137 - Arthur I. Miller [66]
Pauli was a man dominated by intellect, who focused his thinking entirely on the world outside of himself and had almost no awareness of what was going on in his own being—and a famous scientist to boot. For Jung it must have seemed an irresistible opportunity to work with such a person and examine what made him tick, while also trying to help him achieve balance.
Later, in the preface to Psyche and the Symbol, Jung phrased it thus:
And what shall we say of a hard-boiled scientific rationalist who produced mandalas in his dreams and in his waking fantasies? He had to consult an alienist, as he was about to lose his reason because he had suddenly become assailed by the most amazing dreams and visions…. When the hard-boiled rationalist mentioned above came to consult me for the first time, he was in such a state of panic that not only he but I myself felt the wind blowing over from the lunatic asylum!
“He had completely disintegrated” “he had lost himself entirely” “he was about to lose his reason” Jung “felt the wind blowing over from the lunatic asylum!” Perhaps Jung is exaggerating, but nevertheless his phrases make it clear how desperate Pauli was at this point—with a desperation he could not solve in his working life or communicate to his friends and colleagues in the scientific world. To find a solution he had to step out of that world into Jung’s extraordinarily different—and eccentric—universe.
Pauli poured out his troubles—his anger, his loneliness, his drunken brawls, his problems with women, and how he frequently made himself disagreeable to men. His dreams, he said, were full of threes and fours and other matters that seemed to spring out of seventeenth-century science, not modern physics. These dreams and visions were driving him to distraction.
Here was, Jung realized, a young man not only in need of help but also “chock full of archaic material.” The problem was how “to get that material absolutely pure, without any influence from” Jung himself. There was only one way. To allow Pauli to speak and dream freely, without any suggestions from Jung, Jung had to keep Pauli at a distance. “Therefore I won’t touch it,” he wrote.
His solution was rather extraordinary. Instead of treating Pauli himself, initially Jung sent him to Erna Rosenbaum, a young, vivacious Austrian student of his. Rosenbaum had studied medicine in Munich and Berlin and had worked with Jung for a mere nine months before he assigned her Pauli as a patient. Pauli was disappointed at being fobbed off on a student, but Jung gave him no choice.
Pauli wrote to her in his usual laconic manner: “[I contacted] Mr. Jung because of certain neurotic phenomena which are connected with the fact that it is easier for me to achieve academic success than success with women. Since with Mr. Jung rather the contrary is the case, he appeared to me to be quite the appropriate man to treat me medically.” But then, Pauli continued, Jung had surprised him by refusing to treat him, sending him instead to her despite the fact that “I am very touchy toward women and slightly distrustful and thus have some hesitations against them. Anyway,” he concluded, “I want nothing to be left untried.”
Jung later revealed that he had specifically selected a woman as Pauli’s analyst because he was convinced that only a woman could draw out a man’s thinking from the depths of his unconscious, particularly in the case of a highly creative person such as Pauli. As far as he was concerned, Rosenbaum was the perfect conduit to encourage Pauli to record his dreams. Jung instructed her to play a “passive role,” to do no more than provide encouragement and indicate points that Pauli should work out more clearly. “That was enough,” wrote Jung. He perceived intuitively that Pauli “had the gift of visualizing things and so he had spontaneous fantasies” as well as dreams. Rosenbaum, in fact, fulfilled