137: Jung, Pauli, and the Pursuit of a Scientific Obsession Part 1

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

Arthur I. Miller.

Acknowledgments.

LOOKING into the story of Carl Jung and Wolfgang Pauli has taken me on a journey into ways of exploring the cosmos that transcend psychology and physics and transported me to areas to which I had never before given serious thought. A supposedly rational physicist and historian, I found myself investigating alchemy, mysticism, and the Kabbalah.

I owe an enormous debt to my friend and colleague Karl von Meyenn who opened many doors to me in my study of Pauli's life. For over thirty years Karl has worked on editing Pauli's vast correspondence, now published in eight splendid volumes. He was extremely generous in sharing unpublished insights and doc.u.ments for which I am hugely appreciative.

Early in my research I had the good fortune to meet Carl Jung's grandson, Andreas Jung. He graciously received me at 228 Seestra.s.se, Kusnacht, near Zurich, once his grandfather's house. He gave me a guided tour, showing me Jung's small study and large library crammed with esoteric books as well as the dining room, which Jung considered the center of the house. It was in these rooms that Pauli sat as Jung's patient and then as esteemed colleague and co-worker.

Information collected in archives is indispensable for historical work. I am grateful to Anita Hollier, the archivist at CERN who oversees La Salle Pauli where Pauli's physics papers and personal books are stored. She patiently guided me through it as well as the magnificent CERN Doc.u.ment Server and Pauli Photo Archive.

Thanks to Gabriele Veneziano, chair of the Pauli Committee at CERN, for his kind a.s.sistance in my research and for many good conversations on the nature of things. I would also like to take this occasion to express my grat.i.tude to the Pauli Committee for their kind considerations of my requests for access to archival materials.

Important archival material relating to Jung and Pauli is housed at the ETH-Bibliothek Archive. Michael Ga.s.ser, head of Archives and Private Collections, Rudolf Mumenthaler, and Yvonne Voegeli facilitated my access to this collection. A special thank-you for their splendid hospitality.

I found enlightening information on Pauli's sister, Hertha, at the Ma.n.u.scripts Division at the New York Public Library, which I thank for their a.s.sistance. Thanks to Susanne Blumesberger, Ursula Gabel, Christian Gastberger, and Charles Enz, Pauli's last a.s.sistant, for informative conversations on Hertha.

Interviews with Igal Talmi, at the Weizmann Inst.i.tute, Tel Aviv, and T. D. Lee at Columbia University, New York City, broadened my knowledge of Pauli the man.

Ullrich Muller-Herold and Norbert Straumann took me on several enjoyable strolls around Zurich and filled me in on the scientific milieu there during the last years of Pauli's life.

Helmut Rechenberg told me a great deal about Pauli's time in Munich as a student and his relationship with Heisenberg.

Sonu Shamdasani generously made available to me some of Jung's unpublished lectures and informed me about recent developments in Jung scholarship. Another Jung scholar, Angela Graf-Nold, helped me navigate Jung material at the ETH-Bibliothek and provided me with new Jung sources and information about his professional life in Zurich. My thanks to both.

At the May 2007 symposium on Jung and Pauli, in scenic Ascona in Switzerland, I was fortunate enough to meet a number of "Jungians" who have been extremely helpful as well as becoming friends. Special thanks to Reinhard Nesper, Harald Atmans.p.a.cher, and Suzanne Gieser. Suzanne's scholarship has been enormously helpful to me.

I appreciate informative exchanges with Finn Aaserud and Herbert van Erkelens.

In Jerusalem Josef Dan, one of the world's foremost experts on the Kabbalah, gave me valuable insights into the subject.

Thanks to Hans-Joachim Braun and Karin Reich for wonderful historical tours of the University of Hamburg, where Pauli held his first professorship.

John Barrow, Jan Munch Pederson, and Simon Singh kindly replied to questions about "strange numbers."

Thanks to Chiara Ambrosio for her a.s.sistance in gathering source materials and for chats about creativity.

Conversations with Jeremy Bernstein, Freeman J. Dyson, and T. D. Lee were valuable for my investigation of events surrounding Pauli's 1958 lecture at Columbia University, for which I am grateful.

For perceptive comments on the ma.n.u.script, I thank Mike Brady, Karl von Meyenn, and Sonu Shamdasani. I am especially grateful to Gary Steigman for his insightful and detailed critiques, which were immensely helpful.

As always, my agent and good friend Peter Tallack of The Science Factory has been a pillar of support and enthusiasm, providing sagacious advice and comments on successive drafts.

I am hugely grateful to my editor at W. W. Norton, Angela von der Lippe, for her encouragement and for her many valuable criticisms. I could not have written this book without her help. Thanks too to Erica Stern for easing me through production hurdles.

Unless indicated otherwise, all translations are mine.

My primary interest has always been in studying the creative process. The interaction between Jung and Pauli is a powerful example. To unravel the equations of the soul, they embarked on a path that led them deep into the psychology of the unconscious, which Jung called the "darkest hunting ground of our times." To tell their story I have spun a scenario based on available information. In this way I hoped to look into their minds and understand better who these men really were.

Chapters 8 and 9 explore Jung's a.n.a.lysis of Pauli's dreams. We cannot know exactly what transpired between them in the privacy of Jung's study. I have inferred the scenario in these chapters on the basis of the in-depth descriptions Jung made soon afterward and Pauli's biographical details.

For all this I bear full responsibility. Any errors that remain are my own.

Many thanks to those who provided me with photographs and who helped me locate them as well as their copyright owners. Every effort has been made to trace copyright holders; if any have been missed, I would appreciate them contacting me.

My wife, Lesley, as always full of good cheer and love, provided me with peace of mind and indispensable encouragement. She is also a fount of invaluable advice on how to turn out a readable book. I am indebted to her for all this and for much else. This book is dedicated to her.

Arthur I. Miller.

London, 2008.

www.arthurimiller.com.

The no-man's land between Physics and the Psychology of the Unconscious [is] the most fascinating yet the darkest hunting ground of our times. -CARL JUNG What is decisive for me is that I dream about physics as Mr. Jung (and other non-physicists) think about physics. Every time I have talked to Mr. Jung (about the "synchronistic" phenomenon and such), a certain spiritual fertilization takes place. -WOLFGANG PAULI

Prologue.

IS THERE a number at the root of universe? Is there a primal number? Is there a number that everything in the universe hinges on, that explains everything? Many of the major discoveries in science have emerged out of mathematics-Einstein's general theory of relativity, black holes, parallel universes, string theory, and complexity theory are only a few of many examples. All of these can be expressed in equations; yet they also depict concrete aspects of the physical universe.

Could there be a single number at the root of the universe which is, as Douglas Adams has it in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, "the answer to life, the universe and everything?" Physicists, psychologists, and mystics have pondered this question. Some have proposed the number three-as in the Trinity and the three dimensions of length, breadth, and depth. Some have argued for four-after all, we have four seasons, four directions (north, south, east, and west), and four limbs. Some have been convinced that the answer might be the very weird number 137, which on the one hand very precisely describes the DNA of light and on the other is the sum of the Hebrew letters of the word "Kabbalah." This is a matter that exercised many of the great minds of the twentieth century, among them the physicist Wolfgang Pauli and the psychoa.n.a.lyst Carl Jung.

137 is the story of two mavericks-Pauli, the scientist who dabbled in the occult, and Jung, the psychologist who was sure that science held answers to some of the questions that tormented him. Both made enormous and lasting contributions to their fields. But in their many conversations they went much further, exploring the middle ground between their two fields and striking sparks off each other.

In 1931 Wolfgang Pauli was at the height of his scientific career. He had discovered the exclusion principle-known to this day as the Pauli exclusion principle-which explains why the structure of matter is as it is and why certain stars die as they do.

Just a year earlier, he had made the audacious suggestion that there might be an as yet undiscovered particle-an outrageous suggestion in those days. Besides the electron, proton, and light quantum, which everyone took for granted, he insisted that there had to be another particle that became known as the neutrino. Twenty-six years later Pauli's neutrino was finally discovered in the laboratory.

But while his friends and colleagues competed to win science's glittering prizes, Pauli was a different kind of character. He seemed almost indifferent to success. His scientific work was not enough to give him satisfaction and his personal life too fell deeper and deeper into chaos as he trawled the bars of Hamburg, sampling the nightlife and chasing after women.

In 1932 a prize-winning film of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde came out, starring Frederic March as the tormented doctor. Pauli's life too seemed to have fractured.

The solution was obvious. He turned to the world-famous psychologist Carl Jung who, as it turned out, lived not far from him just outside Zurich.

Pauli was thirty-one. Jung, his senior by twenty-six years, was firmly established and hugely famous. He was the toast of the wealthy ladies and gentlemen of European and American high society, who came to him hoping to solve their various psychological malaises.

At the time the world was still living through the aftermath of the 1929 Wall Street crash; two years earlier in Germany the n.a.z.is had won 37 percent of the vote in a key election and Adolf Hitler was on the way to becoming chancellor; j.a.pan had recently invaded Manchuria; and Franklin Delano Roosevelt had just been elected president of the United States. But none of this much affected Jung and his wealthy patients. They were interested in more arcane and intimate matters.

Along with Sigmund Freud, Jung had opened up the concept of the mind as something that could be studied and understood-and also healed. But the approaches of the two legendary psychoa.n.a.lysts could not have been more different.

Right from the start Jung wanted to shed light on those deep recesses of the unconscious that were beyond Freud's method, which dealt only with the areas of the unconscious generated by events in one's daily life. Yet Jung was far more than just a psychologist. His interests ranged far and wide across Chinese philosophy, to alchemy and UFOs. He saw the same patterns underlying radically different ways of thinking across the world, and he was convinced that these patterns arose from the mind. He called them archetypes, essential elements of the pysche. Thus he developed the concepts of the collective unconscious and of archetypes, which are today taken for granted.

He then came up with the concept of synchronicity, which he always considered one of his most important ideas. He was sure that bonds as strong as those that linked Eastern and Western thinking could also link the apparently cold rational world of science with the supposedly irrational world of intuition and the psyche.

One area that brought all these interests together was numbers. Jung was fascinated by certain numbers-three and four-that popped up again and again in alchemy and also in religion, and in the power of numbers to predict occurrences in life, as codified in the I Ching (the Chinese Book of Changes). But it was not until he met Wolfgang Pauli that all this began to coalesce.

PAULI, a kindred spirit, was also fascinated by numbers. His infatuation with numbers had begun when he was a physics student, when his mentor Arnold Sommerfeld used to extol the wonders of whole numbers with all the fervor of a kabbalist. Among them was 137.

It was Sommerfeld who discovered this extraordinary number in 1915, while trying to solve one particular puzzling feature of atoms: the "fine structure" of spectral lines, the characteristic combination of wavelengths of light emitted and absorbed by each chemical element-the fingerprint or DNA, as it were, of each wavelength of light. It was dubbed the "fine structure constant" (which in fact equals 1/137, though for convenience physicists refer to it as 137).* From the moment 137 first popped up in his equations, he and other physicists saw that its importance went far beyond the fact that it solved this one puzzle. They quickly realized that this unique "fingerprint" was the sum of certain fundamental constants of nature, specific quant.i.ties believed to be invariable throughout the universe, quant.i.ties central to relativity and the quantum theory.

But if this one number were so important, should it not be possible to deduce it from the mathematics of these theories? Disturbingly, no one could.

The fine structure constant turns out to be exquisitely tuned to allow life as we know it to exist on our planet. Perhaps it was not surprising, then, that physicists began referring to 137 as a "mystical number."

By the time Sommerfeld stumbled across 137 in 1915, whole numbers were beginning to crop up everywhere in atomic physics. Two years before, the Danish physicist Niels Bohr had worked out that the energy levels of the electrons within atoms could be expressed with whole numbers, so-called quantum numbers. He a.s.sumed that only three quantum numbers were necessary to locate an electron in the atom, just as it takes only three numbers to locate an object in s.p.a.ce: its coordinates in the three dimensions. But then ten years later the twenty-four-year-old Pauli showed that in fact a fourth quantum number was needed. The problem was that the fourth quantum number could not be visualized.

For Pauli the problem came down to numbers: to the "difficult transition from three to four." And 137 turned out to be linked with this transition.

Three hundred years earlier, a full-scale row over a very similar issue had broken out between the mystic and scientist Johannes Kepler and the Rosicrucian Robert Fludd. Kepler argued that three was the fundamental number at the core of the universe, using arguments from Christian theology and ancient mysticism. Fludd, however, argued for four on the basis of the Kabbalah, of the four limbs, the four seasons, and the four elements (earth, water, air, and fire): G.o.d's creation of the world was a transition from two to three to fourness, he a.s.serted.

But where did 137 come in? Pauli became convinced that the number was so fundamental that it ought to be deducible from a theory of elementary particles. This quest took over his waking and sleeping life. Driven beyond endurance, he sought the help of Jung.

Jung's theory of psychology offered Pauli a way to understand the deeper meaning of the fourth quantum number and its connection with 137, one that went beyond science into the realm of mysticism, alchemy, and archetypes. Jung, for his part, saw in Pauli a treasure trove of archaic memories, as well as a great scientist who could help him put his theories on a firm footing.

THE EARLY YEARS of the twentieth century were a watershed not unlike the Renaissance. Freud's discovery of the mind as a field of study and Max Planck's discovery of the quantum nature of matter were quickly followed by Einstein's relativity theory and Bohr's theory of the atom. Then came the horrors of the First World War, which inspired a trend toward spiritualism and a return to ancient beliefs, especially in Germany. Just before the war the great German physicist Werner Heisenberg was finding solace in reading Plato. In 1927 Sommerfeld, in response to a request by a periodical for an article on astrology, wrote: Doesn't it strike one as a monstrous anachronism that in the twentieth century a respected periodical sees itself compelled to solicit a discussion about astrology? That wide circles of the educated or half-educated public are attracted more by astrology than astronomy? [We] are thus evidently confronted once again with a wave of irrationality and romanticism like that which a hundred years ago spread over Europe as a reaction against the rationalism of the eighteenth century.

Yet he himself wrote ecstatically of the mystical qualities of 137.

The search for some point of contact between physics and the mind was of key interest to many physicists, including Max Born and Werner Heisenberg-two other pioneers of quantum physics-and Pauli and Bohr. As Pauli put it: I do not believe in the possible future of mysticism in the old form. However, I do believe that the natural sciences will out of themselves bring forth a counter pole in their adherents, which connects with the old mystic elements.

All this was taking place at a time when philosophy was shifting from a positivistic approach, which excluded anything that could not be reduced to sense perceptions, to a search for a reality beyond appearances. The search for this reality became a pa.s.sionate quest in the arts as well: Pablo Pica.s.so and Wa.s.sily Kandinsky were discovering new ways to represent reality as they developed cubism and abstract expressionism; composers such as Igor Stravinsky and Arnold Schonberg were rebelling against the traditional canons of music; while writers such as James Joyce were incorporating relativity into their fiction.

PAULI told very few colleagues about his discussions with Jung. He feared their derision. Nevertheless his sessions with Jung convinced him that intuition rather than logical thought held the key to understanding the world around us. Many scientists see Pauli as the epitome of rationality and logical thinking. They a.s.sume that a scientist who worked as hard as he did, and achieved as much, must have lived strictly a life of the mind, devoted to physics. This still tends to be the image that both ordinary people and scientists themselves have of scientists.

It is important to remember Isaac Newton, who laid the foundations of modern science. For over two hundred years after his death people imagined he was a man devoid of emotions-"with his Prism and silent Face," as William Wordsworth wrote-who sat at his desk day after day working out equations.

A colleague once asked Newton what he was working on. He replied that he did physics-but only in his spare time. In the 1930s, a bundle of papers which he had kept secret came to light. These revealed that Newton had been very much a man of his time, concerned less with physics than with issues such as how big the new city of Jerusalem would have to be to receive the souls on Judgment Day, with biblical chronology and how to discern the motion of material objects relative to G.o.d. As far as he was concerned, his famous laws of motion were simply a means to work toward this end.

As the English economist John Maynard Keynes, who bought many of Newton's newly discovered papers, wrote, "Newton was not the first of the age of reason. He was the last magician."

Newton's first biographer, the nineteenth-century Scottish scientist David Brewster, was adamant that there was "no reason to suppose that Sir Isaac Newton was a believer in the doctrines of alchemy." But Newton's papers reveal just the opposite-that Newton was among the most knowledgeable alchemists of his day. We now take for granted that he should be understood as a man of his time, who lived in a world of alchemy, magic, and mysticism, like his near-contemporary, the seventeenth-century German astronomer Johannes Kepler, whom Pauli saw as an image of himself.

Scientists who have not examined Pauli's vast correspondence and writings still place him in the old Newtonian straitjacket. But Pauli was alive to the alchemical roots of science. Modern science, he believed, had come to a dead end. Perhaps the means to break through and to develop new insights was to take a radically different approach and return to science's alchemical roots.

Although a twentieth-century scientist, Pauli felt an affinity with the seventeenth century-perfectly natural to anyone who, as he did, accepted that there was, as Jung postulated, a collective unconscious.

Today a vocal minority of scientists believe in paranormal phenomena. For twenty eight years a laboratory at Princeton University tried to establish evidence for extra-sensory perception (ESP)-using card-guessing methods-as well as evidence for telekinesis, the ability of the mind to move objects. It had been privately funded to the tune of ten million dollars and closed down in 2007. Its founder, Robert G. Jahn, a pioneer in jet propulsion systems said, "it is time." He claimed to have demonstrated that test subjects "thinking high" and "thinking low" could alter a sequence of numbers flashed from a random number generator-very slightly, however, two or three flips out of ten thousand. Pauli and Jung discussed experiments of this sort. They, too, believed in powers of the mind inexplicable by the logic of physics.

The two men also discussed at great length the notion of consciousness, considered by most scientists at that time to be sheer nonsense-"off limits." Today it is a burgeoning field of research using concepts from quantum mechanics, some of which Pauli had speculated on.

MORE THAN TWENTY YEARS ago I was intrigued to discover that Pauli and Jung had co-auth.o.r.ed a book ent.i.tled The Interpretation of Nature and the Psyche. I tracked it down and read it with growing fascination. I was gripped by the new aspects of both men it revealed. As a physicist I knew about Pauli and his contributions to science and of course was well aware of Jung. But the two together, the rational Pauli with the iconoclastic Jung?

I was determined to find out more about their story. Nevertheless, many years pa.s.sed before I finally had the chance. I began my research in Zurich where I studied their letters, housed in the library of the very famous technological university, the ETH (Eidgenossische Technische Hochschule). I visited the areas where Pauli had lived, the restaurants and bars where he used to go, and the streets he used to walk, and stood outside his home in Zollikon, just outside Zurich. It was a large, nondescript, suburban detached house surrounded by trees, not the grand house I had imagined.

In Hamburg I walked the streets where Pauli had lived, worked, and played. Some of the bars he frequented in the Sankt Pauli red-light district are still there and still carry the same edge of violence.

At La Salle Pauli at the huge nuclear physics research laboratory CERN (Conseil Europeenne pour la Recherche Nucleaire), outside Geneva, where Pauli's library is housed, I looked through his books, marked in his own handwriting with his code for important pa.s.sages, both books he read before meeting Jung and during the time he knew him.

Jung's Gothic mansion, two stops on the train from Zollikon, was, I had heard, no longer open to visitors. Nevertheless I sent a letter there, addressed simply to "The resident of 228 Seestra.s.se." A few days later I received an email from Jung's grandson Andreas, inviting me to visit. A gracious and friendly man-and the spitting image of his grandfather-he showed me around Jung's vast and splendid residence. I was thrilled to step inside the s.p.a.cious high-ceilinged library where Jung and Pauli used to sit, first as patient and a.n.a.lyst and then as friends, mulling over the mind, the times in which they lived, and the civilization they knew. I looked around the dining room and put my hand on the table where they had dined. Outside the grand windows the lawn stretched down to Lake Zurich. It was the same view that the two friends used to admire as they chatted over fine wine and fine tobacco.

The table in Jung's dining room, the seventeenth-century alchemical books in his library, and Pauli's own books, with his markings, brought home to me the intensity of their common quest. For Pauli realized that quantum mechanics-despite its grandeur, and in the face of his distinguished colleagues-lacked the power to explain biological and mental processes, such as consciousness. It was not a complete theory. As he put it, "Though we now have natural sciences, we no longer have a total scientific picture of the world. Since the discovery of the quantum of action, physics has gradually been forced to relinquish its proud claim to be able to understand, in principle, the whole world." To Pauli the only hope was an amalgam of quantum mechanics and Jung's psychology.

Jung's and Pauli's was a truly unique meeting of the minds. It was, as Jung wrote, to lead both of them into "the no-man's land between Physics and the Psychology of the Unconscious...the most fascinating yet the darkest hunting ground of our times."

Dangerously Famous.

IN 1920S EUROPE, Carl Jung was a celebrity and regarded as the chief rival of the great Sigmund Freud. While Freud had carved out the new field of psychoa.n.a.lysis, it was Jung who made it fashionable. He extended the boundaries by using dream images to explore the unconscious more deeply than Freud had, probing into the archetypes built into our minds. He was a spell-binding lecturer and recipient of adulation both from colleagues and a host of women whom he referred to as his "fur-coat ladies." The rich and famous flocked to his fortresslike mansion on the sh.o.r.e of Lake Zurich, not only as prospective patients but also to enjoy his inspiring conversation. Among them were the McCormicks of the Chicago newspaper dynasty, H. G. Wells, and Hugh Walpole, who remembered him as looking "like a large genial cricketer." Some came just to gaze at the "primitive" who washed his own jeans with his "powerful arms" on the lawn outside his mansion.

Jung was, as he said himself, "dangerously famous," so much so that patients sometimes had to wait a year for an appointment. Psychoa.n.a.lysis had become all the rage and "going to Jung was somehow very chic and modern," as a wealthy American female client put it.

But there was still something missing. Jung was concerned that his approach to psychoa.n.a.lysis needed a scientific underpinning, but he didn't have the requisite scientific background. To develop his ideas, he needed to work with someone who was au fait with the latest developments in science.

Boyhood.

Jung was born on July 26, 1875, in the village of Kesswil on Lake Constance, on the northern border of Switzerland, to an impoverished Protestant pastor with a pa.s.sion for learning. His mother, Emilie, had had three stillborn children before young Carl's arrival and had withdrawn into a world of ghosts and spirits. Jung's father moved from parish to parish but nothing seemed to help her. This often enraged him, leading to violent arguments between the two, during which young Carl would take refuge in his father's book-lined study.

Embarra.s.sed by his shabby clothes and poverty, the boy for the most part kept away from others. His main interest was in his own rich dreams, in ghosts, in stories of the supernatural, and in seances. His charmed solitude came to an end with the birth of a sister, when he was nine. From then on he had to share with her the little attention he received from his parents.

Young Carl spent long periods of time staring at a stone and talking to it. One day he carved the top of a wooden ruler into a manikin and painted it to look like a village elder. He hid it in the attic, took it presents, and even wrote letters to it. Years later, he realized that what he had created was actually a totem-a primeval object of worship. It was a straightforward case of "archaic psychic components" entering "the individual psyche without any direct line of tradition." Thus he found in himself what he would later call the "collective unconscious."

By the age of eleven young Carl's brilliance was clear. He was also bigger and stronger than his cla.s.smates and always up for a fight. By fifteen he had read most of the books in his father's study, from adventure novels to Nietzsche's Thus Spake Zarathustra and Goethe's Faust (both "a tremendous experience for me," he recalled), as well as Kant, the Grail legends, and Shakespeare.

Jung's family was so poor that the only university he could go to was Basel, near enough that he could live at home. The question was what to study. He was interested in archaeology, but the university did not offer it. Then he had two dreams. In one he was digging up the bones of ancient animals, while the other concerned protozoa. From this he decided he should study some form of natural science. But if he studied zoology he would be bound to end up as a teacher. So he opted for medicine, even though his father had to pet.i.tion for a stipend to support him. He started at the university in 1895.

Jung's calling.

By his final year Jung had realized that his real interest lay in probing the secrets of the psyche: "Here, finally, was the place where nature would collide with spirit." Following up his childhood interest in dreams and ghosts, he wrote a dissertation ent.i.tled "On the Psychology and Pathology of the So-Called Occult Phenomena."

After a brilliant university career, Jung was immediately offered a position at the Burgholzli Mental Hospital by its director, the world-famous Dr. Eugen Bleuler, who had coined the term "schizophrenia." The hospital is in Zurich, sixty miles from Basel. Jung began work there in December 1900, when he was twenty-five. Physically so big that he dwarfed colleagues, handsome and br.i.m.m.i.n.g with enthusiasm, with a voice and laugh so loud they filled the room, Jung had a magnetic presence. He soon became the director's protege.

A huge, sprawling, austere building, the Burgholzli loomed over Lake Zurich. To discourage thoughts of suicide it was built in such a way that none of the inmates could see the water. Inside, the building was spa.r.s.e. Apart from the doctors' offices there were no comfortable chairs, only wooden benches. The working day at Burgholzli rarely ended before 10 p.m. Jung found the regime exhausting and missed the intellectual life of Basel with its late night philosophical conversations. But he was convinced that psychiatry was his metier.

Emma.