137 - Arthur I. Miller [89]
Early in 1948 Pauli gave two lectures on Kepler and Fludd at the Psychological Club in Zürich. Jung was in the audience. In his lectures Pauli queried the relationship between sense perceptions and the abstract thinking necessary to understand the world around us. How do we generate knowledge from the sense impressions that bombard us? Sensations enter our minds and knowledge emerges. But what happens in between?
We could argue that we have nothing in our minds with which to organize incoming sense perceptions and stumble about learning from experience. But in that case how do we arrive at an exact science such as mathematics from the results of inexact measurements? The alternative is to assume that we are born with certain organizing principles already existing in our minds. Pauli argued that it is archetypes that function “as the long sought-for bridge between the sense perceptions and the ideas and are, accordingly, a necessary presupposition even for evolving a scientific theory of nature.” They are, in other words, catalysts for creativity.
A month after Pauli’s second lecture, the C. J. Jung Institute opened in Zürich. It was to be the base for a multidisciplinary approach toward understanding the unconscious, which would require forging a link between psychology and physics.
In his speech at the opening ceremony, Jung took particular pleasure in drawing attention to Pauli’s work in examining this problem “from the standpoint of the formation of scientific theories and their archetypal foundations.”
Pauli, of course, attended and once again his presence had a devastating effect on a material object. In this case it was not a piece of scientific equipment that broke down but a vase that overturned, spilling water all over the ground. Pauli wrote gleefully to Jung about “that amusing ‘Pauli effect’.” Inspired by Jung’s lecture on the importance of linking psychology and physics, he wrote up his own thoughts on the subject in an essay entitled, “Modern Examples of ‘Background Physics’.”
Dreams of physics
Starting from around 1935 Pauli had occasionally had dreams and fantasies in which “terms and concepts from physics appeared in a quantitative and figurative—i.e., symbolic sense.” He called this “background physics.” At first he dismissed it as personal idiosyncrasy and was reluctant to discuss it with psychologists because of the physics terminology involved. But then he was struck by the similarity of the symbols in these dreams with the images he came across in seventeenth-century treatises like Kepler’s, written at a time when “scientific terms and concepts were still relatively undeveloped.”
When he looked into it, he discovered that people who knew nothing of science often created similar images. From this he concluded that his dreams were not, after all, meaningless or arbitrary. It seemed to be proof that “‘background physics’ is of an archetypal nature.” Because physics and psychology are complementary, he was certain that there is “an equally valid way that must lead the psychologist ‘from behind’ (namely, through investigating archetypes) into the world of physics.” In other words, the prevalence of these symbols seemed to provide firm evidence that the symbols of atomic physics derived from archetypes.
Pauli gave as an example of background physics “a motif that occurs regularly in my dreams”: the fine structure of spectral lines. What he was looking for was the underlying meaning of these dreams, their “second meaning,” beyond pure physics. To understand this he needed to find a “neutral language,” understandable by psychologists as well as physicists, into which to translate the concept of spectral lines. He was particularly interested in his dreams of doublets—where the fine structure appears as two spectral lines. He related this to our experience of the division into two components at the moment of birth when, like the doublet splitting, a child becomes an