137 - Arthur I. Miller [105]
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 coauthored 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 horsemen 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 professorship.” 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 analyst 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 hell, 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 hellish 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