137 - Arthur I. Miller [101]
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 classical physics—space, 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 entitled 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