8

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 passage, 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 analytical 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 passage 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 prickly, inaccessible, haughty; [he has] a vague dread of the other sex.

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, passed 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-glass 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 spacious 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 Zürich. 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 analyze 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 space 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 assailed 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 assigned 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 analyst 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 “passive 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 Zürich for Berlin. He continued to record his dreams and tried to analyze 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 Zürich 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 identity. 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 assistant 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 analysis with Rosenbaum. Shortly afterward, Aniela Jaffé, 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 analysis, 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 analysis, 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 analytic 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 analysis, Jung advised. “There are plenty of lunatics with the most wonderful individuation dreams, and nothing comes of it because there is nobody 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.

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-god, 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 assumed 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, pushing all other women into the background. This sort of man takes a passive view of life, for he is still in an infantile state. His relationships are passionless, usually restricted to prostitutes.

Jacob’s dream, as depicted by William Blake (19th century).

As Jung says, Pauli’s behavior exactly fit this analysis:

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 circumstances; 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 circumstances 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 attitude 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 Käthe 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 pass 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 substitute—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 relationship to the as-yet unknown new woman.

The sun worshipper

A short time later Pauli dreams that an unknown woman is standing on a globe, worshipping the sun.

The unknown woman has appeared at last, says Jung. She is Pauli’s anima and he sees her as a sun worshipper 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 Zürich, 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 Institute, 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 Léon 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 documentary 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 Urbanus 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 analysis 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.

Jung insists that mythology—and its descendent, alchemy—requires the female element to emerge from darkness to become the fourth entity. This will set the stage for the union of irreconcilable opposites—man and woman—symbolizing every primordial opposing pair, such as brother and sister.

To illustrate this, he tells a story. The Babylonian creation myth, the “Enuma Elish,” describes a matriarchal world ruled by the goddess Tiamat, the salt water, who represents the unfathomably deep ocean—chaos. Tiamat was murdered by her grandson Marduk in an act of unimaginable violence. The result, says Jung, was a shift in the world’s consciousness toward the masculine, casting femininity into the darkness of the unconscious. Pagan and Christian myths, alchemy, and Eastern religions denote odd numbers as masculine. Thus in Christianity the masculine Trinity, three, is also the One. Even numbers, conversely, are feminine. The time has now come to release the feminine unconscious, to create balance by turning three into four.

Pauli is now ready to plunge into the sea of the unconscious. But he still feels an unbearable tension between the conscious and the unconscious, rationality and irrationality.

The square

Then one night Pauli has a terrifying nightmare. People circulate around a square formed by four serpents. As they walk they must let themselves be bitten at each of the four corners by foxes and dogs. Pauli is also bitten. In the center of the square, a ceremony is going on to transform animals into men. Two priests touch a shapeless animal lump with a serpent, transforming it into a human head.

Jung is elated that Pauli has dreamed of a square for the first time. He presumes that it arose from the circle as a result of the four people who appeared in Pauli’s earlier dreams. Like the space enclosed by the Uroboros serpent, Jung says, the square is a temenos, a stage, a protected area where the drama can be played out.

In the dream of the ape-man, Pauli was threatened by a monstrous ape and saved by his intellect in the form of a Mephistopheles figure. Jung interprets this new dream to mean that man, in the prehuman state of his animal ancestors—the shapeless animal lump—is about to be created anew. Pauli is about to be reborn.

The leftward march of the people around the square signifies that Pauli is now focused on the center. He is moving toward centering the psyche, toward individuation, reaching toward his unconscious. Alchemical parallels enter Pauli’s dreams, permitting a creative play of images as a way of fusing the apparent irreconcilables of the conscious and the unconscious. This fusion is represented by the alchemical marriage, the coniunctio, the union of opposites: fire and water, man and woman, yang and yin.

Archetypal images depict the alchemical marriage as sexual union. Pauli can now sense the alchemical opposition between three and four, the trinity and the quaternity. Jung tells Pauli the axiom of Maria Prophetissa, spoken seventeen centuries ago: “One becomes two, two becomes three, and out of the third comes One as the fourth.” Pauli’s psychological journey—a story of threes and fours—is coming together with his scientific journey.

A temenos—a symbolic city representing the center of the earth, with four protecting walls laid out in a square. (Michael Maier, Viatorium, hoc est, De montibus planetarum septem [17th century].)

Marriage of water and fire, the union of irreconcilables. Each figure has four hands to symbolize the many different combinations of fours. (Ancient Indian painting; Nikolaus Müller, Glauben, Wissen und Kunst der alten Hindus [1882].) Psychic union of opposites. (Rosarium philosophorum [1550].)

Coniunctio—the alchemical wedding—is a symbol for the alchemists’ eternal quest to create the philosopher’s stone or lapis through the fusion of the four opposing elements. Pauli’s nightmare is an attempt to achieve individuation, like the alchemists’ striving for the lapis.

The primal hermaphroditic nature of man and woman—essential to Jung’s psyschology in which the female anima exists in man—relates to the four, the quaternary. The Rosarium philosophorum, a thirteenth-century alchemical treatise, provides a graphic account of this process. “Make a round circle of man and woman, extract therefrom a quadrangle and from it a triangle. Make the circle round, and you will have the Philosopher’s Stone.” Thus Jung explains it.

The conscious and unconscious have touched as the alchemical marriage takes place. Now they try to fly apart. But the magic circle traced by the walking figures in Pauli’s dream prevents the unconscious from breaking out; the conscious mind takes a stand.

Reflecting on the image of two priests creating a head out of a shapeless mass in Pauli’s dream, Jung shows Pauli a fifteenth-century image of God creating Adam from a lump of clay. Perhaps this is the deeper meaning of the image. Pauli is re-creating himself.

In his dream Pauli is bitten by foxes and dogs but this is a good sign, for transformations in the psyche require suffering.

As for the serpents in Pauli’s dream, rites of transformation involving serpents are standard archetypes. The serpent appears in Gnostic ceremonies of healing and in their representations of Christ, sometimes on a cross.

Squaring the circle to make the two sexes one whole. (Michael Maier, Scrutinium chymicum [1616].)

God creates Adam from the clay of materia prima . (Hartmann Schedel, Das Buch der Chroniken [1493].)

Jung sees the square formed by the four serpents as an archetypal ground plan revealing an ordering of the unconscious. But why four?

The basis of alchemy is the reconciliation of opposites. In Jung’s psychological theory of types, the least differentiated of the four functions remains in the collective unconscious; in Pauli’s case, it is the feeling function. The problem is how to fuse this fourth function with the other three.

When the feeling function emerges into consciousness it releases the Self. Since the inferior function signifies the feminine, the result is a wavering between masculine and feminine. The development of the symbols in Pauli’s dreams is a sign of the healing process.

Pagan rites of transformation in the Middle Ages. (Joseph Hammer-Purgstall, Mémoire sur deux coffrets gnostiques du moyen âge [1835].)

Left and right

Some time later Pauli dreams that a group of soldiers armed with antiquated rifles tries to prevent a revolution in Switzerland by “completely throttling” the left. When he is angry, Pauli tells Jung, he often threatens to “throttle” someone. Jung suggests that the soldiers represent the antiquated view that left is evil.

To find perfect balance, says Jung, left and right—the unconscious and the conscious—have to be like mirror images. Pauli needs to achieve this, to accept the conscious and the unconscious on an equal footing.

The night club

Shortly afterward Pauli dreams he is in a squalid night club. It is a place where feelings do not count, which makes him feel safe. It’s like the old days again. There are a few bedraggled prostitutes there. He argues with the unsavory proprietor about the meaning of left and right. He wants to find symmetry, but he is afraid. He is still suspicious of the left, the unconscious. Angrily he walks out and takes a taxi traveling counterclockwise around the sides of a square. Back in the night club, he tells the proprietor, “The left is the mirror-image of the right. Whenever I feel like that, as a mirror-image, I am at one with myself.” The man replies pensively, “Now that’s better.” Jung adds that the man has left one thing unsaid: “but still not good enough!”

A man of unpleasant aspect

Two days later Pauli dreams he is sitting at a round table with “a certain man of unpleasant aspect.” At the center is a glass filled with a gelatinous mass. The round table, Jung says, suggests wholeness. The man sharing it is Pauli’s shadow, his dark side, made up of all the qualities that he and others find so repellent. Pauli’s anima is absent. He has finally succeeded in separating his anima from his shadow. His recognition that his shadow is separate from his anima is an enormous step forward. His anima is no longer tainted with moral inferiority. She is finally able fully to assume her role as the mediator between the conscious and the unconscious. At the same time the amorphous mass, or prima materia, comes to life.

He dreams again. The vessel on the table is now a uterus, a symbol which stands for the alchemical vessel in which the chaos of the prima materia is transformed by degrees into the lapis, the Self. It is a moment of creation—the beginning of Pauli’s rebirth.

For Jung too the work with Pauli was a journey of discovery, of magical transformations. For both of them it was a way to enter “the no-man’s-land between Physics and the Psychology of the Unconscious…the most fascinating yet the darkest hunting ground of our times.”