137 - Arthur I. Miller [67]
The day after Pauli’s visit, as Jung recalled, she went to see him.
“What sort of man have you sent me?” she demanded. “What’s the matter with him? Is he half crazy?”
“What’s going on?” Jung asked.
Pauli told her stories with “such emotion that he rolled around on the floor,” Rosenbaum replied. “Is he crazy?” she demanded again.
“No, no, he is a German philosopher who is not crazy,” Jung replied. Some years later, in a lecture, Jung said that “through this woman [Pauli] had simply realized for the first time that he had a huge amount of emotion about certain things. This he hid from me—I have seen this later again from him. Because in the presence of a man he cannot be inferior. He cannot be inferior!” Jung’s intuition was that Pauli could never let down his defenses in front of a man; but with a woman he felt much freer to express himself. His decision to send Pauli to Rosenbaum was the right one.
Pauli saw Rosenbaum regularly for five months, until for reasons which are not clear she left Zürich for Berlin. He continued to record his dreams and tried to analyze them himself. He communicated with her by letter, in which he related his dreams in some detail adding, “I do not envy you for having to read all this.”
Meanwhile he was traveling and doing his best to dry out. He stayed at hotels in Portofino and Genoa where no one knew him, and tried to concentrate on a book he was writing on quantum mechanics. But he often became depressed. In September that year, he wrote to Rosenbaum from Zürich complaining about the weather and his intermittent bouts of depression. He mentioned that his sister was in Berlin, and asked for Rosenbaum’s phone number, which she did not seem willing to divulge. He added that he hoped to see her again when she returned from Berlin. There is no record of whether he did. In the late 1930s, however, he made several unexplained trips to London. Rosenbaum had moved there to escape the political situation in Germany. There are rumors that their relationship had become more personal. Certainly it sounds as if Pauli had become rather obsessed with her.
In November 1932 Pauli was back in Jung’s library. Eight months later they began to meet regularly, on Mondays at noon for an hour or so. Pauli had written up 355 dreams and added another 45 by the time they concluded their sessions a year later. “They contain the most marvelous series of archetypal images,” Jung reported ecstatically in a lecture he gave in London some two years later.
Jung often spoke of the dreams “of a great scientist, a very famous young man” in his lectures, but at Pauli’s insistence he never revealed his identity. Concerned with his professional reputation, Pauli preferred to keep his sessions with Jung a secret.
Jung first described Pauli’s dream sequence at the annual Eranos lectures in 1935 in Ascona, Switzerland. The physicist Markus Fierz, who became Pauli’s assistant the following year, claimed that he immediately guessed that the dreamer was Pauli, and others suspected it too. But none of Pauli’s colleagues ever revealed anything.
In fact the question of who the “brilliant young scientist” was remained a mystery for fifty years until Carl A. Meier, Jung’s successor at the ETH (where Jung had been on the staff since 1933), revealed that Pauli had been in analysis with Rosenbaum. Shortly afterward, Aniela Jaffé, who had been Jung’s personal secretary, confirmed that the dreams Jung had often discussed and referred to were indeed Pauli’s.
Of Pauli’s four hundred dreams, Jung looked at fifty-nine in detail. The ones he chose exemplified the process of what he called individuation. This is a specifically Jungian term referring to the process by which one develops an individual personality. In terms of analysis, individuation is said to have occurred when the patient achieves a balance between the conscious and unconscious. The mark of this is that the patient begins to dream of mandalas—diagrams, usually based on a circle or square with four symbolic objects symmetrically placed.
In the state of individuation