137 - Arthur I. Miller [113]
Fierz wrote: “Pauli himself thoroughly believed in his effect. He has told me that he senses the mischief already before as a disagreeable tension, and when the anticipated misfortune then actually hits—another one!—he feels strangely liberated and lightened. It is quite legitimate to understand the ‘Pauli effect’ as a synchronistic phenomenon as conceived by Jung.”
Second Intermezzo—Road to Yesterday
The dream
ON NOVEMBER 4, 1955, Pauli’s father died. By now the two had reconciled and Pauli was deeply affected. It felt like a defining episode in his life. As he put it, “the shadow with me was projected onto my father for a long time, and I had to learn gradually to distinguish between the dream figure of the shadow and my real father.”
Despite the rift between them after the suicide of Pauli’s mother, Wolfgang Sr. had been always immensely proud of his son’s achievements. Eventually father and son managed to overcome their differences and were back on good terms. Perhaps their reconciliation was a combination of time healing emotional wounds and, of course, Jung’s therapy.
When Germany invaded Austria, in 1938, it placed Pauli’s father in great danger. For despite his conversion, he had been born a Jew. Pauli immediately arranged for him to move into Switzerland. Wolfgang Sr. had to leave all his possessions behind and arrived in Zürich with only a suitcase, accompanied by his wife, Maria (Pauli’s “wicked stepmother”). Initially they stayed with Pauli and Franca. Franca did not get along with Maria. In the end Maria decided to return to Vienna and was not reunited with her husband until after the war. In Switzerland Wolfgang Sr. was welcomed at the chemistry department of the University of Zürich, where he continued his scientific research. After he died Maria had severe monetary problems, often turning to her stepson for help. She also had an alcohol problem.
Soon after Pauli’s father’s death, Jung’s wife Emma also died, followed by the elegant mathematician Hermann Weyl. Weyl’s cremation was set for December 12 at 17.00 hours.
A few weeks earlier, on October 24, Pauli had had a dream. In it he is on an express train, departing at 17.00 hours—the exact time of Weyl’s cremation. The train encounters an obstacle and has to swerve around it. Then Pauli goes into a church with Franca and a Swiss friend whom he calls Mr. X. In the church “some strangers” are waiting—the strangers who occur again and again in Pauli’s dreams. There is a blackboard in the church. Pauli goes up to it and writes some complicated equations to do with the quantum theory of magnetism.
Then a famous preacher appears, the “Master” or the “great stranger.” He walks to the blackboard and says in French that the subject of that day’s sermon “will be the formulas of Professor Pauli. There is here an expression with four quantities,” taken from one of Pauli’s equations on magnetic effects. The equation reads: HN/V. Mu () is the extent to which a material is magnetized, H the magnetic field produced by the number (N) of electrons in the magnet, and V is the magnet’s volume.
In all, there are four symbols—the number four again. Later Pauli recalled that in Jung’s books, particularly Aion, he had mentioned that magnets were often considered a source of magical power, in that they contain opposite poles, north and south, in a single object.
In Pauli’s dream the strangers become excited and shout in French “parle, parle, parle”—“speak, speak, speak.” As always they want him to speak about feelings (France being the country of feelings) and about physics and psychology. (In his account of this to Jung, Pauli comments humorously, “In my dreams, by the way, I often speak somewhat better French than I do when I am awake.”) But he is reluctant to speak up, fearing for his reputation among fellow scientists. His heart begins to pound so hard that he wakes up.
Musing over his dream, Pauli interprets the church as a new house, free from any struggle between opposites. Franca is with him. He is at one with himself.
Through