137 - Arthur I. Miller [114]
This self-assessment was corroborated by Marie-Louise von Franz, who said of him: “He was highly intelligent, very honest in his thinking, but otherwise a very immature big boy in his feelings…. He had a patriarchal outlook on women. Women were pleasant things to play with, but not something to take seriously.”
Pauli described his dream to Fierz as well as to Jung. Fierz asked rhetorically, “To where is this journey?” He pointed out that the formula Pauli had written on the blackboard referred to optics as well as magnetism. The combined subject is called magneto-optics and concerns how light is transformed when it is passed through a material immersed in a magnetic field. Pauli had made important advances in it, one of which was this formula. Fierz reminded Pauli that magnetism was to do with attraction—the attraction of the north and south poles—while optics refers to visualizations. “What is the connection for us of these magnetic visualizations?” he asked.
“The connection,” he continued, answering his own question, “is an alchemical one which concerns a transformation leading to an unfolding of events. How so and why so, you know much better than others from personal experience. ‘The magneto-optical transformation and the 4 quantum numbers,’ this is the key to your biographical experience.” But Fierz did not know the meaning of the journey in the dream or how it related to the alchemical notion of transformation as Jung reinterpreted it.
In fact Pauli was about to make a very significant train journey.
Brief encounter
Pauli told the story of his journey in three different ways in three different letters: to his friend Paul Rosbaud, the Scientific Director of Pergamon Press; to Fierz; and to Jung. The events took place during a trip to Hamburg between November 29 (full moon night) and December 1. Pauli also described the trip to Bohr. He referred to it only as “this ‘road to yesterday,’” with no details.
Pauli’s trip to Hamburg on November 29 was to give a lecture at the university there on “Science and Western Thought.” He spoke on how important it was to reconcile the rational-critical (that is, Western science) with the mystical-irrational (that is, Eastern thought) to try to create a single framework of the physical and the psychical. It was an important lecture for him because it was one of the very few times he ever spoke in public on this topic. “It is precisely by these means,” he concluded, “that the scientist can more or less consciously tread a path of inner salvation. Slowly then develop inner images, fantasies or ideas, compensatory to the external situation, which indicate the possibility of a mutual approach of poles in the pairs of opposites.”
Early that evening, at precisely 17.00 hours, the phone in his hotel room rang. Pauli picked up the receiver. He recognized the voice immediately. It was the beautiful, blonde girlfriend from his Sankt Pauli days whom he had abruptly dumped when she had become a morphine addict. In writing about this meeting to his friends, he kept the woman’s name a secret.
Ten years earlier, she said, she had seen his name in a newspaper, announcing that he had won the Nobel Prize. But she couldn’t track him down. She didn’t know where he was living. Then she spotted an advertisement in a newspaper saying that he was to give a lecture in Hamburg. His hotel was also named.
Pauli was excited to hear from her and curious as to what had become of her. But he was also apprehensive. Even though so many years had passed since then, he still felt the old dread of mixing his night and day selves. In the end he agreed to meet her on the day he was due to leave, in the lobby of his hotel, the Hotel Reichshof,