137 - Arthur I. Miller [65]
Pauli marked the following passage with three vertical lines: “Where the persona is intellectual, the soul is quite certainly sentimental…. A very feminine woman has a masculine soul, and a very manly man a feminine soul. This opposition is based upon the fact that a man, for instance, is not in all things wholly masculine, but has also certain feminine traits.” Pauli was certainly intellectual and equally certainly sentimental, battered as he was by the traumas of his emotional life. He was also a man, and a manly one. But where was his feminine soul? Perhaps Jung would help him discover it.
Jung’s description of the introverted-thinking type was an uncannily precise description of Pauli himself:
His judgment appears cold, obstinate, arbitrary, and inconsiderate; only with difficulty can he persuade himself to admit that what is clear to him may not be equally clear to everyone; [if] he falls among people who cannot understand him, he proceeds to gather further proof of the unfathomable stupidity of man; he may develop into a misanthropic bachelor with a childlike heart; he appears prickly, inaccessible, haughty; [he has] a vague dread of the other sex.
No doubt all of this was on Pauli’s mind as he stepped into the entry hall of Jung’s house.
Proceeding up a wide turning staircase, he reached the first floor, then, turning right down a hallway, passed the small office Jung sometimes used as a retreat. This was a compact room without any bookcases, immaculately laid out with a desk with three drawers, a small desk lamp, and a rack of pigeon holes for filing papers. Stained-glass windows depicting mythological scenes provided a muted natural light. Seated in his desk chair on a comfortable pillow, Jung would smoke his pipe here while he wrote up reports and articles and replied to correspondence.
In front of Pauli was Jung’s spacious library packed with ancient alchemical texts. The floor was covered with oriental rugs. A green-tiled stove kept the room warm in the winter while breezes blowing in from the lake kept it cool in summer. There was a writing desk with a straight-backed chair and a desk lamp opposite the doorway, next to a large window looking out onto Lake Zürich. A couch flanked by two easy chairs occupied the opposite end of the room. Patients could choose either chair, depending on whether they preferred to look at the bookcase or the lake.
Jung in 1930.
Jung used the small room to analyze patients whose problems did not particularly interest him. For those he found emotionally involving, he preferred the library. There he had his alchemical books on hand, added to which, as he put it, the size of the room gave him the mental space for what he termed an out-of-body experience. On these occasions he would “go up and sit on the window, and look down and watch myself, how I am acting, until I see what from the unconscious has caught me and I can deal with it.”
It was in the library, sitting on the couch with a table in front of him piled high with books and notes, that Dr. Jung awaited his new patient.
Four years later, Jung described the man who came to see him that day. Pauli was in a shockingly disintegrated state:
He is a highly educated person with an extraordinary development of the intellect, which was, of course, the origin of his trouble; he was just too one-sidedly intellectual and scientific. He has a most remarkable mind and is famous for it. He is no ordinary person. The reason why he consulted me was that he had completely disintegrated on account of this very one-sidedness. It unfortunately happens that such intellectual people pay no attention to their feeling life and so they lose contact with the world that feels, and live in a world that thinks; in a world of thoughts merely. So in all his relations to others and to himself he had lost himself entirely. Finally he took to drink and such