137 - Arthur I. Miller [80]
In search of a fusion of physics and psychology
In October 1935 Pauli had a dream in which he was at a physics conference. In his dream he was trying to explain his dreams to colleagues using everyday language but they could not understand. He realized that his dream was all about the need to find a common language that could be understood by both physicists and psychologists. Writing to Jung about it he played with the idea. Perhaps the term “radioactive nucleus,” for example, could be interpreted in psychological terms as the Self. Jung declared it an “excellent symbol” for a constellated archetype in the collective unconscious which then made an appearance in individual consciousness and thus encompassed both the unconscious and conscious Selves.
Over the next few years Pauli forged ahead in his research. He worked on crucial problems in physics and maintained a huge correspondence. He pursued infinities in quantum electrodynamics, damning certain of his colleagues’ results as deplorable; mulled over the myriad end products of cosmic rays smashing through the earth’s atmosphere; delved into the exciting new subject of nuclear physics; and sought a deeper understanding of his greatest discovery, the exclusion principle.
But he never revealed to his scientific colleagues another issue that continued to preoccupy him: the need for a fusion of physics with Jung’s analytical psychology in order to understand first the unconscious and then the conscious. Weisskopf recalled that in all the years he knew Pauli, Pauli never once mentioned the topic.
Pauli’s dreams and Jung’s analyses of them had led Pauli to the rather extraordinary conclusion that “even the most modern physics lends itself to the symbolic representation of psychic processes,” he wrote to Jung, adding that there are “deeper spiritual layers that cannot be adequately defined by the conventional concept of time.”
In January 1938, Pauli recorded the following dream and illustrated it with a drawing:
Pauli’s drawing showing his dream of January 23, 1938.
In the dream he sees three layers or lines. The top line contains a rectangle, labeled “window,” and a circle divided into three sections and labeled “clock.” The two other lines are waves with different degrees of oscillation. Pauli and his anima, his female aspect, are both present, but neither can see the time on the clock because it is too far above the lower two levels which he is moving along. So his anima tries to create her own time with what he calls “these odd oscillation symbols,” the same as those produced by the dwarves with their pendulum clocks in his “world vision.”
Pauli tries to work out the meaning of the dream. He realizes that the rate at which the oscillatory forms vibrate per second must be related to the notion of time. To bring harmony into this system he must find a way to relate all “3 layers to a four-part object (clock).” Once again he is torn between three and four.
Pauli began to notice symbols in his dreams that related to concepts in physics, such as pendulums and time. “In my dreaming and waking fantasies,” he informed Jung, “abstract figures are appearing.” These included “acoustic rhythms” or “alternating dark and white stripes” like spectral lines or wasps about which Pauli had a severe phobia. “It will become a matter of life and death for me to understand more about the objective (communicable) meaning of these symbols than I do at the moment,” he wrote to Jung.
Jung and the rise of Hitler
But no matter how otherworldly they were, in the end neither Jung nor Pauli