Perhaps the Zurich academics were surprised that no one else"s wife was involved. In those circles extramarital affairs were common and most marriages quite open. Schrodinger, for example, had had a legendary number of liaisons. He usually traveled with both his wife and current girlfriend. Schrodinger"s wife, meanwhile, was infatuated with the elegant mathematician Hermann Weyl, whose own wife was having an affair with Scherrer.
Pauli had fallen in love. He had met Kathe Deppner some years earlier, during one of his jaunts into the demi-monde of Berlin. Born in Leipzig, she was six years his junior and had trained at the famous Max Reinhardt School for Film and Theater in Berlin. Reinhardt had brought high-cla.s.s theatre to Berlin and established a film industry that served as a model for Hollywood. Pauli"s sister, Hertha, was with the Max Reinhardt theater and he later revealed that it was when he went to visit her that he had met Kathe for the first time. The two women were friends.
At first Pauli bowled Kathe over by boasting what an eminent physicist he was. Shortly afterward he ran into her again at a party in Zurich given by his friend Adolf Guggenbuhl, a wealthy publisher and one of the founders of the magazine Schweizer Spiegel. Kathe was performing with a dance school founded by Trudi Schoop, an old girlfriend of Scherrer"s. Zurich was a small world.
Why anyone falls in love is difficult to work out, especially when no hints are left behind, as was the case with Pauli and Kathe. Kathe was an attractive woman, with a round face and curly hair and a keen sense of fashion. No doubt as a chorus girl she had all the allure of the demi-monde and knew how to attract men. In a photograph of the two on a walk in the mountains, Pauli looks ecstatically happy. Perhaps he sensed a mutual longing and on impulse proposed marriage. It is harder to fathom why she accepted.
Kathe Deppner and Pauli in the countryside, 1929.
For even before the marriage had taken place, it was clear it was going to be a disaster. Kathe made it known that she had already fallen in love with someone else, but for some reason she decided to go through with the marriage to Pauli. Maybe she hoped it would work out in the end. After the ceremony the couple moved into a flat in Hadlaubstra.s.se, 41, a three-story house with large French windows on a pleasant tree-lined street.
Letters of congratulation poured in. But only two months later, Pauli was already confessing to a friend that he was married only in a very "loose way." He was clearly unhappy. "He used to walk around like a caged lion in our apartment," Kathe recalled, "formulating his answers [to letters] in the most biting and witty manner possible. This gave him great satisfaction." Pauli"s profession demanded that he sit at a desk alone for hours on end. It must have been stifling for someone like her.
In November 1930, less than a year after they had married, the two divorced. Kathe had walked out on Pauli. What he most resented, he always said wryly, was that she had left him for a mere chemist. "If it had been a bullfighter-with someone like that I could not have competed-but with an average chemist?" he would complain. "In spite of his theories he is, like other mortals, at times vehemently plagued by jealousy," a colleague observed. Soon afterward Kathe married her chemist, Paul Goldfinger.
The lonely neutrino-Pauli"s second breakthrough.
Through all this tumult, Pauli"s scientific creativity never flagged. The problem absorbing him at the time was, What happens when the nuclei of certain atoms give off excess energy by emitting an electron? Precise measurements of this process-known as beta-decay-showed, inexplicably, that the energy contained in the nucleus before the electron was emitted was greater than the combined energies of the nucleus afterward plus the discharged electron.
Somewhere, somehow, some energy had been lost. Could it be that beta-decay violated the law of conservation of energy, which holds that these energies must be equal? The law of conservation of energy was a mainstay of physics and engineering, and theories that violated it invariably turned out to be wrong.
Yet, in 1929, Niels Bohr had gone so far as to suggest that this fundamental law might not hold precisely for processes inside the nucleus, but only on average. "We must still be prepared for new surprises" in the atomic world, he wrote. Pauli and most other physicists strongly disagreed.
Pauli jokingly suggested to Bohr, "What if someone owed you a great deal of money and offered to pay it back in instalments, but each time the agreed instalment was not met? Would you consider this to be a statistical error or that something was missing?" In other words, Bohr was trying to make out that the missing energy was a matter of statistics and so was only missing on average.
In the papers on quantum electrodynamics that Pauli wrote with Heisenberg in 1929, he had demonstrated that the law of conservation of energy was built into its equations. Now he pondered long and hard over the loss of energy in beta-decay. Then he came up with an audacious suggestion. Perhaps something really was missing. Could it be that the nucleus undergoing beta-decay emitted another as-yet-undetected particle, along with the electron, that would balance the books?
From the mathematics of beta-decay Pauli inferred that this particle"s ma.s.s must be not more than the electron"s, its spin must be one-half and it must have no electric charge. He was later to write of it as "That foolish child of the crisis of my life (19301)-which further behaved foolishly."
He announced his hypothesis in a letter to the audience at the radioactivity session of a physics meeting in Tubingen, Germany, in December 1930, a mere month after his divorce. Even as he pursued his scientific research he could not ignore the fact that his personal life was crumbling around him. The letter-beginning "Dear Radioactive Ladies and Gentlemen"-was to be read in his absence. Pauli had opted instead to attend Zurich"s major social event of the winter, a ball at the splendid Baur au Lac.
In 1930 it was unheard of to suggest a new particle. No one had ever before dared do so. Were the electron, proton (the nucleus of the hydrogen atom), and light quantum (a particle of light) not enough? At first the scientific community was shocked. But it did not take long before everyone acknowledged that Pauli was almost certainly right.
A few years later the Italian physicist Enrico Fermi dubbed Pauli"s new particle the neutrino. The neutrino was the centerpiece of Fermi"s 1934 theory of beta-decay. One of the implications was how weakly neutrinos interacted with matter. The neutrino was a loner, it pa.s.sed through the earth as if it were not even there and could whiz through s.p.a.ce alone, not interacting with anything for three trillion miles. Yet neutrinos also const.i.tuted an essential part of the universe, required by basic laws of nature.
Soon after Pauli"s hypothesis of the neutrino, experimental evidence on beta-decay suggested that if the neutrino existed, its ma.s.s would have to be zero. We now know it has a tiny ma.s.s-about one hundred thousand times less than that of the electron.
Finally, in 1956, twenty-six years after Pauli had suggested it, neutrinos were detected in the laboratory. The neutrino has turned out to be essential for understanding the structure of matter on the subatomic level as well as how ma.s.sive stars end their lives as supernovas.
In the same period that he had to suffer the death of his mother and his own disastrous marriage and divorce, Pauli had managed to come up with a concept of enormous importance in one of those hunches that influence the whole of physics and our perception of the world. Perhaps it was his need to rescue the beauty of quantum mechanics that impelled him to take this imaginative leap. No matter what dramas occurred in his personal life, his mind was always focused on physics.
Pauli in the United States.
Nevertheless, Pauli could not suppress his pain forever. He spent the following summer-1931-traveling across the United States, to Pasadena, Chicago, Ann Arbor, and New York, lecturing on his new particle. Oppenheimer and Sommerfeld were among his traveling companions. Prohibition was in force at the time, forbidding the sale of alcohol, which Pauli found exceedingly trying. Ann Arbor, however, was close to the Canadian border and there was plenty of opportunity for smuggling. He wrote to Peierls, "In spite of the opportunity for swimming here I suffer much from the great heat. But under "dryness" I don"t suffer at all."
Indeed he did not. By now he was drinking to excess. At a dinner party in Ann Arbor he fell down an entire flight of stairs. "I broke my shoulder and now must lie in bed until my bones are whole again-very tedious," he wrote. As his shoulder was broken he could not write on the blackboard. Instead of his usual impenetrable lecture style, he was forced to face his audience, his injured arm supported by a metal rod attached to a ring around his expansive waist, while a colleague wrote up the equations. His audiences were enthralled by the brilliance and clarity of his explanations. He kept the real reason for his handicap a secret. The story that went around was that he had injured his shoulder while swimming. One partic.i.p.ant at the physics sessions in Ann Arbor commented that he "now runs around with it stuck up in the air like a traffic cop signalling." Sommerfeld called it an inverse Pauli effect. Later Pauli commented jokingly that it was the only time in his life he had ever raised his hand in a "Heil Hitler" salute.
Instead of returning to Zurich immediately, Pauli spent part of September in a small hotel in Manhattan. Much of the time he kept to himself, except for the occasional meeting with "second-order acquaintances"-friends of friends. (A second-order approximation to solving a problem is less exact than one of first order.) He frequented second-order bars-small speakeasies and out-of-the-way bars rather than the elegant ones that Scherrer had recommended.
Pauli enjoyed America, its people and food-excellent but for the Athenaeum Club at the California Inst.i.tute of Technology, where he p.r.o.nounced the food schlecht (wretched). He was less enthralled by its puritanical side; at one dinner there "was a prayer instead of coffee and cigars-not to speak at all of alcohol." But on the whole he liked it "better than Europe which seems to me now often tiny and clumsy.... It is all very simple and very neat here," he wrote to Wentzel.
That evening, he continued, he was looking forward to going to "a very good bar and drinking many whiskies." For, despite his efforts to conceal it, he was falling deeper and deeper into depression. "With women and me things don"t work out at all, and probably never will succeed again," he confessed to Wentzel. "This, I am afraid, I have to live with, but it is not always easy. I am somewhat afraid that in getting older I will feel increasingly lonely. The eternal soliloquy is so tiresome." Alone in his hotel room he signed his letter, "Your old Pauli."
Back in Zurich, he went on a binge of drinking and parties and resumed his life of barroom brawls, smoking, and womanizing. Eventually his bitter quarrels with his colleagues at the ETH came to the attention of the administration, who had to call him in and warn him that his position might be in jeopardy despite his brilliant work.
In front of his colleagues he spoke of his divorce from Kathe in witty, sardonic terms, but his behavior reflected his true desperation. Once again he was living a Jekyll and Hyde existence between two different worlds. To add to all this, his always vivid and dramatic dreams were beginning to seep into his waking life. By the beginning of 1932 he had plummeted to a frightening low point. Despite his hatred of his father, Pauli finally decided to heed his advice: to consult the celebrated psychoa.n.a.lyst Carl Jung.
The Mephistopheles of Copenhagen.
That year, Pauli"s neutrino hypothesis was the central topic at the annual Easter conference held at Bohr"s inst.i.tute in Copenhagen. It was also the theme of the spoof that customarily concluded the conference, written that year by Max Delbruck, a twenty-five-year-old physicist who had studied with Born.
He and Pauli were close friends; Pauli addressed him in letters as "Max" and signed them "Wolfgang." Pauli characterized their friendship as a mutual attraction between "two problematic temperaments."
Years later, Pauli reminded Delbruck that "for me personally the history of the neutrino is inseparably connected with your-very unsuccessful-flirtation with Eve Curie at the party [at the Nuclear Physics Meeting in Rome, in 1931]. She had a sincere veneration of her old mother, whom she had accompanied to the Rome meeting, but otherwise this icy woman had nothing on her mind other than publicity, newspapers with her name in, etc. Why should she have any interest in you, if there was no chance for her to increase her publicity with your help?"
Delbruck ent.i.tled his spoof "Faust in Copenhagen," and modeled it on Goethe"s Faust, with the luminaries of physics as its characters: G.o.d stood for Bohr, and Faust for Ehrenfest (who had said to Pauli, "I like your publications better than I like you"). Mephistopheles stood for the sharp-tongued Pauli, who was also the progenitor of the neutrino (Gretchen). In the spoof, Felix Bloch played G.o.d (Bohr) and Leon Rosenfeld, Bohr"s a.s.sistant at the time, played Mephistopheles (Pauli).
Mephistopheles/Pauli the troublemaker tries to tempt Faust/Ehrenfest by offering him the seductive neutrino-a hypothesis of which the conservative Ehrenfest was famously deeply skeptical. Faust declares that no elementary particle could possibly exist with neither ma.s.s nor charge; it is pure madness.
The spoof was wonderfully translated by the physicist, prankster, and frequent visitor to the inst.i.tute, George Gamow, who had provided delightful cartoons of the characters, including a wickedly accurate depiction of the plump Pauli as Mephistopheles with an infuriating grin and a long tail.
The play opens with Mephistopheles leaping into the midst of a group of archangels, headed by G.o.d, all busy discussing astrophysical matters and how stars shine. "To me the theory"s full of sound and fury," he declares. The Lord/Bohr demands, Pauli as Mephistopheles in George Gamow"s caricature.
But must you interrupt these revels.
Just to complain, you Prince of Devils?
Does Modern Physics never strike you right?
Mephistopheles replies, No, Lord! I pity Physics only for its plight, And in my doleful days it pains and sorely grieves me.
No wonder I complain-but who believes me?
Delbruck perfectly captured the rivalry between Bohr and Pauli, who kept each other at arm"s length. Pauli had initially proposed the neutrino specifically to counter Bohr"s suggestion that the laws of conservation of energy and momentum held only on average in the case of beta-decay.
The Lord dismisses the neutrino hypothesis in Bohr"s much-feared words, saying that it "is very in-ter-est-ing"-incorrect, in other words. Mephistopheles fires back, "What rot you talk today! Be quiet!"
Ehrenfest doubted more than Pauli"s neutrino. He also questioned the work on quantum electrodynamics in which Pauli and Heisenberg had been immersed for five years, plagued by the infinite values for the electron"s ma.s.s and charge, which they could not eliminate no matter how hard they tried. Gamow portrayed the oblong-headed Heisenberg and devilish Pauli as Siamese twins.
Mephistopheles, transformed into a bowler-hatted traveling salesman, tries to sell Faust quantum electrodynamics, the theory formulated "By Heisenberg-Pauli." "No sale!" Faust shouts. Then Mephistopheles offers Faust "something unique"-his neutrino theory. Says Faust, You"ll not seduce me, softly though you speak.
If ever to a theory I should say: "You are so beautiful!" and "Stay! Oh, stay!"
Then you may chain me up and say goodbye- Then I"ll be glad to crawl away and die.
Ehrenfest famously believed that beauty was for tailors, not scientists.
Finally Gretchen herself, the neutrino, enters singing: My ma.s.s is zero, My Charge is the same.
You are my hero, Neutrino"s my name....
I am your fate, And I"m your key.
Closed is the gate For lack of me.
But Ehrenfest remains unconvinced.
Pauli was not present to see himself lampooned, but he later received a copy of the text complete with Gamow"s drawings of him as the mischievous troublemaker of physics. He proudly showed it to visitors. He was obviously delighted to be cast in this role.
In fact he was in Zurich, and his life was about to change.
The Dark Hunting Ground of the Mind.
PAULI ALWAYS liked to be well informed and, in preparation for his first meeting with Jung, had no doubt studied several of Jung"s books which he kept in his library. Over the course of their work together he read most of the collection. He marked them in pencil: a vertical line for an important pa.s.sage, two for very important, three for extremely important.
He paid particular attention to Psychological Types, the book in which Jung laid out the vocabulary and framework for his a.n.a.lytical psychology. In this he identified two poles of personality-extravert and introvert-and four "functions," thinking versus feeling and intuition versus sensation. Psychological Types contains by far the most markings of any of Jung"s books in his library. No doubt Pauli was struck by the similarity between Jung"s tug-of-war between pairs of complementary functions and Bohr"s complementarity principle. Complementarity seemed to be everywhere. Just as it clarified issues in physics for him, perhaps he felt that Jung"s familiar-sounding words might provide a key to his inner self.
Pauli marked the following pa.s.sage with three vertical lines: "Where the persona is intellectual, the soul is quite certainly sentimental.... A very feminine woman has a masculine soul, and a very manly man a feminine soul. This opposition is based upon the fact that a man, for instance, is not in all things wholly masculine, but has also certain feminine traits." Pauli was certainly intellectual and equally certainly sentimental, battered as he was by the traumas of his emotional life. He was also a man, and a manly one. But where was his feminine soul? Perhaps Jung would help him discover it.
Jung"s description of the introverted-thinking type was an uncannily precise description of Pauli himself: His judgment appears cold, obstinate, arbitrary, and inconsiderate; only with difficulty can he persuade himself to admit that what is clear to him may not be equally clear to everyone; [if] he falls among people who cannot understand him, he proceeds to gather further proof of the unfathomable stupidity of man; he may develop into a misanthropic bachelor with a childlike heart; he appears p.r.i.c.kly, inaccessible, haughty; [he has] a vague dread of the other s.e.x.
No doubt all of this was on Pauli"s mind as he stepped into the entry hall of Jung"s house.
Proceeding up a wide turning staircase, he reached the first floor, then, turning right down a hallway, pa.s.sed the small office Jung sometimes used as a retreat. This was a compact room without any bookcases, immaculately laid out with a desk with three drawers, a small desk lamp, and a rack of pigeon holes for filing papers. Stained-gla.s.s windows depicting mythological scenes provided a muted natural light. Seated in his desk chair on a comfortable pillow, Jung would smoke his pipe here while he wrote up reports and articles and replied to correspondence.
In front of Pauli was Jung"s s.p.a.cious library packed with ancient alchemical texts. The floor was covered with oriental rugs. A green-tiled stove kept the room warm in the winter while breezes blowing in from the lake kept it cool in summer. There was a writing desk with a straight-backed chair and a desk lamp opposite the doorway, next to a large window looking out onto Lake Zurich. A couch flanked by two easy chairs occupied the opposite end of the room. Patients could choose either chair, depending on whether they preferred to look at the bookcase or the lake.
Jung in 1930.
Jung used the small room to a.n.a.lyze patients whose problems did not particularly interest him. For those he found emotionally involving, he preferred the library. There he had his alchemical books on hand, added to which, as he put it, the size of the room gave him the mental s.p.a.ce for what he termed an out-of-body experience. On these occasions he would "go up and sit on the window, and look down and watch myself, how I am acting, until I see what from the unconscious has caught me and I can deal with it."
It was in the library, sitting on the couch with a table in front of him piled high with books and notes, that Dr. Jung awaited his new patient.
Four years later, Jung described the man who came to see him that day. Pauli was in a shockingly disintegrated state: He is a highly educated person with an extraordinary development of the intellect, which was, of course, the origin of his trouble; he was just too one-sidedly intellectual and scientific. He has a most remarkable mind and is famous for it. He is no ordinary person. The reason why he consulted me was that he had completely disintegrated on account of this very one-sidedness. It unfortunately happens that such intellectual people pay no attention to their feeling life and so they lose contact with the world that feels, and live in a world that thinks; in a world of thoughts merely. So in all his relations to others and to himself he had lost himself entirely. Finally he took to drink and such nonsense and grew afraid of himself, could not understand how it happened, lost his adaptation, and was always getting into trouble. This is the reason he made up his mind to consult me.
Pauli was a man dominated by intellect, who focused his thinking entirely on the world outside of himself and had almost no awareness of what was going on in his own being-and a famous scientist to boot. For Jung it must have seemed an irresistible opportunity to work with such a person and examine what made him tick, while also trying to help him achieve balance.
Later, in the preface to Psyche and the Symbol, Jung phrased it thus:.
And what shall we say of a hard-boiled scientific rationalist who produced mandalas in his dreams and in his waking fantasies? He had to consult an alienist, as he was about to lose his reason because he had suddenly become a.s.sailed by the most amazing dreams and visions.... When the hard-boiled rationalist mentioned above came to consult me for the first time, he was in such a state of panic that not only he but I myself felt the wind blowing over from the lunatic asylum!
"He had completely disintegrated" "he had lost himself entirely" "he was about to lose his reason" Jung "felt the wind blowing over from the lunatic asylum!" Perhaps Jung is exaggerating, but nevertheless his phrases make it clear how desperate Pauli was at this point-with a desperation he could not solve in his working life or communicate to his friends and colleagues in the scientific world. To find a solution he had to step out of that world into Jung"s extraordinarily different-and eccentric-universe.
Pauli poured out his troubles-his anger, his loneliness, his drunken brawls, his problems with women, and how he frequently made himself disagreeable to men. His dreams, he said, were full of threes and fours and other matters that seemed to spring out of seventeenth-century science, not modern physics. These dreams and visions were driving him to distraction.
Here was, Jung realized, a young man not only in need of help but also "chock full of archaic material." The problem was how "to get that material absolutely pure, without any influence from" Jung himself. There was only one way. To allow Pauli to speak and dream freely, without any suggestions from Jung, Jung had to keep Pauli at a distance. "Therefore I won"t touch it," he wrote.
His solution was rather extraordinary. Instead of treating Pauli himself, initially Jung sent him to Erna Rosenbaum, a young, vivacious Austrian student of his. Rosenbaum had studied medicine in Munich and Berlin and had worked with Jung for a mere nine months before he a.s.signed her Pauli as a patient. Pauli was disappointed at being fobbed off on a student, but Jung gave him no choice.
Pauli wrote to her in his usual laconic manner: "[I contacted] Mr. Jung because of certain neurotic phenomena which are connected with the fact that it is easier for me to achieve academic success than success with women. Since with Mr. Jung rather the contrary is the case, he appeared to me to be quite the appropriate man to treat me medically." But then, Pauli continued, Jung had surprised him by refusing to treat him, sending him instead to her despite the fact that "I am very touchy toward women and slightly distrustful and thus have some hesitations against them. Anyway," he concluded, "I want nothing to be left untried."
Jung later revealed that he had specifically selected a woman as Pauli"s a.n.a.lyst because he was convinced that only a woman could draw out a man"s thinking from the depths of his unconscious, particularly in the case of a highly creative person such as Pauli. As far as he was concerned, Rosenbaum was the perfect conduit to encourage Pauli to record his dreams. Jung instructed her to play a "pa.s.sive role," to do no more than provide encouragement and indicate points that Pauli should work out more clearly. "That was enough," wrote Jung. He perceived intuitively that Pauli "had the gift of visualizing things and so he had spontaneous fantasies" as well as dreams. Rosenbaum, in fact, fulfilled her role perfectly.
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 Zurich for Berlin. He continued to record his dreams and tried to a.n.a.lyze 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 Zurich 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 ident.i.ty. 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 a.s.sistant 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 a.n.a.lysis with Rosenbaum. Shortly afterward, Aniela Jaffe, 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 a.n.a.lysis, 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 the four psychological functions-thinking, feeling, intuition, and sensation-are fully in the conscious and together form an integrated whole. Before he began a.n.a.lysis, the thinking function dominated Pauli"s conscious while his feeling function was totally submerged in his unconscious, and his sensation and intuition functions were both partly submerged. He was a totally cerebral personality, out of touch with his feelings. Jung depicted Pauli"s psychological state thus: Jung"s theory was that dreams emerge out of the unconscious and therefore offer a means of understanding how it works. Dreams appear when the level of consciousness sinks below the unconscious, a situation most likely to occur during sleep. When we wake up the level of consciousness rises and the world of the unconscious disappears. But dreams can also occur when we are awake. Jung referred to such waking dreams as "visions." Dreams and visions, he wrote, are the two keys to the unconscious.
The four consciousness functions in Pauli"s case. Thinking, the superior function, occupies the upper half of the circle. Feeling, the inferior function, is in the dark half. The two auxiliary functions, sensation and intuition, are partly in light and partly in dark.
Jung paid great attention to the imagery in a dream, linking it with images from alchemy, religion, and myth and applying his a.n.a.lytic psychology to seek out archetypes. In this way he hoped to use the opposition between the conscious and the unconscious to enable a patient to meet his "shadow"-his dark side-and to separate it from his anima, the female aspect of the male personality. This would bring about a struggle between opposites-of function types or dream symbols-that would enable the patient to come to terms with the fact that he himself was a combination of light and dark, and good and evil. Thus he could eventually create a balanced personality.
When archetypal symbols, most particularly mandalas, appeared in a dream, it often signaled that a previously disordered conscious was becoming ordered. This, however, did not necessarily mean successful a.n.a.lysis, Jung advised. "There are plenty of lunatics with the most wonderful individuation dreams, and nothing comes of it because there is n.o.body home," he said.
So what sort of dreams did the tortured scientist have and how did Jung help him work through them? A selection of Pauli"s dreams and Jung"s comments on them give a flavor of the process through which Jung marked out a path through his chaotic mental state and helped him work toward individuation.
We cannot know exactly what transpired between Jung and Pauli in the privacy of Jung"s study. I have put together the following dialogue on the basis of the descriptions Jung made soon afterward and details from Pauli"s biographical materials.
Three women.
Pauli dreams he is surrounded by a group of female forms. He hears a voice somewhere inside himself saying: "First I must get away from Father."
Jung"s first comment is that the phrase "get away from" needs to be completed by the words "in order to follow the unconscious," as embodied in the seductive female forms. Rising from his chair he walks over to his collection of alchemical texts. He opens a sixteenth-century book. In the image, Pauli"s own dream is depicted with amazing precision. It shows the sleeping dreamer, three maidens who, says Jung, signify the unconscious and Hermes-the ancient Greek name for Mercurius, the central figure of alchemy, who moves between the dark and light worlds. In Jung"s interpretation of alchemy, Hermes is the intermediary between the conscious and the unconscious.
Jung suggests that the "Father" of the dream is not Pauli"s actual father but represents the masculine world of the intellect and of rationality, in opposition to the unconscious. Perhaps the dream indicates that Pauli fears that giving rein to the unconscious will mean sacrificing his intellect, whereas in fact it is a matter of entering an entirely different world with different but equally meaningful experiences. As yet he is not able to attribute to the unconscious its proper reality. Jung adds that Pauli will encounter this problem repeatedly until he can find a way to balance the conscious and the unconscious in his psyche.
In order for the modern scientific world to develop, it has been necessary-in Jungian terms-to relegate the unconscious to a position below the conscious and rationality. In Pauli"s case, this marginalizing of the unconscious has been an inevitable consequence of his life as a scientist. It is no accident that the figures in his dream are feminine, for the unconscious is feminine in nature. Like the seductive maidens of mythology and alchemy who appear to lead the unwary traveler astray, Pauli"s unconscious is reaching out to him. Pauli can run away if he wants to, but it seems he does not wish to do so. Rather he wants to "get away from Father"-from intellect and rationality which have dominated his life so far.