JUNG AND PAULI: A Meeting of Rare Minds
BY BEVERLEY ZABRISKIE

Readers of the Swiss psychiatrist C. G. Jung are more familiar with Wolfgang Pauli's unconscious than with his waking life and achievement. Through Jung's Psychology and Alchemy--an exposition of "the problem of individuation" and "normal development . . . in a highly intelligent person"--depth psychologists have known the Nobel laureate's dreams, not his professional genius. Meanwhile, the scientists who continue Pauli's pursuit of the nature and composition of the material universe know little of the quantum physicist's depth exploration of his unconscious, his fascination with the interface of matter with psyche, and his collaboration with Jung in probing connections that appear to be acausal.

This collection of letters between Jung and Pauli offers insightful information about a relationship that was valuable for both analytical psychology and quantum physics, two realms of investigation that at first seem to have no point of contact. Historically, physical science and religion have focused, from different perspectives, on the sources of the universe and its inhabitants. Religion and psychology, in a similar fashion, have had overlapping concerns about the nature of existence. Science traditionally seeks the most fundamental, objective, and universal facts by confirming and measuring external reality through experiments. Psychology, however, while presuming both norms and anomalies in its dynamic descriptions and differential diagnoses, is concerned primarily with subjective experience and individual apprehension.

Each thinker was concerned with the effect of the particular and specific on the universal. Jung's concern was individual experience: the psyche's perception and conception, emotion, and imagination regarding inner and outer realities. He focused on the individual's psychic development as it interrelated with recurring, and thus collective, predispositions and representations of human experience. He was especially curious about the ways in which images produced by the psyche become unprovable but assumed beliefs. Pauli sought to prove theories about the nature of the tiniest particles in the ever-extending energy patterns of the material universe and to find the formulas and means of measurement that would reveal the universe's past, present, and future. While focusing on the most fundamental elements in the world's makeup, as a quantum theorist Pauli was also alert to the effect of the particular presence of the observer on what is observed. 

In his physics, Pauli sought a unified field. But his personal life was one of fragmentation and dissociation. Within one year, his mother poisoned herself in reaction to his father's involvement in an affair, and Pauli plunged into a brief marriage with a cabaret performer. At thirty, he turned to Jung for help.

Jung, in his 1935 lectures at the Tavistock, offered the following example of dreams effecting change:
I had a case, a university man, a very one-sided intellectual. His unconscious had become troubled and activated; so it projected itself into other men who appeared to be his enemies, and he felt terribly lonely because everybody seemed to be against him. Then he began to drink in order to forget his troubles, but he got exceedingly irritable and in these moods he began to quarrel with other men. . . and once he was thrown out of a restaurant and got beaten up.16

For Pauli, the creativity of science included considerations of the psyche.
Pauli demonstrated the value of intuition to science's empiricism. As Weinberg recounted, physicists in the early 1930'swere worried about an apparent violation of the law of conservation of energy when a radioactive nucleus undergoes the process known as beta decay. In 1932 Wolfgang, . . . Pauli proposed the existence of a convenient particle he called the neutrino, in order to account for the energy that was observed to be lost in this process. The elusive neutrino was eventually discovered experimentally over two decades later. Proposing the existence of something that has not yet been observed is a risky business, but it sometimes works.24

Jung and Pauli both gloried in the possibilities of the human mind and also remained aware that all human understanding must remain open to question. They might well speak the lines from a contemporary English play, Copenhagen, in which the character of Niels Bohr says to the character of Werner Heisenberg:

We put man back at the centre of the universe . . . It starts with Einstein. He shows that measurement, on which the whole impossibility of science depends--measurement . . . [is] a human act, carried out from a specific point of view in time and space, from the one particular viewpoint of a possible observer. Then, here in Copenhagen in those three years in the mid-twenties we discover that there is no precisely determinable objective universe. That the universe exists only as a series of approximations. Only within the limits determined by our relationship with it. Only through the understanding lodged inside the human head.86