10
The Superior Man Sets His Life in Order
Franca
PAULI WAS still deep in his sessions with Jung when he happened to go to one of Adolf Guggenbühl’s parties in 1933. It was at another of Guggenbühl’s famous parties, three years earlier, that he had had his second fateful meeting with Käthe Deppner. On this occasion he was introduced to an elegant and striking young woman named Franziska Bertram.
Born in Munich, Franca was thirty-two, a year younger than Pauli. Always fashionably dressed, she was cultured and well traveled, a woman of determination and strong opinions. Her parents had divorced and she had been brought up by her mother, first in Italy, then in Cairo, where she went to high school. When World War I broke out the family returned to Munich. She moved to Zürich in 1922, where she had been the personal assistant of Friedrich Adler, an eminent Communist politician—famous for having shot the prime minister of the Austro-Hungarian Empire—among several high-level secretarial positions.
Franca moved in high cultural circles and had just ended a relationship with the Swiss author and film writer Kurt Guggenheim. She was still in a fragile state, but was intrigued by Pauli’s strange personality. When Guggenbühl suggested that Pauli drive her home, as they both lived on Hadlaubstrasse—Franca at number 17, Pauli at number 47—Pauli replied off-handedly, “I suppose I could take you along.” Franca was not impressed.
Pauli was certainly lacking in social graces but nevertheless, despite his apparent coolness, he set out to court her. Perhaps his gauche behavior had simply been shyness. After all, Franca must have been rather intimidating. Shortly afterward, Franca moved in with him. A year later, she recalled, Pauli said abruptly, “Now we marry.”
As the great day approached, Pauli maintained his usual air of indifference. But his assistant at the time, Victor Weisskopf, tells a different story. Being Pauli’s assistant was a full-time job. It involved grading problems for Pauli’s courses as well as being available for discussions with him about his work and keeping him updated on developments in physics. It was always a struggle to obtain his permission to leave Zürich. Late in March that year, Weisskopf with great trepidation asked for one week’s leave to go to Copenhagen. “Why?” Pauli demanded impatiently. “I intend to marry and come back with my wife,” Weisskopf explained. To Weisskopf’s amazement, Pauli replied, “I approve of that, I am going to get married also!”
Pauli and Franca married in London on Sunday, April 4, 1934. Most likely Pauli chose London because he had never been there. Franca’s hooded eyes and half smile make her look uncannily like a female version of Pauli.
A couple of weeks later Jung sent Pauli his “best congratulations.” Jung had predicted that Pauli’s marriage “would constellate the ‘dark side of the collective’,” meaning that it would bring the good side of otherwise potentially dark archetypes into his consciousness. Pauli, elated, declared Jung was “perfectly correct.” To Jung, Pauli described Franca as someone who had “a similar problem of opposites, but the reverse of mine…. She fell in love with my shadow side because it secretly made a great impression on her.”
Shortly afterward the couple found themselves seated across the table from Jung at yet another of Guggenbühl’s dinner parties. Strangely, Jung totally ignored Franca. To make matters worse, Pauli had only just told her that he had previously been married, to Käthe. How could Jung not speak to her when he “was aware that the new marriage could lead to a devastating catastrophe,” she later demanded. Pauli reassured her that “Jung knew [from Pauli’s dreams] that the binding would be good.”
Franca’s conclusion was that Jung had ignored her because of “Pauli’s decision to marry” in other words, that Jung had lost Pauli to her. “Pauli, the extremely rational thinker, subjected himself to total dependence on Jung’s magical personality,” she remembered bitterly. Her distrust of Jung was augmented by her anger that he had sent Pauli to be analyzed by a mere student, Erna Rosenbaum. She insisted that Pauli end his sessions with Jung. Perhaps, in fact, it was she who was jealous of Jung.
Nevertheless, Pauli acquiesced. He ceased dream analysis with Jung. Colleagues at the ETH such as Hermann Weyl thought that Franca had done him a favor.
Nevertheless, Pauli remained somewhat disturbed and insecure. On a skiing trip with Franca that December he panicked that the “earth was shaking under his feet” and screamed that he wanted to “thrash someone.” Weisskopf and his wife were skiing nearby and dropped in to see them. Pauli was angry with Weisskopf because he had made an error in a physics paper and was not speaking to him. Weisskopf was eager to get back on speaking terms but Pauli refused to see him. Weisskopf asked Franca to intervene but Pauli had stopped speaking to her too because she had dented their car.
Back in Zürich, Pauli tried to make it up with Weisskopf. “Don’t take it too seriously,” he said grandly. “Many people have published wrong papers.” Then he ruined everything by adding, “But I never did!”
The following year, Erich Hecke wrote to Weyl that he was concerned about Pauli’s mental health. He seemed too preoccupied with “dreaming and waking fantasies.” Hecke felt sympathetic toward Franca and referred to the “huge piece of work” she had to contend with in her marriage.
In fact Franca contended well. She took care of day-to-day tasks, put up with his cynicism and, all in all, provided a secure home for him. She gave Pauli what he sorely needed—an ordered life in which he could get on with his work. Theirs was an affectionate relationship. The two of them always appeared comfortable with one another.
Over breakfast, Pauli regularly told Franca his dreams and then wrote them down. She recalled that this routine became increasingly important to him as he grew older. To her his dreams were useless exaggerations. After his death, she destroyed all the records of them she could find.
Though Pauli had stopped going to Jung for analysis, the two never ceased corresponding. Franca could not stop his dreams and Pauli continued sending Jung dreams that “perhaps [may be] of some interest to the psychologist.” Jung was ecstatic and promised to “‘excavate’ [the] ancient and medieval lines that have led to our dream psychology,”—to continue unearthing the mythical and alchemical aspects of Pauli’s dreams and working out what they revealed about archetypes. Jung referred not to “my” but to “our dream psychology,” a phrase he never used to anyone else. His patient had become a co-worker.
In search of a fusion of physics and psychology
In October 1935 Pauli had a dream in which he was at a physics conference. In his dream he was trying to explain his dreams to colleagues using everyday language but they could not understand. He realized that his dream was all about the need to find a common language that could be understood by both physicists and psychologists. Writing to Jung about it he played with the idea. Perhaps the term “radioactive nucleus,” for example, could be interpreted in psychological terms as the Self. Jung declared it an “excellent symbol” for a constellated archetype in the collective unconscious which then made an appearance in individual consciousness and thus encompassed both the unconscious and conscious Selves.
Over the next few years Pauli forged ahead in his research. He worked on crucial problems in physics and maintained a huge correspondence. He pursued infinities in quantum electrodynamics, damning certain of his colleagues’ results as deplorable; mulled over the myriad end products of cosmic rays smashing through the earth’s atmosphere; delved into the exciting new subject of nuclear physics; and sought a deeper understanding of his greatest discovery, the exclusion principle.
But he never revealed to his scientific colleagues another issue that continued to preoccupy him: the need for a fusion of physics with Jung’s analytical psychology in order to understand first the unconscious and then the conscious. Weisskopf recalled that in all the years he knew Pauli, Pauli never once mentioned the topic.
Pauli’s dreams and Jung’s analyses of them had led Pauli to the rather extraordinary conclusion that “even the most modern physics lends itself to the symbolic representation of psychic processes,” he wrote to Jung, adding that there are “deeper spiritual layers that cannot be adequately defined by the conventional concept of time.”
In January 1938, Pauli recorded the following dream and illustrated it with a drawing:
Pauli’s drawing showing his dream of January 23, 1938.
In the dream he sees three layers or lines. The top line contains a rectangle, labeled “window,” and a circle divided into three sections and labeled “clock.” The two other lines are waves with different degrees of oscillation. Pauli and his anima, his female aspect, are both present, but neither can see the time on the clock because it is too far above the lower two levels which he is moving along. So his anima tries to create her own time with what he calls “these odd oscillation symbols,” the same as those produced by the dwarves with their pendulum clocks in his “world vision.”
Pauli tries to work out the meaning of the dream. He realizes that the rate at which the oscillatory forms vibrate per second must be related to the notion of time. To bring harmony into this system he must find a way to relate all “3 layers to a four-part object (clock).” Once again he is torn between three and four.
Pauli began to notice symbols in his dreams that related to concepts in physics, such as pendulums and time. “In my dreaming and waking fantasies,” he informed Jung, “abstract figures are appearing.” These included “acoustic rhythms” or “alternating dark and white stripes” like spectral lines or wasps about which Pauli had a severe phobia. “It will become a matter of life and death for me to understand more about the objective (communicable) meaning of these symbols than I do at the moment,” he wrote to Jung.
Jung and the rise of Hitler
But no matter how otherworldly they were, in the end neither Jung nor Pauli could ignore the ominous changes in the world around them—to be specific, the rise of Nazism.
Back in 1935 Jung was invited to attend the tercentenary celebrations at Harvard University, scheduled for August 31 to September 18 the following year, as an honored guest.
Behind the scenes, however, there had been a great deal of struggle over whom to invite from Germany—if anyone at all. By now Hitler was in power and professing rabidly racist policies. The situation was particularly complex in the case of Jung who, early on, had become interested in the rise of Nazi Germany from the standpoint of analytical psychology. “Would you have believed that a whole nation of highly intelligent and cultivated people could be seized by the fascinating power of the archetype?” he wrote, adding “the ‘blond beast’ is stirring in its sleep.” He saw this as the archetypal image of Wotan, the mythical warrior king, worshipped before Christianity arrived in central Europe, who had been awakened by the “Hitler movement [which] literally brought the whole of Germany to its feet…. Wotan the wanderer is on the move,” he declared, awestruck at witnessing what he saw as his psychology in action.
Jung also expressed ambivalence and downright fear at what he saw happening in Nazi Germany, but nevertheless for him it was an opportunity not to be missed. In 1933 Freud’s books had been among those burned in Berlin. Psychoanalysis, so long associated with the Jews, was now banned in Germany. Jung’s analytical psychology was the only one allowed in the German cultural scene. Jung wrote several tracts in praise of National Socialism (Nazism) and in condemnation of the Jews, making statements no doubt intended to curry favor with the authorities, such as “The ‘Aryan’ unconscious has a higher potential than the Jewish.” Condemning Freud’s psychology, he wrote sternly, “it has been a grave error in medical psychology up till now to apply Jewish categories—which are not even binding on all Jews—indiscriminately to Germanic and Slavic Christendom.”
Jung cemented his control over psychoanalysis in Germany by becoming president of the International General Medical Society for Psychotherapy as well as editor of its journal Zentralblatt für Psyschoanalyse. But he made sure that the organization’s rules were vague enough that they banned Jews only from the German section.
Rumors even reached the Harvard tercentenary selection committee that Jung was “The Mephistopheles in the Nazi drama”—that is, that he was the eminent grise behind the Nazis—and that he was amused at the Nazi’s treatment of “Freud’s brethren”—the Jews. After many acrimonious sessions the committee decided to invite Jung, placing academic unity over political concerns. It was a decision for which Harvard would later be criticized.
Pierre Janet from France and Jean Piaget from Switzerland were among other psychologists who were invited. Freud, then eighty years old, was not invited. The tercentenary committee decided he was too old to attend and would probably decline.
Einstein declined and Bohr decided not to attend. Heisenberg had also been invited and had accepted but was forced to withdraw. In fact, the German government had granted him permission to travel, but his military obligations and his need to reply to attacks on science in the press required him to stay in Germany. Pauli was not invited. Either the Harvard University scientists did not consider he had the required stature or perhaps they wanted to invite only physicists who were Nobel laureates.
The ceremonial sessions were attended by a distinguished audience of 17,000 who took their seats in Harvard’s inner sanctum, Harvard Yard, where the fledgling Continental Army had drilled in 1776 and George Washington had been headquartered. Most of the major figures of European academia were there. Sixty-seven thousand people formally registered to attend the proceedings.
The featured speaker was President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who was then running for his second term in office. Jung’s opinion of him made headlines in The New York Times: “‘Roosevelt Great,’ Is Jung’s Analysis.” He thought less about Roosevelt’s wife, Eleanor: “the nightmare on the way to being dreamt,” he was quoted as saying.
James Conant, Harvard’s dynamic young president, read out Jung’s official citation for his honorary degree thus: “Doctor of Science. A philosopher who has examined the unconscious mind, a mental physician whose wisdom and understanding have brought relief to many in distress.”
Jung’s lecture, on the morning of September 7, drew the largest crowd of all the seminars given. He spoke on “Psychological Factors Determining Human Behavior,” of how the “human psyche lives in indissoluble union with the body.” Afterward there was a spellbinding conversation between Jung and the American modernist poet Charles Olsen on mandala imagery in Herman Melville’s novel Moby-Dick.
The Jungs stayed in Milton, Massachusetts, at the home of G. Stanley Cobb, an eminent medical researcher. As was European custom, every evening Jung left his shoes outside their bedroom door to be shined, apparently unaware that they did not have live-in help. So as not to embarrass his guest, Cobb shined them himself.
As part of the climax of the splendid celebrations, on September 17 there was a spectacular fireworks display on the Charles River. Half a million spectators lined the banks.
After the celebrations at Harvard Jung gave a series of lectures at Bailey Island (Maine), New York City, and Yale University, where he spoke about how he had treated a brilliant but troubled scientist. Back home he got down to work on his “long overdue” book on alchemy.
According to one (unsubstantiated) story Jung shortly afterward interrupted his work for an undercover assignment. Josef Goebbels, Nazi minister of propaganda, summoned him to Berlin to attend official ceremonies with Hitler, Hermann Göring, commander of the German Air Force, and Heinrich Himmler, head of the feared SS. Jung’s task was to assess whether they were crazy. Presumably, if so there would have been a coup. According to the story Jung quickly realized they were all madmen, and, fearing for his life, left immediately.
Germany heads for war
Shortly afterward a very serious problem arose for Pauli—the question of his status in Switzerland. Germany annexed Austria in March 1938 and as a result Pauli’s Austrian passport became a German one. He immediately applied for Swiss citizenship but his application was refused. There were problems with residency requirements, added to which Pauli’s command of the Swiss-German dialect was not good. The mayor of Zürich informed him that his residency requirement would be fulfilled in spring 1940, after which he should reapply for Swiss citizenship.
So Pauli ended up back at the German consulate in Switzerland. After a cursory examination of his family history, the officials there declared him half Aryan, qualifying him for a straightforward German passport without the “J” stamp (meaning “Jewish”). His German passport was issued in November 1938 and was valid for two years. In Jewish tradition being Jewish is passed through the mother and so Pauli actually was not Jewish. But in German terms he was, because he had Jewish ancestry through his father’s family. In fact, under the grotesque arithmetic of Nazi racial theory, Pauli was 75 percent Jewish. As well as his father being Jewish, his mother’s father was too. If the Germans were to occupy Switzerland his passport would receive the dreaded “J” stamp, which would mean almost certain death.
As Pauli put it in his inimitable English to Frank Aydelotte, the director of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey:
By the fact that Switzerland didn’t make possible my naturalization in the moment of the annexation of Austria by Germany I was forced to accept a German passport. The German consulate counted me to the half-Aryans without further examination and so I got a non-Jewish (that means without J) passport. Actually I suppose I am after German law 75 percent Jewish. This would mean that in the case of German occupation of Switzerland I would be really menaced and treated as a Jew.
The following year Arthur Rohn, president of the ETH, suggested that Pauli apply again for Swiss citizenship. He did so in December 1939 but heard nothing for six months.
By the end of May 1940 Germany had Switzerland surrounded. Pauli acted quickly. He had been invited to the Institute for Advanced Study as a visiting professor for the winter term 1940–1941. He immediately arranged visas for Franca and himself to travel to the United States. He also pressed Rohn to resolve his citizenship case.
Rohn warned the head of the police division, Dr. Heinrich Rothmund, that the eminent Professor Pauli could be lost to the United States if Swiss citizenship was not granted soon. Pauli also wrote to Rothmund about the delay in processing his application and his attitude toward Germany’s annexation of Austria. He received a negative reply.
In a more detailed letter to Rohn, Rothmund declared that Pauli’s disapproval of the political situation in Austria and his desire to rid himself of his German citizenship, which he had never wanted in the first place, were not grounds for accepting him as a Swiss citizen. The decisive factor, he added “follows from [Pauli’s] characterization, reflected in one of the present police reports from Zürich, given by a closer colleague [regarding] his fitness for naturalization.” In other words, as Charles Enz, Pauli’s last assistant, wrote, “Pauli’s difficulty was due to a colleague!” Pauli was well aware of the animosity of several colleagues to him due to his being a Jew. One, it seemed, had written antagonistic comments about him.
Rohn questioned the police report, even calling for support from Pauli’s close friend and colleague Paul Scherrer and the ubiquitous Adolf Guggenbühl, but to no avail.
By now the Swiss authorities were well aware of German expansionist ambitions. Granting a famous Jewish scientist citizenship would not be a politic move. It was only on their second attempt that Pauli and Franca managed to make it to the United States after an arduous and sometimes nail-biting journey. They traveled by train through southern France, then across to Barcelona and Lisbon, from where they took a ship to New York, arriving on August 24, 1940. During the journey Pauli lost his nerve several times. Franca had to argue with him fiercely to persuade him to push on through Portugal. Just before he left, Pauli wrote a letter to Jung, concluding in all sincerity, “With my best wishes to you in this difficult time.”
Franca Pauli wrote of this 1940 passport photograph, “To my opinion, it is the best existing photo of W. Pauli.”
Unknown to Pauli, just a few weeks later his sister Hertha took a similar escape route. Her journey was even more harrowing. She had had to leave Berlin in 1933 after the Nazis began to suppress the arts. She went back to Vienna where she founded a literary agency, did some journalism, and began writing novels—all very much in the footsteps of her mother. She arrived with her lover Odön von Horváth, a Hungarian author of political plays that lampooned the Nazis. Hertha had fallen madly in love with him in 1932 and divorced Carl Behr. The two fled Berlin together. In Vienna they were the toast of the town. His plays were highly acclaimed and along with her beauty and talent as an actress, writer, and sometimes painter they gained easy access to the city’s vibrant intellectual world. Her first breakthrough book was the biography of Baroness Bertha von Suttner, the first woman Nobel laureate, awarded the Peace Prize in 1905 for her pacifist activities. Hertha also painted a portrait of her that bears a touching resemblance to her mother, both a pacifist and a journalist. In fact, Hertha’s mother had been a close friend of von Suttner’s.
When Germany annexed Austria in 1938, the couple fled to Paris where Hertha worked in publishing and continued writing novels. Not long after they arrived, the couple were caught in a violent rainstorm on the Champs Elysées. In a freak accident a branch of a tree fell on von Horváth, killing him instantly.
Two years passed. As the Germans invaded France, Hertha headed south to Marseilles, braving air attacks on refugee columns, German tanks, and the constant threat of arrest by the Vichy police. With the help of the legendary Varian Fry, the American Schindler, she managed to cross the Pyrenees into Spain and from there made her way to Lisbon. After obtaining an “emergency rescue visa” from the International Rescue Committee she arrived in New York City in September 1940. A year later Hertha was in Hollywood writing for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer studios. In 1942 she returned to New York City where she discovered her talent for writing books for children, usually with Catholic themes. She had always been convinced her escape from France was a miracle, which she attributed to the fact she had passed through the town of Lourdes.
The war years
Arriving in Princeton in 1940, Pauli spent his time working with Einstein on general relativity and continuing his prewar research. He also became close friends with the art historian and Kepler expert Erwin Panofsky, whom he had first met in Hamburg in 1928. Pauli quickly adapted to his new life. He bought a car and drove cross-country to visit colleagues and give lectures on his work. But this was also a trying time. Pauli’s German passport meant that he was stranded. At the institute he had difficulties finding funds to extend his stay, which had initially been planned for only one year.
In Zürich, officials and students at the ETH wrote demanding that Pauli return by the end of 1942. Otherwise, they said, his position would be in jeopardy. They regarded his leaving the country as a defection. Colleagues who were jealous of Pauli or had anti-Semitic feelings took the opportunity to vent their anger openly.
In the files of the ETH there is a letter that Paul Scherrer, supposedly Pauli’s friend and colleague, wrote to Arthur Rohn, the president of the ETH, in October 1941, saying he opposed allowing Pauli to continue his leave of absence. “Mr. Pauli is naturally having a very good time in the United States; but his productivity has suffered very much—as for all émigré physicists,” he wrote. It seems likely that the person who wrote to the police chief Heinrich Rothmund, advising him not to accept Pauli’s request for naturalization, was Scherrer and that Scherrer was probably causing Pauli further difficulties in maintaining his professorship at the ETH. He seems to have been more concerned about the future of the physics department in the event of a German invasion than the safety of the man he pretended was his friend.
To the end of his life, Pauli never knew of Scherrer’s treachery. What had happened to their previous friendship? Franca always noticed that at ETH functions and in group photographs Scherrer stole the limelight from Pauli. Scherrer’s manic need for self-publicity was well known and Pauli used to joke about it, rating people’s self-importance in “Scherrer Units.” Perhaps he felt he had to support Franca’s distrust of the academic hierarchy and drew away from Scherrer. As a result Scherrer began to resent what he saw as a lack of support from the department’s most important physicist.
Pauli replied to President Rohn that the ETH officials who ordered him to return were ignoring “the practical impossibility of the journey for me” and threatened to take legal action against the ETH. In response President Rohn hastened to secure Pauli’s position until 1948, the end of his second ten-year contract.
Pauli sometimes complained of being lonely at Princeton. “The past years have been rather lonesome, particularly ’42 and ’43,” he wrote to a former postdoctoral student, Hendrik Casimir, in Holland. His one-time colleagues from Europe were now at Los Alamos, working on the Manhattan Project to develop an atomic bomb. Pauli was not, as he later made clear, a great enthusiast of the bomb project. But he was running low on funds and offered his services to the director of the project who happened to be one of his first postdoctoral students, J. Robert Oppenheimer. Oppenheimer rejected his offer. He advised Pauli that he was better off doing pure research, setting an example for physicists who because of “legal complications cannot work on military problems.”
Pauli, in any case, was not a specialist in nuclear physics, nor had he ever been a team player. His brilliance was in research at the highest theoretical level, whereas what was required at Los Alamos was very much applied research.
All the same, it is striking that Oppenheimer should have turned down such a distinguished scientist. Perhaps the Pauli effect was on Oppenheimer’s mind? After all, there was plenty of delicate machinery, not to mention powerful explosives, at the site.
Pauli inadvertently almost played a part in the war effort. In 1942, his old friend Gregor Wentzel wrote to tell him that Scherrer had invited Heisenberg to give a lecture at the ETH. It was the first time during the war years that Heisenberg had left occupied Europe. Pauli passed the information on to Weisskopf as a bit of friendly gossip. Weisskopf was working on the Manhattan Project and knew that Heisenberg was involved in the German atomic bomb program. He immediately hatched a plan, in which he too would have played a part, to have Heisenberg kidnapped. He passed the plot on to Oppenheimer who passed it to the military. But in the end nothing came of it.
Hertha, meanwhile, who was in New York, had discovered that her older brother was not just an important scientist but a famous one, and that he was near New York. Life was not going well for her and she needed financial and personal help. From time to time, she took to visiting the Paulis. Franca had misgivings about her. Possibly it was connected with Hertha’s drive to have a career, while Franca devoted her life to her husband. Or perhaps it was Franca’s innate jealousy of any female acquaintance of Wolfgang’s, even his sister—perhaps with good reason.
Agent 488
Pauli had the choice to opt out of the war, but Jung could not. As war loomed, Zürich became a nest of espionage and counter-espionage. In neutral Switzerland people moved freely about while keeping constant watch on each other. Parties, social gatherings, and universities were all potential places for exchanging information, finding out who was an agent and for what side, or trying to be a double-agent. Double-crossings were not uncommon, sometimes with dire consequences.
Ordinary citizens had to cope with food and fuel shortages. Like everyone else the Jungs dug up their landscaped lawns to grow vegetables. As a family of means they were able to come up with enough food, tobacco, and wine to maintain at least a vestige of their opulent prewar lifestyle.
Then Allen Dulles arrived, sent by Colonel William J. (“Wild Bill”) Donovan, head of the American Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the forerunner of the CIA, to establish a listening post in Switzerland. Dulles’s official title was Special Assistant to the American Ambassador in Bern. Before the war Dulles had been a successful Wall Street lawyer. He also had extensive experience in intelligence affairs from World War I. Just hours after he had slipped into Switzerland the Germans invaded Vichy France and closed the French border. Dulles would have to work with whomever he could recruit locally. Meanwhile there was two-way traffic of German spies across the German border with northern Switzerland, aided by a sympathetic population.
One of Dulles’s earliest recruits was Mary Bancroft, a thirty-six-year-old American and a well-known socialite. She was famous for her affairs and also for her loose tongue.
Dulles quickly added her to his list of lovers. He impressed upon her the seriousness of her task as a go-between, gathering information from Germans working for the OSS as well as advising him on who was who in Zürich. He cautioned that if she talked too much lives could be lost.
Bancroft knew Jung socially and mentioned him to Dulles in her reports. Aware of Jung’s reputation as a Nazi sympathizer, Dulles had him investigated and concluded that the allegations were untrue. The two men met and were impressed with each other. Perhaps Jung was intrigued at the prospect of folding together espionage and psychology.
On Dulles’s suggestion, Jung embarked on a series of psychological profiles of Nazi leaders. “It is Jung’s belief that Hitler will take recourse to desperate measures up to the end, but he doesn’t exclude the possibility of suicide in a desperate moment,” Dulles wrote. It turned out to be an accurate prediction.
Dulles considered Jung’s profiles dependable and referred to him as Agent 488 in his despatches to the OSS offices in Washington. Jung may also have given him information obtained from patients.
Bancroft had also started analysis with Jung, to bolster her confidence in the spying game. As part of their sessions Jung advised her on how best to question someone based on psychological type, as well as how to apply analytical psychology to the speeches of the top Nazis.
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 Zürich.
SO DID JUNG have Nazi sympathies or not? The judgment of history is still out. It is difficult to weigh the anti-Semitic opinions he expressed, supporting the Nazi line, against his comments about the dark side of Nazism, 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 brimming with creative potential of the greatest complexity.
He wrote at some length of Freud’s psychoanalysis as a Jewish doctrine and described how its reduction of everything mental to material beginnings based on primitive sexual 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 Nazis. 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 Nazis, Scholem asked the highly respected Rabbi Leo Baeck for advice. Baeck had visited Zürich 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 Nazis 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 Nobel 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 Institute for Advanced Study and also at Columbia University. Then came the greatest honor of all: He was awarded the Nobel 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. citizenship. With job offers at Columbia and the Institute 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 Zürich 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 Institute 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 Japanese 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 Zürich.
Thus it was that Pauli returned to Zürich 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 Zürich, 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 God, like a ray of light emanating from the sun. Pauli’s analysis 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 space. 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 entity 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 assistant Markus Fierz. Fierz had studied Newton, who was born twelve years after the death of Kepler, and pointed out that his concepts of space and time were saturated with religion; to Newton both space and time were relative to God.
What of Kepler’s era, Pauli wondered, when space 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 Zürich. Jung was in the audience. In his lectures Pauli queried the relationship 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 assume 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 Institute opened in Zürich. 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 entitled, “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 quantitative 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 assimilation 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 quantity 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.