137 - Arthur I. Miller [78]
It shows what an extraordinary degree of self-awareness he had achieved through his dreams and Jung’s analysis of them.
A few months later Pauli wrote again to Jung:
With regard to my own personal destiny, it is true that there are still one or two unresolved problems remaining. Nevertheless, I feel a certain need to get away from dream interpretation and dream analysis, and would like to see what life has to bring me from the outside. A development of my feeling function is, of course, very important to me, but it does seem to me that it cannot emerge solely as the outcome of dream analysis. Having given the matter much thought, I have come to the conclusion that I shall not continue my visits with you for the time being, unless something untoward should arise.
That was the end of Pauli’s face-to-face sessions with Jung.
Thanks to Jung, in later years Pauli was somewhat calmer, less acerbic, and less hypercritical, although he was still never seen without a glass of wine in his hand or the occasional martini. Friends guessed that alcohol enabled him to cope with his lifelong bouts of depression.
“The naïve certainty of my former Hamburg days, with which I could easily declare, ‘That’s all nonsense,’ is something I have since rather lost,” he wrote to Erich Hecke, a former colleague and friend from those same riotous Hamburg days some years after he stopped his sessions with Jung. Later still, in the middle of a string of critical comments on the work of his former mentor Born, Pauli added wryly to Born, “You will certainly remember old times where I did not have the habit to mix my critical remarks with so much sugar.”
As Jung put it, “On a conservative estimate, a third of my cases were really cured, a third considerably improved, and a third not essentially influenced.” Pauli fell in the middle.
The Superior Man Sets His Life in Order
Franca
PAULI WAS still deep in his sessions with Jung when he happened to go to one of Adolf Guggenbühl’s parties in 1933. It was at another of Guggenbühl’s famous parties, three years earlier, that he had had his second fateful meeting with Käthe Deppner. On this occasion he was introduced to an elegant and striking young woman named Franziska Bertram.
Born in Munich, Franca was thirty-two, a year younger than Pauli. Always fashionably dressed, she was cultured and well traveled, a woman of determination and strong opinions. Her parents had divorced and she had been brought up by her mother, first in Italy, then in Cairo, where she went to high school. When World War I broke out the family returned to Munich. She moved to Zürich in 1922, where she had been the personal assistant of Friedrich Adler, an eminent Communist politician—famous for having shot the prime minister of the Austro-Hungarian Empire—among several high-level secretarial positions.
Franca moved in high cultural circles and had just ended a relationship with the Swiss author and film writer Kurt Guggenheim. She was still in a fragile state, but was intrigued by Pauli’s strange personality. When Guggenbühl suggested that Pauli drive her home, as they both lived on Hadlaubstrasse—Franca at number 17, Pauli at number 47—Pauli replied off-handedly, “I suppose I could take you along.” Franca was not impressed.
Pauli was certainly lacking in social graces but nevertheless, despite his apparent coolness, he set out to court her. Perhaps his gauche behavior had simply been shyness. After all, Franca must have been rather intimidating. Shortly afterward, Franca moved in with him. A year later, she recalled, Pauli said abruptly, “Now we marry.”
As the great day approached, Pauli maintained his usual air of indifference. But his assistant at the time, Victor Weisskopf, tells a different story. Being Pauli’s assistant was a full-time job. It involved grading problems for Pauli’s courses as well as being available for discussions with him about his work and keeping