found.) Perhaps a clue is that "here is projected a psychological problem connected with numbers." Pythagoras's discovery of this pair was rather extraordinary. Apparently it was an inspired mental leap after a great deal of hard work.

The pair of friendly numbers 284 and 220 were well known. In the Middle Ages talismans inscribed with them were worn by a couple to advertise their love for each other. In Genesis Jacob gave 220 goats to Esau on the grounds that one-half of a friendly pair expressed Jacob's love for Esau. Arab numerologists have written about the practice of carving 220 on one fruit and 284 on another, eating one and then offering the other to a lover as a sort of mathematical aphrodisiac.

Pauli applied this line of reasoning to the dreams about the "strangers," the lecture, and the Chinese woman, which was still nagging at him: "From my earlier dreams it is to be expected that my unconscious soon will be activated, as soon as I am 'cranked up' by means of a suitable lecture." Perhaps thinking about numbers would activate the proper archetypes in his unconscious which would, in turn, enable him to find all the friendly numbers.

The Piano Lesson.

In October 1953 Pauli wrote an "Active Fantasy about the Unconscious," which he ent.i.tled The Piano Lesson. He dedicated it to von Franz. It could be regarded as stream of consciousness, a sort of automatic writing.

He began poetically: "It was a foggy day and for a long time I had been seriously troubled." In his daydream, Pauli is worried about how to bring together physics and psychology. He searches for a neutral language because both physicists and psychologists need to understand not only words, but their meanings. He visits the house of a friend-von Franz. As he enters, a voice shouts, "Time reversal." Suddenly Pauli is back in his home in Vienna, in 1913. There is a piano there and a woman-whom he takes to be his anima-is about to give him a lesson. (The woman is actually his maternal grandmother, of whom Pauli had many fond memories.) He plays the chord C-E-G and he and the woman discuss four variations of it-all on white keys, all on black keys, a combination of the two, or in a major key. When Pauli asks about the opposition of the white and black keys and the many combinations, the teacher replies, "One can play in minor on the white keys and in major on the blacks, it is only a question of knowing how to play."

In the dream which Pauli had described to Jung, he had been about to give a lecture before an audience of strangers-his "una.s.similated thoughts"-who wanted him to speak about psychology. In The Piano Lesson, Pauli actually gives the lecture, holding forth on psychology, physics, and biology.