137 - Arthur I. Miller [13]
But Jung saw something more, particularly in Schopenhauer’s view of the mind—that representations visible to us emerged from an underlying invisible world, the abode of the ultimate physical reality. Surely this meant that mental or psychic energy could be traced to nodes of energy in the unconscious, namely archetypes.
From 1913, Jung began to take a new approach with his patients. Instead of applying a theoretical framework to his analytic sessions, he asked patients to report their dreams spontaneously, gently prodding them to interpret the dreams and helping them understand their own dream-images. He himself began to dream fantasies populated by violent dwarfs, savages bent on killing him, Biblical figures, and Egypto-Hellenic characters fraught with Gnostic coloration. He walked and talked with his dream figures. What was going on, he asked himself. Was this science and, if not, what was it? It was a riddle he had to crack.
Eventually he concluded that the images in his dreams came from the collective unconscious and were transmitted to his conscious. In 1916 he transferred his extensive dream notes into what he called his Red Book, richly illustrated in the manner of a medieval manuscript. Jung permitted no one to see this book during his lifetime. When R.F.C. Hull, Jung’s longtime friend and translator, read it after Jung’s death he wrote, “Talk of Freud’s self analysis—Jung was a walking asylum in himself, as well as its head physician.”
That same year Jung painted his first mandala (a diagram, usually based on a circle or square, with four symbolic objects symmetrically placed—and a key archetype and ancient symbolic device in cultures around the world). It flowed from him, he wrote, but he did not understand why he had painted it or what it meant. Art, it seemed, flowed from the unconscious. Convinced that his fantasies were spontaneous and self-created, he concluded that a mandala was a message that the conscious and unconscious had merged to become one: the Self was a whole. The appearance of a mandala in a dream signaled stability and inner peace, as Jung himself had come to feel.
The old man whom Jung called Philemon and with whom he walked and had long conversations. (Jung, Red Book [2009].)
Jung’s first mandala, drawn in 1916.
The next step was to bring these insights together. He called his new version of psychology “analytical psychology” to distinguish it from Freud’s psychoanalysis. But there was still a long way to go and many pieces of the puzzle to find.
Early Successes, Early Failures
THERE WAS something about Wolfgang Pauli. From early on in his career, colleagues couldn’t help noticing that whenever he entered a laboratory, equipment spontaneously broke down. The Pauli effect, as it became known, was obviously impossible; it had to be just a matter of coincidence. But nevertheless it happened again and again.
There was the time, in the 1920s, that there was a massive equipment breakdown in a laboratory at the University of Göttingen, in Germany. Early one afternoon, without apparent cause, a complicated apparatus for the study of atoms collapsed. Pauli wasn’t even in the country. He was in Switzerland. At last said his colleagues, relieved, here was clear proof it couldn’t be the Pauli effect. The professor in charge of the laboratory wrote a humorous letter to Pauli to tell him about it. The letter was sent to Pauli’s Zürich address. After a considerable delay, a letter arrived from Pauli with a Danish stamp on it. Pauli had been on his way to Copenhagen, he wrote. At the precise moment when the equipment broke down, his train had stopped for a few minutes at Göttingen station.
There were other things about Pauli too. He just happened to be one of the most brilliant physicists of his day. The great Einstein spoke of him as his successor. But Pauli was extremely modest and refused to participate in the feverish competitive scrum in which all the other physicists of his day pursued their research. Instead of publishing papers,