137 - Arthur I. Miller [29]
Thus Jung finally understood the meaning of his two dreams about being trapped in the seventeenth century, the period when alchemy was at its height. Hereafter primordial dream images, which he saw as visual symbols of archetypes, began to play a central role in Jung’s analytical method, along with ancient myths and religion.
Jung’s associates warned him that he might be considered a charlatan if he dabbled in alchemy. If a scholar of Wilhelm’s standing could publish a book on alchemy, Jung replied, then so could he. Furthermore, he was convinced that alchemical imagery and notions of transformation could provide another approach to understanding the psyche.
So Jung set to work to incorporate alchemy into his analytical psychology. One of his patients, Aniela Jaffé, later to become his personal secretary and collaborator, recalled a particularly startling yet productive analytic session. She was describing her problems with her mother when Jung abruptly cut her off with the words, “Don’t waste your time.” He went to his bookcase and took down the Mutus Liber, an alchemical book from the seventeenth century that contained only images, no text, and they spent the rest of the session discussing the images. Looking back on this and similar sessions in later years, she recorded that they had a more lasting influence on her than any of those spent in conventional therapy.
Thus by incorporating alchemy into his analytic psychology, Jung began to evolve a dramatic new way to understand the unconscious.
Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
The pesky anomalous Zeeman effect
IN THE AUTUMN of 1923 Pauli left Copenhagen to go back to Hamburg. He had still made no progress with the anomalous Zeeman effect. The problem, to recap, was to find the correct equation to describe the spectral lines of an atom placed in a weak magnetic field. He worried at it like a dog with a bone. But no matter how hard he tried, he just couldn’t crack it.
Pauli was growing more and more despondent. He had become friendly with Bohr’s assistant, Hendrik Kramers, who promised to visit him in Hamburg to cheer him up. Then Bohr decided that Kramers must go to England with him. Pauli wrote telling Bohr how deeply offended he was by this decision and how much he had looked forward to seeing his friend, whose presence “would mean a great deal for me psychically.” “I feel myself so unwell,” he added. He had just returned and already he was writing to Bohr about how unhappy he was. His letter was in effect a cry for help.
Not long after he had settled back in Hamburg he gave his inaugural lecture. His subject was the periodic table of chemical elements, but his heart was not in it. He was all too aware that the most basic problem in understanding it had yet to be resolved: what was the reason that the shells of electrons in each atom filled in the way they did? He had a hunch that it was related in some way to the multiplets in the anomalous Zeeman effect. Surely it was all tied together. After all, the way in which the shells filled up with electrons determined the numbers of spectral lines.
In struggling to find a mathematical description for the effect, he began by reworking equations from the normal Zeeman effect—where Bohr’s theory produced equations that agreed reasonably closely with the spectral lines that had been observed. Pauli’s goal was to apply the new equations to the anomalous Zeeman effect. Sommerfeld had already made some progress along these lines.
To study the anomalous Zeeman effect, physicists focused on alkali atoms—primarily sodium, potassium, and cesium—which displayed behavior similar to the hydrogen atom for which Bohr’s theory seemed to work. Like the hydrogen atom, alkali atoms have only one electron in their outer shell and this is the only electron that can bond with other chemical elements. The other electrons are in the inner shells, which have already been filled and thus cannot react.
Sommerfeld set Heisenberg, who