Part 9 (1/2)

There is a story about Bancroft's unconventional way of communicating with an important German contact. Telephones could be tapped, so this method of communication was used only with the greatest care. Bancroft claimed that when she needed to speak to her contact she used telepathy, willing him to call her. Minutes later he phoned saying, ”I just got your message to call.”

Dulles was incredulous. ”I wish you'd stop this nonsense! I don't want to go down in history as a footnote to a case of Jung's!” he said. But Jung was interested in telepathy and asked her to keep records of how long she spent willing him to call and how long it took him to respond.

Whether true or not, that the story is told at all is evidence of Jung's involvement with intelligence activities in Zurich.

SO DID JUNG have n.a.z.i sympathies or not? The judgment of history is still out. It is difficult to weigh the anti-Semitic opinions he expressed, supporting the n.a.z.i line, against his comments about the dark side of n.a.z.ism, though these were never as strongly put during the war. Was his ambivalence an attempt to play it safe? In fact, throughout his life he made anti-Semitic comments. In 1918 he declared that Jews were so overcivilized that they no longer possessed that essential dark Germanic quality-being a pure barbarian br.i.m.m.i.n.g with creative potential of the greatest complexity.

He wrote at some length of Freud's psychoa.n.a.lysis as a Jewish doctrine and described how its reduction of everything mental to material beginnings based on primitive s.e.xual wishes as an oversimplification unsuitable for application to the complex German mentality. He had voiced similar opinions even earlier. In 1897, when he was a medical student at the University of Basel, he spoke to a Swiss student fraternity where he remarked, repeating the then-current prejudice against Jews, that they were materialists who robbed science and culture of their spiritual foundations.

Jung was a man of his times, typical of the Northern Swiss culture, a region that remained neutral yet was sympathetic to the n.a.z.is. But as early as 1934 he realized that he may have overstepped the mark. ”I have fallen afoul of contemporary history,” he wrote. Yet he persisted.

Many years later, in 1947, Jung invited Gershom Scholem, a well-known Israeli scholar of Jewish mysticism, to lecture at the annual Eranos Conference in Ascona, Switzerland. Aware of the rumors that Jung had sympathized with the n.a.z.is, Scholem asked the highly respected Rabbi Leo Baeck for advice. Baeck had visited Zurich shortly after being released from the concentration camp at Theresienstadt in Czechoslovakia, where he had been one of the camp's spiritual leaders. At that time he had refused Jung's invitation to visit him at home. Jung was insistent and came to Baeck's hotel where they talked for two hours. Defending his stance, Jung spoke of the wartime conditions in which it had not been clear how long the n.a.z.is would be in power, that things might get better, and that to survive it was best to play along with them. Then Jung said, ”Well, I slipped up.” It was the closest he ever came to an admission of guilt. This satisfied Baeck and they parted as colleagues. Having heard this story, Scholem accepted Jung's invitation and stayed two weeks at his house.

Pauli wins the n.o.bel Prize.

For Pauli 1945 was a momentous year. At the suggestion of Einstein and the mathematician Hermann Weyl, he was offered a permanent position at the Inst.i.tute for Advanced Study and also at Columbia University. Then came the greatest honor of all: He was awarded the n.o.bel Prize for his discovery of the exclusion principle.

During a dinner in Princeton in his honor, Einstein gave an impromptu address in which he spoke of Pauli as his successor. Pauli was visibly moved. Panofsky also spoke highly of his friend's knowledge of Kepler and his period.

He recalled their first meeting, in 1928 or 1929, in Hamburg, where they had been introduced by a mutual friend over lunch at an outdoor restaurant. For Panofsky it was an unforgettable occasion on many levels, one being that it provided him with a personal experience of the famous Pauli effect. After the meal, when the three stood up, Panofsky and the friend discovered that the two of them-but not Pauli-had been sitting in whipped cream for the whole three hours. He added two more stories of the Pauli effect. On one occasion ”two dignified-looking ladies simultaneously and symmetrically collapsed with their chairs on either side of Pauli” as he took his seat in a lecture hall. On another, Pauli was on a train when, unknown to him, the rear cars decoupled and were left behind while he proceeded to his destination in one of the front cars.

The Pauli effect was surely, Panofsky concluded, based on the Pauli exclusion principle in that whenever Pauli appeared, catastrophes occurred to animate and inanimate objects in his vicinity-but always ”excluding Pauli himself.”

In photographs Pauli is smiling and relaxed. His great discovery had finally been recognized.

In January 1946 Pauli was granted U.S. citizens.h.i.+p. With job offers at Columbia and the Inst.i.tute for Advanced Study he could easily have stayed in the United States forever-as many scientists, such as Einstein, chose to do. But in fact he decided to return to Zurich and the ETH. It was not so much that he pined for Switzerland: ”For me, of course, it is not possible to consider myself as belonging to a single country (that would contradict the whole course of my life). I feel, however, that I am European,” he wrote to Casimir. He went on, ”I know how bad the material situation in Europe is, and it is true that the material side of life is very well and undisturbed here. I cannot say the same about the spiritual situation.”

He was more explicit about what he meant by the ”spiritual situation” in a letter to his old friend from his earliest visits at Bohr's Inst.i.tute in Copenhagen, Oskar Klein, ”I am a bit concerned (though not surprised) on this new instrument of murder, the 'atomic bomb'. Although your first hope, that it will shorten the j.a.panese war, has been fulfilled, I am very skeptical about your other hope, that it will never more be used in any war! I feel that our profession will be discredited among decent feeling persons if the production of this new instrument of murder will not soon be brought under international control.”

Pauli never regretted not having taken part in the Manhattan Project to develop the atomic bomb. As he saw it, science in the United States was becoming nothing more than an arm of the military: ”As in Austria during the First World War, in this year in the U.S.A. I suddenly had the feeling that I was placed in a 'criminal' atmosphere-and this at the time when those 'A-bombs' were dropped,” he wrote scathingly. It has even been said that he once referred to the American scientists who worked on the bomb as ”gangsters.” So clearly he didn't feel at home in the United States.

Friends say, however, that he simply missed his home in Zollikon, outside Zurich.

Thus it was that Pauli returned to Zurich and the ETH in July 1946. Meeting him again after six years, President Rohn found him totally different from the arrogant character he had been when he left. Pauli declared he wanted to put all the difficulties he had had at the ETH behind him. What had hurt him most, he said, was being judged unworthy of being a Swiss citizen and a professor at the ETH. Nevertheless it took another three years before Pauli was finally naturalized.

He had also missed seeing Carl Jung.

Dreams of Kepler.

Once he was settled in Zurich, Pauli quickly got back in touch with Jung and sent him some dreams.

One of his first dreams, which he sent to Jung in October 1946, was about a ”blond” man. In the dream, Pauli is reading an ancient book about the Inquisition and how it persecuted disciples of Copernicus, Galileo, and Giordano Bruno, and also about Kepler's image of the sun as a concrete symbol of the unvisualizable Trinity. The blond man tells Pauli that ”The men whose wives have objectified rotation are being tried.” Then Pauli is in the courtroom with them. His wife is not among them and he wants to send a note to her. The blond man tells him that not even the judges understand what rotation means.

The blond man then says he is seeking a ”neutral language” that transcends terms such as ”physical” or ”psychic.”

Pauli kisses his wife goodnight and tells her how sorry he feels for the accused. He weeps. The blond man says to him with a smile, ”Now you've got the first key in your hand.”

Shaken, Pauli awakens. The essence of the dream, he thinks, is that men have lost touch with their animas-their female aspect, that is, their wives, for their wives, being cut off from the world of science, cannot understand the scientific term ”rotation.” But what does this have to do with ancient science and with Kepler? Thinking through the problem, Pauli realizes that Kepler too did not fully understand ”rotation.” Kepler's image of the Trinity as a sphere is also a mandala. But, in the Jungian sense of the term ”mandala,” it is incomplete in that it is made up of three, not four, elements.

Kepler's image of the creation of the universe is a straight line emanating from the center, from G.o.d, like a ray of light emanating from the sun. Pauli's a.n.a.lysis is that this line snags the surface of the sphere and as a result Kepler's mandala is static and cannot rotate. It cannot be a true mandala until it is completed by the fourth element, the anima. This is why in Pauli's dream his wife is absent in the court scene.

Beginning with Kepler, Pauli realizes, modern scientists deliberately excluded the anima (in the Jungian sense of the female aspect of their psyche) as they tried to mechanize the world, partially guided, perhaps, by the image of the Trinity, which they saw in the three dimensions of s.p.a.ce. Fludd recognized that modern science's emphasis on inert matter relegated human feeling to the depths of the unconscious. It is when Pauli weeps in his dream, expressing feeling, that the blond man tells him he has found the ”first key.” Pauli recognizes Kepler and Fludd as opposing psychological types-Kepler the thinking type and Fludd the feeling type. Thus his knowledge of Jungian psychology has revealed to him the limitations of modern science.

Kepler, he thinks, saw the soul ”almost as a mathematically describable system of resonators”-like Bohr's virtual oscillators-rather than an ent.i.ty that could be visualized. Fludd, conversely, focused on four, not three, and used drawings to communicate his beliefs.

It was as he was thinking through this dream that Pauli decided to look more deeply into Kepler and his work. Delighted with Pauli's plan, Jung gave him alchemical literature, as did Panofsky. Pauli also corresponded with his one-time a.s.sistant Markus Fierz. Fierz had studied Newton, who was born twelve years after the death of Kepler, and pointed out that his concepts of s.p.a.ce and time were saturated with religion; to Newton both s.p.a.ce and time were relative to G.o.d.

What of Kepler's era, Pauli wondered, when s.p.a.ce and time had not yet been elevated to such heavenly heights? He was eager to go back to the moment when mysticism and alchemy clashed with the new rational scientific thinking. He suspected that this collision still went on in ”a higher level in the unconscious of modern man.”

Early in 1948 Pauli gave two lectures on Kepler and Fludd at the Psychological Club in Zurich. Jung was in the audience. In his lectures Pauli queried the relations.h.i.+p 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 a.s.sume 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 Inst.i.tute opened in Zurich. 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 ent.i.tled, ”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 quant.i.tative 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 independent existence. It is also linked to doubling in a psychic sense in which the ”new conscious content indicates a mirror image of the unconscious”-the conscious as the mirror of the unconscious.

In 1953 Pauli had a particularly memorable dream about spectral lines. In it, he and Franca were observing an experiment whose results appeared as spectral lines on a photographic plate. One of the lines had a fine structure. He described it thus: the dream ”contains a favorable indication-namely, the fine structure of the second line.” His interpretation was: ”What this does is to indicate the beginning of an a.s.similation of an unconscious content into consciousness.” In the dream, he added, ”My wife says that she finds this very interesting.” In other words, he took the dream to mean that his unconscious was emerging in the conscious. Perhaps by this he meant that his interpretation of the dream was that he was developing some characteristics of Franca's psychological types. Unlike him, Franca was outgoing and in touch with the world.

He noticed that the doublets were like the alternating dark and light stripes on wasps (a great source of fear for him) and tigers. This was, he knew, an archetype. It occurred in Western alchemy and also in India, where he had seen the pattern on Indian temples when he was there with Franca earlier that year. It was an expression of two opposite forces, light and dark, endlessly repeating. In psychological terms it symbolized the tendency of a psychic situation to repeat.

This opposition between light and dark was further clarified by Bohr's complementarity concept, which stated that quantum phenomena could be fathomed in terms of the opposition between complementary pairs-such as wave and particle. Bohr had been sure that complementarity went beyond physics and was basic to all of life, where the complementary pairs of life/death, love/hate, and yin/yang played a key role. All this, said Pauli, ”seems to point to a deeper archetypal correspondence of the complementary pairs of opposites.” And it was symbolized by the splitting of spectral lines into two, a separation defined by 137. This reinforced his belief that 137 was an archetypal number.

It also reminded him of the patterns of lines that form the basis of the Chinese Book of Changes-the I Ching.

I Ching.

The I Ching, a Chinese oracle, was written four thousand years ago. It was translated into German by Richard Wilhelm, a Sinologist and a close friend of Jung's. Jung considered that it revealed insights into chance occurrences that cannot be understood using the Western concept of causality.

The basic structure of the I Ching consists of sixty-four combinations of six broken and unbroken lines, laid out one above the other: the hexagram. The broken line represents yin, the feminine principle, the unbroken one, yang. To consult the oracle, one builds up a hexagram by casting three Chinese coins six times. The inscribed side of the coin counts as yin and has a value of two, the other side as yang with a value of three. One then looks up that hexagram in the I Ching. What the oracle has to offer for any one hexagram is extremely gnomic and requires careful interpretation.

The prediction relates to many factors, foremost that the world about us emerges from a struggle of opposites-yin and yang-signifying good/evil, light/darkness, love/hate, man/woman, and other dualities, quite foreign to the rationalism of Western thought. Jung often emphasized that to the Western mind the whole process seems like nonsense. But Western science also has little light to shed on the psyche. Thus other ways of knowing have to be considered. Jung believed that the message of a hexagram-written thousands of years ago-can illuminate the hidden qualities of the present moment, a coincidence in time that cannot be explained by Western physics.

Pauli, too, consulted the I Ching for advice ”when interpreting dream situations.” He noted that to consult the oracle one has to ”draw” three times ”whereas the result of the draw depends on the divisibility of a quant.i.ty by four”-those numbers again. Sixty-four, of course, is four multiplied by four three times-43. This brought Pauli back to the world clock in which the ”motif of the permeation of the 3 and the 4 was the main source of the feeling of harmony.”

In his writings Wilhelm had discussed the significance of ”magical pictures of trees in rows,” relating the image to hexagram 51-”The Arousing” (Shock, Thunder)-in the I Ching. In this hexagram the two trigrams-the top and bottom sets of three lines-consist of two broken lines (like two doublets) on top of an unbroken one, which seems to push them violently upward, as if in the awakening of a life force. The text reads: The superior man sets his life in order.

And examines himself.

It was a message Pauli was determined to take to heart.