137 - Arthur I. Miller [71]
Jung at Lake Zürich, 1920.
Jung in his library in 1946, when he and Pauli resumed their conversations.
An excerpt from one of Jung’s alchemical treatises.
1936 Congress at the Niels Bohr Institute, Copenhagen. Front row, left to right, Wolfgang Pauli, Pascual Jordan, Werner Heisenberg, and sixth from the left, Otto Stern; third row, sixth from the left, Paul Dirac; fifth row, second from the left, Victor Weisskopf, and fourth from the left, Hendrik Kramers. Standing at left, Niels Bohr and Léon Rosenfeld.
Max Born tugs Pauli’s ear in punishment for sleeping late and missing morning lectures, Hamburg, 1925.
Pauli and Ehrenfest sharing a joke, 1929.
Pauli lecturing on his and Heisenberg’s theory of quantum electrodynamics, Copenhagen, 1929.
Pauli on vacation in Pontresna, Switzerland, winter 1931/1932.
Hertha, Pauli’s glamorous sister, in 1933.
Sommerfeld (on left) and Pauli, in Geneva, October 1934.
Pauli’s father with Franca, 1936.
Pauli and Franca shortly after their marriage.
Pauli and Wu in Berkeley between 1941 and 1945.
Scherrer and Pauli, after World War II.
Heisenberg and Pauli in 1957, discussing their unified field theory.
The coniunctio of the sun and the moon. (Salomon Trismosin, Splendor solis [MS, 1582].)
Now that Pauli’s anima has appeared, his consciousness is flooded with energy surging up from his unconscious.
The ape-man
Then Pauli dreams that a monstrous ape-man is threatening him with a club. A figure appears and drives the monster away.
Jung shows Pauli an alchemical text written four hundred years earlier, in which there is an image that exactly mirrors the monster in Pauli’s dream. “You see, your dream is no secret,” Jung tells him. “You are not the victim of a pathological insult and not separated from mankind by an inexplicable psychosis. You are merely ignorant of certain experiences well within the bounds of human knowledge and understanding.” Far from being the unique fantasies of a madman, Pauli’s dreams are phrased in precisely the same imagery in which humankind has delineated the inner quest—the quest for oneself—over hundreds of years. For Pauli the picture of the ape-man enables him to see “with his own eyes the documentary evidence of his sanity.”
There are creatures in the psyche about which we know nothing at all, says Jung. He interprets the figure in Pauli’s dream who scares the monster away as Mephistopheles—Pauli’s intellect, his rational side.
Pauli has now reached a turning point in his therapy. He has used “active imagination” to reach down into the contents of the unconscious which lie just below the level of consciousness—a method Jung developed from studying the trance states of shamans and medicine men. To do this Pauli has to suspend his critical faculties, to permit emotions, feelings, fantasies, obsessive thoughts, and even waking dream-images to bubble up from the unconscious—a particularly difficult process for a rationalist like him. The danger, warns Jung, is that the patient can become trapped in a world of phantasmagoria.
A fifteenth-century version of the “wild man.” (Codex Urbanus Latinus [15th century].)
The perpetual motion machine
A few weeks later Pauli dreams of a pendulum clock ticking on forever without any friction, a perpetual motion machine.
Jung is pleased that Pauli’s rational brain has not stepped in and rejected this machine as an impossibility. He interprets it as the second appearance of the eternal circle. Pauli’s dream of the serpent Uroboros encircling the dreamer was the first appearance of a circle—a mandala—and the first evidence of a change in Pauli and was quickly followed by the first appearance of the unknown woman, his anima. Similarly this second circle means a step forward in the process.
Three becomes four
Then Pauli dreams that he is with three other people, one of whom is the unknown woman.
Jung interprets the four people as the four functions of the fully rounded personality—thinking, feeling, intuition, and sensation.