Part 7 (1/2)
The awakening of the sleeping king, shown as a judgment of Paris, with Hermes Trismigestus as psychopomp. (Thomas Aquinas, De alchimia [MS, 16th century].) The serpent Uroboros.
A few days later Pauli dreams that he is rooted to the center of a circle formed by a serpent biting its own tail.
Jung reaches down another book, which has a picture of the creature whom alchemists called the Uroboros, a serpent who devours his own tail and gives birth to himself. Uroboros slays and is slain, resurrects and is resurrected, in an eternal and magical transformative process.
Uroboros symbolizes the process in which the four elements, earth, water, air, and fire, are transformed into each other. (Abraham Eleazar, Uraltes chymisches Werk [18th century].) The Uroboros symbolizes the eternal circle, the circular process by which the four elements (earth, water, air, and fire) transform into one another. The circular form taken by the Uroboros is also the first hint of the symmetrical form of a mandala, suggesting that change is beginning. The area that the Uroboros encircles is a protected area, the temenos, where the dreamer-Pauli-can safely come face to face with his unconscious.
The veiled woman.
Then Pauli dreams of a veiled woman.
This is the first time the veiled woman has entered Pauli's dreams. She has done so because the serpent has created a protected area where she can safely appear. Jung tells him she is his feminine side-his anima. The appearance of a person, rather than a symbol, means that the unconscious is stirring. Something has awoken. Pauli's anima will lead him to his unconscious and reveal its contents, but he must beware; there may be unpleasant surprises in store. He may find irrationality lurking there.
Jung shows Pauli a picture of veiled women like the woman in his dream moving up and down a staircase, symbolizing the ascent of the soul through the seven spheres of the planets to the sun-G.o.d, from whom the soul originates. (In ancient pre-Copernican astronomy, there were seven planets. Copernicus realized there were only six; one of the seven was the moon.) Perhaps Pauli's dream relates to an initiation rite and moving up the staircase symbolizes the beginning of his transformation into a new person.
Jung also examines the role of woman and of the eternal female in Pauli's personal life. Jung a.s.sumed that Pauli must have originally projected his anima onto his mother, as men usually do. No doubt this made Pauli think of his mother, Bertha, who had died six years earlier. The mother symbolizes the source of life-the unconscious, where Pauli's feeling function is hidden. While a man continues to project his anima wholly onto his mother, his feelings too-his Eros-remain identified with her, pus.h.i.+ng all other women into the background. This sort of man takes a pa.s.sive view of life, for he is still in an infantile state. His relations.h.i.+ps are pa.s.sionless, usually restricted to prost.i.tutes.
Jacob's dream, as depicted by William Blake (19th century).
As Jung says, Pauli's behavior exactly fit this a.n.a.lysis: The dreamer repeatedly found himself in the most amazing situations. For instance, he once found himself in the midst of a great row in a restaurant, and a man threatened to throw him out of the window on the first floor.* Then he grew afraid of himself. He did not understand how he got into such a situation. Anyone outside could see very clearly how he stumbled into it. But to himself, he was a victim of circ.u.mstances; he had no control over his outer conditions because he was still an embryo suspended in the amniotic fluid where things simply happen. He was a victim of circ.u.mstances in this way because he was not related. This is what happens to such a nice boy continuously. He has one affair after another, and is always the victim.
Recognizing himself, Jung adds, Pauli ”says: 'What could I do?' like that, like a so-called innocent girl, 'What could I do?' He held my both hands and kissed me.” Through his dream work and his intuition, Jung has quickly accessed the depths of Pauli's being and brought some of his most disquieting behavior into the light of day.
Pauli's mother.
Soon afterward Pauli dreams of his mother pouring water from one basin into another.
Later, Pauli has a sudden recollection: the other basin had belonged to his sister, Hertha. Perhaps the dream means that Pauli's mother has transferred his anima-his feminine side-to his sister. His mother is superior to him, but his sister is his equal. Thus in this dream he is freeing himself from his mother's domination and also from his infantile att.i.tude toward life.
Pauli had always kept in touch with Hertha. At the age of seventeen she had left the gymnasium to study acting at the Academy of Dramatic Arts in Vienna. Two years later she made her first stage appearance in Breslau, now the Polish city of Wroclav. She was such a dazzling success that the theater impresario, Max Reinhardt, swept her off to Berlin to join his famous German Theater. There she widened her scope to perform on radio and in film. Pauli often boasted about his glamorous sister and enjoyed visiting her backstage after performances. It was also a way to meet other actresses.
Pauli confesses to Jung that all the women he has ever fallen in love with either looked like Hertha or, like Kathe Deppner, were her friends. But he has never felt close to her. He tells Jung that Hertha was born in his seventh year. Seven is a mystical number: the number of planets on their spheres, the number of days in the week, the number of orifices in the head, the number of voices heard by Moses on Mount Sinai. And seven marks the moment when his anima-his feminine aspect-was born, when a female other than his mother entered his life and he was no longer the center of attention.
Jung predicts that his anima will soon pa.s.s from Hertha to an unknown woman mired in his unconscious whom he still confuses with his dark side or shadow. This process had already begun, when Hertha married a fellow actor named Carl Behr in 1929, a union Pauli disapproved of. Jung interprets this in psychological terms. Pauli had been critical of her marriage because it meant she could not carry his anima any more, and he now had to share her with another man. The loss of his mother subst.i.tute-Hertha-further added to his troubled state of mind.
To free himself from his mother and Hertha will be a gradual process, says Jung. He will need Jung's help to work out his relations.h.i.+p to the as-yet unknown new woman.
The sun wors.h.i.+pper.
A short time later Pauli dreams that an unknown woman is standing on a globe, wors.h.i.+pping the sun.
The unknown woman has appeared at last, says Jung. She is Pauli's anima and he sees her as a sun wors.h.i.+pper because she belongs to the esoteric beliefs of the ancient world. By separating his intellect from his anima, Pauli has buried the anima in this ancient world. In the same way in the modern world, the dominance of rationality, essential for the development of science, has relegated the anima to a backwater in the human mind.
”Atmavictu,” totem carved by Jung in 1920. He claimed that it reminded him of the one he had carved as a boy and that his unconscious supplied the name.
Jung at Lake Zurich, 1920.
Jung in his library in 1946, when he and Pauli resumed their conversations.
An excerpt from one of Jung's alchemical treatises.
1936 Congress at the Niels Bohr Inst.i.tute, Copenhagen. Front row, left to right, Wolfgang Pauli, Pascual Jordan, Werner Heisenberg, and sixth from the left, Otto Stern; third row, sixth from the left, Paul Dirac; fifth row, second from the left, Victor Weisskopf, and fourth from the left, Hendrik Kramers. Standing at left, Niels Bohr and Leon Rosenfeld.
Max Born tugs Pauli's ear in punishment for sleeping late and missing morning lectures, Hamburg, 1925.
Pauli and Ehrenfest sharing a joke, 1929.
Pauli lecturing on his and Heisenberg's theory of quantum electrodynamics, Copenhagen, 1929.
Pauli on vacation in Pontresna, Switzerland, winter 1931/1932.
Hertha, Pauli's glamorous sister, in 1933.
Sommerfeld (on left) and Pauli, in Geneva, October 1934.
Pauli's father with Franca, 1936.
Pauli and Franca shortly after their marriage.
Pauli and Wu in Berkeley between 1941 and 1945.
Scherrer and Pauli, after World War II.
Heisenberg and Pauli in 1957, discussing their unified field theory.
The coniunctio of the sun and the moon. (Salomon Trismosin, Splendor solis [MS, 1582].) Now that Pauli's anima has appeared, his consciousness is flooded with energy surging up from his unconscious.
The ape-man.
Then Pauli dreams that a monstrous ape-man is threatening him with a club. A figure appears and drives the monster away.
Jung shows Pauli an alchemical text written four hundred years earlier, in which there is an image that exactly mirrors the monster in Pauli's dream. ”You see, your dream is no secret,” Jung tells him. ”You are not the victim of a pathological insult and not separated from mankind by an inexplicable psychosis. You are merely ignorant of certain experiences well within the bounds of human knowledge and understanding.” Far from being the unique fantasies of a madman, Pauli's dreams are phrased in precisely the same imagery in which humankind has delineated the inner quest-the quest for oneself-over hundreds of years. For Pauli the picture of the ape-man enables him to see ”with his own eyes the doc.u.mentary evidence of his sanity.”
There are creatures in the psyche about which we know nothing at all, says Jung. He interprets the figure in Pauli's dream who scares the monster away as Mephistopheles-Pauli's intellect, his rational side.
Pauli has now reached a turning point in his therapy. He has used ”active imagination” to reach down into the contents of the unconscious which lie just below the level of consciousness-a method Jung developed from studying the trance states of shamans and medicine men. To do this Pauli has to suspend his critical faculties, to permit emotions, feelings, fantasies, obsessive thoughts, and even waking dream-images to bubble up from the unconscious-a particularly difficult process for a rationalist like him. The danger, warns Jung, is that the patient can become trapped in a world of phantasmagoria.
A fifteenth-century version of the ”wild man.” (Codex Urba.n.u.s Latinus [15th century].) The perpetual motion machine.
A few weeks later Pauli dreams of a pendulum clock ticking on forever without any friction, a perpetual motion machine.
Jung is pleased that Pauli's rational brain has not stepped in and rejected this machine as an impossibility. He interprets it as the second appearance of the eternal circle. Pauli's dream of the serpent Uroboros encircling the dreamer was the first appearance of a circle-a mandala-and the first evidence of a change in Pauli and was quickly followed by the first appearance of the unknown woman, his anima. Similarly this second circle means a step forward in the process.
Three becomes four.
Then Pauli dreams that he is with three other people, one of whom is the unknown woman.
Jung interprets the four people as the four functions of the fully rounded personality-thinking, feeling, intuition, and sensation. In his dream, Pauli does not converse with the unknown woman, his anima. She remains in the darkness of his unconscious, for she is his feeling function, which is still submerged. Jung's a.n.a.lysis is that ”the feminine nature of the inferior function derives from its contamination with the unconscious as personified by the anima.” In other words, the inferior function-feeling-is contaminated by being submerged and therefore close to the unconscious, and this is why it is feminine.
As Pauli opens himself up to allow these different parts of his being to appear, he is also exposing himself to danger. Emerging out of the unconscious, the anima is imbued with tendencies which, when brought to conscious life, may manifest themselves as antisocial behavior. Men normally resist the urgings of their animas, which are often the cause of trouble. But to repress such tendencies could result in the development of a neurosis.