137 - Arthur I. Miller [120]
Pauli’s curious dream of 1954 had occurred right after he finished his work on mirror symmetry. He was convinced that “unconscious motives play a role” in creative thinking, especially in the case of symmetry. “‘Mirroring’ is an archetype [and] this has something to do with physics. Physics relies on a connection of an image reflected in a mirror and between mind and nature,” he said in an interview in 1957. He recalled having “vivid, almost parapsychological dreams about mirroring, while I worked mathematically during the day.” The mathematical work seemed to cause “some archetype [to be] constellated [that is, to emerge into consciousness] which subsequently made me think about mirroring.” The connection, he concluded was “a kind of synchronicity, because there are unconscious motives when one is involved in something.”
Other examples of synchronicity soon cropped up. Two months after the ground-breaking experiment that spelled the end of parity, in March 1957, Pauli’s friend, Max Delbrück, an eminent biologist, sent him an article on a one-cell, light-sensitive mushroom known as a phycomyces.
A few weeks later Pauli was talking about psychophysics with Karl Kerényi, an authority on Greek mythology and a close friend of Jung’s. Pauli told him about some dreams he had had in which he was wandering about in the constellation of Perseus. Synchronisms started to spring up. For a start, Perseus contains a binary, or double star, known as Algol. Moreover, in Greek mythology, Perseus fought Medusa while looking at her reflection in a mirror. Shortly afterward Pauli came across an article by Kerényi on Perseus. It concluded with an ancient Greek pun about Perseus’s founding of the city of Mycenae. It had been so named after a mushroom called myces—the very mushroom that had been the subject of Delbrück’s scientific paper.
Mirror images
That same month—March 1957—Pauli had a dream in which a “youngish, dark-haired man, enveloped in a faint light” hands him a manuscript. Pauli shouts, “How dare you presume to ask me to read it? What do you think you are doing?” He wakes up feeling upset and irritated.
Writing about the dream to Jung, Pauli suggested it revealed his “conventional objections to certain ideas—and my fear of them,” most notably his belief that parity could never be violated.
In another dream a couple of months later he is driving a car (though in real life he no longer had one). He parks it legally but the young man from the previous dream suddenly appears and jumps in on the passenger side. He is now a policeman. He drives Pauli to a police station and pushes him inside.
Pauli is afraid that he will be dragged from one office to the next. “Oh no,” says the young man. An unfamiliar dark woman is sitting at the counter. In a brusque military voice the young man barks at her, “Director Spiegler [Reflector], please!” Taken aback by the word “Spiegler,” Pauli wakes up. When he falls asleep again the dream continues.
Another man comes in who resembles Jung. Pauli assumes he is a psychologist and explains to him in great detail the significance of the downfall of parity on the world of physics.
For Pauli the dream reflects his long-held belief that the “relationship between physics and psychology is that of a mirror image.” In the dream he appears first as his narrower Self who understands both physics and parity, then as his own mirror image—the psychologist who knows nothing about either. Spiegler—the reflector—is responsible for bringing out the psychologist and is attempting to bring the two together. But now that parity has been violated, there is no longer any mirror symmetry.
Looking at the question in terms of archetypes Pauli finds the loss of mirror symmetry not so shocking. Before the downfall of parity, he feels physicists and psychologists had not been looking deeply enough into matter and mind. They had considered only “partial mirror images.” Full reflections and more profound symmetries can be obtained only by going deeper into the psyche. The CPT symmetry that Pauli himself