137: Jung, Pauli, and the Pursuit of a Scientific Obsession Part 7

The awakening of the sleeping king, shown as a judgment of Paris, with Hermes Trismigestus as psychopomp. (Thomas Aquinas, De alchimia [MS, 16th century].) The serpent Uroboros.

A few days later Pauli dreams that he is rooted to the center of a circle formed by a serpent biting its own tail.

Jung reaches down another book, which has a picture of the creature whom alchemists called the Uroboros, a serpent who devours his own tail and gives birth to himself. Uroboros slays and is slain, resurrects and is resurrected, in an eternal and magical transformative process.

Uroboros symbolizes the process in which the four elements, earth, water, air, and fire, are transformed into each other. (Abraham Eleazar, Uraltes chymisches Werk [18th century].) The Uroboros symbolizes the eternal circle, the circular process by which the four elements (earth, water, air, and fire) transform into one another. The circular form taken by the Uroboros is also the first hint of the symmetrical form of a mandala, suggesting that change is beginning. The area that the Uroboros encircles is a protected area, the temenos, where the dreamer-Pauli-can safely come face to face with his unconscious.

The veiled woman.

Then Pauli dreams of a veiled woman.

This is the first time the veiled woman has entered Pauli's dreams. She has done so because the serpent has created a protected area where she can safely appear. Jung tells him she is his feminine side-his anima. The appearance of a person, rather than a symbol, means that the unconscious is stirring. Something has awoken. Pauli's anima will lead him to his unconscious and reveal its contents, but he must beware; there may be unpleasant surprises in store. He may find irrationality lurking there.

Jung shows Pauli a picture of veiled women like the woman in his dream moving up and down a staircase, symbolizing the ascent of the soul through the seven spheres of the planets to the sun-G.o.d, from whom the soul originates. (In ancient pre-Copernican astronomy, there were seven planets. Copernicus realized there were only six; one of the seven was the moon.) Perhaps Pauli's dream relates to an initiation rite and moving up the staircase symbolizes the beginning of his transformation into a new person.

Jung also examines the role of woman and of the eternal female in Pauli's personal life. Jung a.s.sumed that Pauli must have originally projected his anima onto his mother, as men usually do. No doubt this made Pauli think of his mother, Bertha, who had died six years earlier. The mother symbolizes the source of life-the unconscious, where Pauli's feeling function is hidden. While a man continues to project his anima wholly onto his mother, his feelings too-his Eros-remain identified with her, pushing all other women into the background. This sort of man takes a pa.s.sive view of life, for he is still in an infantile state. His relationships are pa.s.sionless, usually restricted to prost.i.tutes.

Jacob's dream, as depicted by William Blake (19th century).

As Jung says, Pauli's behavior exactly fit this a.n.a.lysis: The dreamer repeatedly found himself in the most amazing situations. For instance, he once found himself in the midst of a great row in a restaurant, and a man threatened to throw him out of the window on the first floor.* Then he grew afraid of himself. He did not understand how he got into such a situation. Anyone outside could see very clearly how he stumbled into it. But to himself, he was a victim of circ.u.mstances; he had no control over his outer conditions because he was still an embryo suspended in the amniotic fluid where things simply happen. He was a victim of circ.u.mstances in this way because he was not related. This is what happens to such a nice boy continuously. He has one affair after another, and is always the victim.

Recognizing himself, Jung adds, Pauli "says: 'What could I do?' like that, like a so-called innocent girl, 'What could I do?' He held my both hands and kissed me." Through his dream work and his intuition, Jung has quickly accessed the depths of Pauli's being and brought some of his most disquieting behavior into the light of day.

Pauli's mother.

Soon afterward Pauli dreams of his mother pouring water from one basin into another.

Later, Pauli has a sudden recollection: the other basin had belonged to his sister, Hertha. Perhaps the dream means that Pauli's mother has transferred his anima-his feminine side-to his sister. His mother is superior to him, but his sister is his equal. Thus in this dream he is freeing himself from his mother's domination and also from his infantile att.i.tude toward life.

Pauli had always kept in touch with Hertha. At the age of seventeen she had left the gymnasium to study acting at the Academy of Dramatic Arts in Vienna. Two years later she made her first stage appearance in Breslau, now the Polish city of Wroclav. She was such a dazzling success that the theater impresario, Max Reinhardt, swept her off to Berlin to join his famous German Theater. There she widened her scope to perform on radio and in film. Pauli often boasted about his glamorous sister and enjoyed visiting her backstage after performances. It was also a way to meet other actresses.

Pauli confesses to Jung that all the women he has ever fallen in love with either looked like Hertha or, like Kathe Deppner, were her friends. But he has never felt close to her. He tells Jung that Hertha was born in his seventh year. Seven is a mystical number: the number of planets on their spheres, the number of days in the week, the number of orifices in the head, the number of voices heard by Moses on Mount Sinai. And seven marks the moment when his anima-his feminine aspect-was born, when a female other than his mother entered his life and he was no longer the center of attention.

Jung predicts that his anima will soon pa.s.s from Hertha to an unknown woman mired in his unconscious whom he still confuses with his dark side or shadow. This process had already begun, when Hertha married a fellow actor named Carl Behr in 1929, a union Pauli disapproved of. Jung interprets this in psychological terms. Pauli had been critical of her marriage because it meant she could not carry his anima any more, and he now had to share her with another man. The loss of his mother subst.i.tute-Hertha-further added to his troubled state of mind.

To free himself from his mother and Hertha will be a gradual process, says Jung. He will need Jung's help to work out his relationship to the as-yet unknown new woman.

The sun worshipper.

A short time later Pauli dreams that an unknown woman is standing on a globe, worshipping the sun.

The unknown woman has appeared at last, says Jung. She is Pauli's anima and he sees her as a sun worshipper because she belongs to the esoteric beliefs of the ancient world. By separating his intellect from his anima, Pauli has buried the anima in this ancient world. In the same way in the modern world, the dominance of rationality, essential for the development of science, has relegated the anima to a backwater in the human mind.

"Atmavictu," totem carved by Jung in 1920. He claimed that it reminded him of the one he had carved as a boy and that his unconscious supplied the name.

Jung at Lake Zurich, 1920.

Jung in his library in 1946, when he and Pauli resumed their conversations.

An excerpt from one of Jung's alchemical treatises.

1936 Congress at the Niels Bohr Inst.i.tute, Copenhagen. Front row, left to right, Wolfgang Pauli, Pascual Jordan, Werner Heisenberg, and sixth from the left, Otto Stern; third row, sixth from the left, Paul Dirac; fifth row, second from the left, Victor Weisskopf, and fourth from the left, Hendrik Kramers. Standing at left, Niels Bohr and Leon Rosenfeld.

Max Born tugs Pauli's ear in punishment for sleeping late and missing morning lectures, Hamburg, 1925.

Pauli and Ehrenfest sharing a joke, 1929.

Pauli lecturing on his and Heisenberg's theory of quantum electrodynamics, Copenhagen, 1929.

Pauli on vacation in Pontresna, Switzerland, winter 1931/1932.

Hertha, Pauli's glamorous sister, in 1933.

Sommerfeld (on left) and Pauli, in Geneva, October 1934.

Pauli's father with Franca, 1936.

Pauli and Franca shortly after their marriage.

Pauli and Wu in Berkeley between 1941 and 1945.

Scherrer and Pauli, after World War II.

Heisenberg and Pauli in 1957, discussing their unified field theory.

The coniunctio of the sun and the moon. (Salomon Trismosin, Splendor solis [MS, 1582].) Now that Pauli's anima has appeared, his consciousness is flooded with energy surging up from his unconscious.

The ape-man.

Then Pauli dreams that a monstrous ape-man is threatening him with a club. A figure appears and drives the monster away.

Jung shows Pauli an alchemical text written four hundred years earlier, in which there is an image that exactly mirrors the monster in Pauli's dream. "You see, your dream is no secret," Jung tells him. "You are not the victim of a pathological insult and not separated from mankind by an inexplicable psychosis. You are merely ignorant of certain experiences well within the bounds of human knowledge and understanding." Far from being the unique fantasies of a madman, Pauli's dreams are phrased in precisely the same imagery in which humankind has delineated the inner quest-the quest for oneself-over hundreds of years. For Pauli the picture of the ape-man enables him to see "with his own eyes the doc.u.mentary evidence of his sanity."

There are creatures in the psyche about which we know nothing at all, says Jung. He interprets the figure in Pauli's dream who scares the monster away as Mephistopheles-Pauli's intellect, his rational side.

Pauli has now reached a turning point in his therapy. He has used "active imagination" to reach down into the contents of the unconscious which lie just below the level of consciousness-a method Jung developed from studying the trance states of shamans and medicine men. To do this Pauli has to suspend his critical faculties, to permit emotions, feelings, fantasies, obsessive thoughts, and even waking dream-images to bubble up from the unconscious-a particularly difficult process for a rationalist like him. The danger, warns Jung, is that the patient can become trapped in a world of phantasmagoria.

A fifteenth-century version of the "wild man." (Codex Urba.n.u.s Latinus [15th century].) The perpetual motion machine.

A few weeks later Pauli dreams of a pendulum clock ticking on forever without any friction, a perpetual motion machine.

Jung is pleased that Pauli's rational brain has not stepped in and rejected this machine as an impossibility. He interprets it as the second appearance of the eternal circle. Pauli's dream of the serpent Uroboros encircling the dreamer was the first appearance of a circle-a mandala-and the first evidence of a change in Pauli and was quickly followed by the first appearance of the unknown woman, his anima. Similarly this second circle means a step forward in the process.

Three becomes four.

Then Pauli dreams that he is with three other people, one of whom is the unknown woman.

Jung interprets the four people as the four functions of the fully rounded personality-thinking, feeling, intuition, and sensation. In his dream, Pauli does not converse with the unknown woman, his anima. She remains in the darkness of his unconscious, for she is his feeling function, which is still submerged. Jung's a.n.a.lysis is that "the feminine nature of the inferior function derives from its contamination with the unconscious as personified by the anima." In other words, the inferior function-feeling-is contaminated by being submerged and therefore close to the unconscious, and this is why it is feminine.

As Pauli opens himself up to allow these different parts of his being to appear, he is also exposing himself to danger. Emerging out of the unconscious, the anima is imbued with tendencies which, when brought to conscious life, may manifest themselves as antisocial behavior. Men normally resist the urgings of their animas, which are often the cause of trouble. But to repress such tendencies could result in the development of a neurosis.

Jung insists that mythology-and its descendent, alchemy-requires the female element to emerge from darkness to become the fourth ent.i.ty. This will set the stage for the union of irreconcilable opposites-man and woman-symbolizing every primordial opposing pair, such as brother and sister.

To ill.u.s.trate this, he tells a story. The Babylonian creation myth, the "Enuma Elish," describes a matriarchal world ruled by the G.o.ddess Tiamat, the salt water, who represents the unfathomably deep ocean-chaos. Tiamat was murdered by her grandson Marduk in an act of unimaginable violence. The result, says Jung, was a shift in the world's consciousness toward the masculine, casting femininity into the darkness of the unconscious. Pagan and Christian myths, alchemy, and Eastern religions denote odd numbers as masculine. Thus in Christianity the masculine Trinity, three, is also the One. Even numbers, conversely, are feminine. The time has now come to release the feminine unconscious, to create balance by turning three into four.

Pauli is now ready to plunge into the sea of the unconscious. But he still feels an unbearable tension between the conscious and the unconscious, rationality and irrationality.

The square.

Then one night Pauli has a terrifying nightmare. People circulate around a square formed by four serpents. As they walk they must let themselves be bitten at each of the four corners by foxes and dogs. Pauli is also bitten. In the center of the square, a ceremony is going on to transform animals into men. Two priests touch a shapeless animal lump with a serpent, transforming it into a human head.

Jung is elated that Pauli has dreamed of a square for the first time. He presumes that it arose from the circle as a result of the four people who appeared in Pauli's earlier dreams. Like the s.p.a.ce enclosed by the Uroboros serpent, Jung says, the square is a temenos, a stage, a protected area where the drama can be played out.

In the dream of the ape-man, Pauli was threatened by a monstrous ape and saved by his intellect in the form of a Mephistopheles figure. Jung interprets this new dream to mean that man, in the prehuman state of his animal ancestors-the shapeless animal lump-is about to be created anew. Pauli is about to be reborn.

The leftward march of the people around the square signifies that Pauli is now focused on the center. He is moving toward centering the psyche, toward individuation, reaching toward his unconscious. Alchemical parallels enter Pauli's dreams, permitting a creative play of images as a way of fusing the apparent irreconcilables of the conscious and the unconscious. This fusion is represented by the alchemical marriage, the coniunctio, the union of opposites: fire and water, man and woman, yang and yin.

Archetypal images depict the alchemical marriage as s.e.xual union. Pauli can now sense the alchemical opposition between three and four, the trinity and the quaternity. Jung tells Pauli the axiom of Maria Prophetissa, spoken seventeen centuries ago: "One becomes two, two becomes three, and out of the third comes One as the fourth." Pauli's psychological journey-a story of threes and fours-is coming together with his scientific journey.

A temenos-a symbolic city representing the center of the earth, with four protecting walls laid out in a square. (Michael Maier, Viatorium, hoc est, De montibus planetarum septem [17th century].) Marriage of water and fire, the union of irreconcilables. Each figure has four hands to symbolize the many different combinations of fours. (Ancient Indian painting; Nikolaus Muller, Glauben, Wissen und Kunst der alten Hindus [1882].) Psychic union of opposites. (Rosarium philosophorum [1550].) Coniunctio-the alchemical wedding-is a symbol for the alchemists' eternal quest to create the philosopher's stone or lapis through the fusion of the four opposing elements. Pauli's nightmare is an attempt to achieve individuation, like the alchemists' striving for the lapis.

The primal hermaphroditic nature of man and woman-essential to Jung's psyschology in which the female anima exists in man-relates to the four, the quaternary. The Rosarium philosophorum, a thirteenth-century alchemical treatise, provides a graphic account of this process. "Make a round circle of man and woman, extract therefrom a quadrangle and from it a triangle. Make the circle round, and you will have the Philosopher's Stone." Thus Jung explains it.

The conscious and unconscious have touched as the alchemical marriage takes place. Now they try to fly apart. But the magic circle traced by the walking figures in Pauli's dream prevents the unconscious from breaking out; the conscious mind takes a stand.

Reflecting on the image of two priests creating a head out of a shapeless ma.s.s in Pauli's dream, Jung shows Pauli a fifteenth-century image of G.o.d creating Adam from a lump of clay. Perhaps this is the deeper meaning of the image. Pauli is re-creating himself.

In his dream Pauli is bitten by foxes and dogs but this is a good sign, for transformations in the psyche require suffering.

As for the serpents in Pauli's dream, rites of transformation involving serpents are standard archetypes. The serpent appears in Gnostic ceremonies of healing and in their representations of Christ, sometimes on a cross.

Squaring the circle to make the two s.e.xes one whole. (Michael Maier, Scrutinium chymic.u.m [1616].) G.o.d creates Adam from the clay of materia prima . (Hartmann Schedel, Das Buch der Chroniken [1493].) Jung sees the square formed by the four serpents as an archetypal ground plan revealing an ordering of the unconscious. But why four?

The basis of alchemy is the reconciliation of opposites. In Jung's psychological theory of types, the least differentiated of the four functions remains in the collective unconscious; in Pauli's case, it is the feeling function. The problem is how to fuse this fourth function with the other three.

When the feeling function emerges into consciousness it releases the Self. Since the inferior function signifies the feminine, the result is a wavering between masculine and feminine. The development of the symbols in Pauli's dreams is a sign of the healing process.

Pagan rites of transformation in the Middle Ages. (Joseph Hammer-Purgstall, Memoire sur deux coffrets gnostiques du moyen age [1835].) Left and right.

Some time later Pauli dreams that a group of soldiers armed with antiquated rifles tries to prevent a revolution in Switzerland by "completely throttling" the left. When he is angry, Pauli tells Jung, he often threatens to "throttle" someone. Jung suggests that the soldiers represent the antiquated view that left is evil.

To find perfect balance, says Jung, left and right-the unconscious and the conscious-have to be like mirror images. Pauli needs to achieve this, to accept the conscious and the unconscious on an equal footing.

The night club.

Shortly afterward Pauli dreams he is in a squalid night club. It is a place where feelings do not count, which makes him feel safe. It's like the old days again. There are a few bedraggled prost.i.tutes there. He argues with the unsavory proprietor about the meaning of left and right. He wants to find symmetry, but he is afraid. He is still suspicious of the left, the unconscious. Angrily he walks out and takes a taxi traveling counterclockwise around the sides of a square. Back in the night club, he tells the proprietor, "The left is the mirror-image of the right. Whenever I feel like that, as a mirror-image, I am at one with myself." The man replies pensively, "Now that's better." Jung adds that the man has left one thing unsaid: "but still not good enough!"

A man of unpleasant aspect.

Two days later Pauli dreams he is sitting at a round table with "a certain man of unpleasant aspect." At the center is a gla.s.s filled with a gelatinous ma.s.s. The round table, Jung says, suggests wholeness. The man sharing it is Pauli's shadow, his dark side, made up of all the qualities that he and others find so repellent. Pauli's anima is absent. He has finally succeeded in separating his anima from his shadow. His recognition that his shadow is separate from his anima is an enormous step forward. His anima is no longer tainted with moral inferiority. She is finally able fully to a.s.sume her role as the mediator between the conscious and the unconscious. At the same time the amorphous ma.s.s, or prima materia, comes to life.

He dreams again. The vessel on the table is now a uterus, a symbol which stands for the alchemical vessel in which the chaos of the prima materia is transformed by degrees into the lapis, the Self. It is a moment of creation-the beginning of Pauli's rebirth.

For Jung too the work with Pauli was a journey of discovery, of magical transformations. For both of them it was a way to enter "the no-man's-land between Physics and the Psychology of the Unconscious...the most fascinating yet the darkest hunting ground of our times."

Mandalas.

FROM EARLY on in Pauli's dream journey, circles had begun to appear as a pattern emerged. The first had been the serpent Uroboros biting its tail, which Jung recognized as a primitive form of mandala. The circle appeared again in a more developed form in Pauli's dream of a perpetual motion machine. His nightmare of people circ.u.mambulating a square in which a human head is being created out of an animal ma.s.s took place not in a circle but in a square, which Jung interpreted as reflecting the four functions of a.n.a.lytical psychology, the four people of Pauli's dreams, and perhaps also the four quantum numbers that Pauli had discovered.

Jung's description of the philosopher's stone-"Make a round circle of man and woman, extract therefrom a quadrangle and from it a triangle. Make the circle round, and you will have the Philosopher's Stone"-is also a description of the cla.s.sic Tibetan Buddhist mandala. At the most basic level this is the ground plan of a stupa, a Buddhist temple constructed of a hemispherical mound within a square. Worshippers always circ.u.mambulate stupas in a clockwise direction, to the right; leftward motion is believed to be evil (hence the word "sinister"). Jung's interpretation was that the right led toward the conscious and the left toward the unconscious. The picture makes it clear that the circle contains the square, the four points of the compa.s.s, and thus all of human life.

Lamaistic Vajra mandala. (Commentary by Jung in R. Wilhelm, The Secret of the Golden Flower [1949].) As the mandalas in Pauli's dreams became more perfect, Jung took this as an indication that he was moving closer in his psychic journey toward individuation-creating a healthy persona. Pauli's dreaming and drawing of mandalas was a clear sign of a growing balance in the mind between the conscious and the unconscious.

Mandalas appear in cultures across the globe and deep into history-from Palaeolithic rock paintings, the mandalas of ancient Egypt, and medieval mandalas with Christ at the center and the four evangelists in the corners, to the sand paintings of the Navaho and the mandalas that play a key part in the religions of India, Tibet, and the Far East. The mandala can be a circle or a square, but it always consists of four objects symmetrically placed around a center that is the seat and birthplace of the G.o.ds. As we have seen, four is an age-old symbol representing, depending on the culture, the four rivers of Paradise, the four directions, the four seasons, and the four elements.

Pythagoras saw the square as the symbol of the soul and in Gnosticism and Hebraism it shared the holiness of the four numbers of the Pythagorean tetraktys. In many religions the square has magical, protective qualities. Thus, for Jung four-not three-was the archetypal foundation of the human psyche. He wrote of how amazing it was that the unconscious should present the same images to people across the globe and across time.

Pauli's first mandalas.

Pauli first dreams of a distorted mandala. He tries to make it symmetrical, but fails. The horizontal arm is longer than the vertical one, which Jung interprets as a lack of depth-that the ego still dominates in Pauli's psyche. Each arm of the mandala holds a bowl, which Pauli draws as circles. Each is filled with liquid. One is red, one yellow, and one green, but the fourth is colorless, for the fourth basic color, blue, is missing. (To alchemists the rainbow was made up of four colors corresponding to the four Aristotelian elements-red [fire], yellow [air], green [water] and blue [earth].) The mandala in Pauli's dream is not only distorted but incomplete.

Nevertheless, the fact that Pauli is drawing mandalas is a good sign. In alchemy one of the ways to produce the fusion of opposites in the philosopher's stone and the alchemical wedding is to create images. Pauli does precisely this in his fastidious recording of his dreams accompanied by his drawings. In Jung's a.n.a.lytical psychology this shows he is grasping the inner essence of things and depicting their nature as accurately as possible.

Pauli's distorted mandala.

In his scientific life Pauli was well aware of the importance of the visual imagination. In the 1930s physics was still in a "period of spiritual and human confusion," as it had been in the 1920s when Pauli had begun to search for a new way to create the true image of the counterintuitive world of the atom. There was no visual image for Pauli's fourth quantum number and this had helped to destroy the visual imagery of Bohr's theory of the atom as a miniature solar system.

The world clock.

Then Pauli has a dream that he calls "the great vision-the vision of the world clock." It is an impression of "the most sublime harmony," he tells Jung, and fills him with happiness and peace: There is a vertical and a horizontal circle, having a common center. This is a world clock. It is supported by a black bird. The vertical circle is a blue disk with a white border divided into 4 8 = 32 part.i.tions. A pointer rotates upon it. The horizontal circle consists of four colors. On it stand four little men with pendulums and around it is laid the ring that was once dark and is now golden.... The "clock" has three rhythms or pulses: The small pulse: the pointer on the blue vertical disk advances by 1/32.

The middle pulse: one complete revolution of the pointer. At the same time the horizontal circle advances by 1/32.

The great pulse: 32 middle pulses are equal to one revolution of the golden ring.

But what does it all mean? Jung sees in Pauli's world clock a bringing together of all the allusions in his earlier dreams in which its symbols appeared in fragments-the circle, the globe, the square, rotation, the cross, quaternity, and time. In this new dream there is perfect symmetry.

Pauli's "world clock."

Pauli's world clock has three rhythms or pulses. First there is the small pulse of the vertical ring, which is divided into thirty-two segments. A pointer ticks around them one at a time. When the pointer has pa.s.sed through all the segments, the middle circle advances by 1/32-the middle pulse. When the middle circle has undergone a complete revolution, "the great pulse occurs"-a single revolution of the golden ring.

The vertical blue circle intersects a circle divided into four parts colored red, green, orange, and blue. On each quarter stands a grotesque dwarf which Jung interprets as a Cabiri, dark G.o.ds dating back to ancient Greece who protect navigation. In Jung's a.n.a.lysis they are there to guide Pauli in his journey into the unconscious. Each holds a pendulum. The pulse of the blue circle starts the entire process. Pauli notes the key role of the number thirty-two. Thirty-two is the product of four times eight-4 8.

This seems strange. But then Jung points out that thirty-two is a key number in the Kabbalah, signifying wisdom. According to the Kabbalah, thirty-two can be written as the sum of twenty-two (the number of letters in the Hebrew alphabet) and ten (the branches of the Sephirot tree). There are also thirty-two mysterious paths of wisdom.

Pauli has finally dreamed a fully fledged three-dimensional mandala. But Jung is, at first, at a loss as to what it means. What does Pauli mean when he describes his vision as "the most sublime harmony"? It seems to signify wholeness in Pauli's psyche, but why does he state so firmly that he is now at peace with himself? Jung wonders if he is missing some essential clue. Perhaps by "harmony," Pauli means musical harmony, the harmony of the spheres in the sense in which Kepler used the term. Yet the circles are not particularly harmonic; they differ in character and movement.

Another problem is that a mandala always has a sacred object or image at its center. Pauli's has none. The center is nothing but a mathematical point formed by the intersection of the diameters of two circles. It is effectively empty.