13

Second Intermezzo—Road to Yesterday

The dream

ON NOVEMBER 4, 1955, Pauli’s father died. By now the two had reconciled and Pauli was deeply affected. It felt like a defining episode in his life. As he put it, “the shadow with me was projected onto my father for a long time, and I had to learn gradually to distinguish between the dream figure of the shadow and my real father.”

Despite the rift between them after the suicide of Pauli’s mother, Wolfgang Sr. had been always immensely proud of his son’s achievements. Eventually father and son managed to overcome their differences and were back on good terms. Perhaps their reconciliation was a combination of time healing emotional wounds and, of course, Jung’s therapy.

When Germany invaded Austria, in 1938, it placed Pauli’s father in great danger. For despite his conversion, he had been born a Jew. Pauli immediately arranged for him to move into Switzerland. Wolfgang Sr. had to leave all his possessions behind and arrived in Zürich with only a suitcase, accompanied by his wife, Maria (Pauli’s “wicked stepmother”). Initially they stayed with Pauli and Franca. Franca did not get along with Maria. In the end Maria decided to return to Vienna and was not reunited with her husband until after the war. In Switzerland Wolfgang Sr. was welcomed at the chemistry department of the University of Zürich, where he continued his scientific research. After he died Maria had severe monetary problems, often turning to her stepson for help. She also had an alcohol problem.

Soon after Pauli’s father’s death, Jung’s wife Emma also died, followed by the elegant mathematician Hermann Weyl. Weyl’s cremation was set for December 12 at 17.00 hours.

A few weeks earlier, on October 24, Pauli had had a dream. In it he is on an express train, departing at 17.00 hours—the exact time of Weyl’s cremation. The train encounters an obstacle and has to swerve around it. Then Pauli goes into a church with Franca and a Swiss friend whom he calls Mr. X. In the church “some strangers” are waiting—the strangers who occur again and again in Pauli’s dreams. There is a blackboard in the church. Pauli goes up to it and writes some complicated equations to do with the quantum theory of magnetism.

Then a famous preacher appears, the “Master” or the “great stranger.” He walks to the blackboard and says in French that the subject of that day’s sermon “will be the formulas of Professor Pauli. There is here an expression with four quantities,” taken from one of Pauli’s equations on magnetic effects. The equation reads: HN/V. Mu () is the extent to which a material is magnetized, H the magnetic field produced by the number (N) of electrons in the magnet, and V is the magnet’s volume.

In all, there are four symbols—the number four again. Later Pauli recalled that in Jung’s books, particularly Aion, he had mentioned that magnets were often considered a source of magical power, in that they contain opposite poles, north and south, in a single object.

In Pauli’s dream the strangers become excited and shout in French “parle, parle, parle”—“speak, speak, speak.” As always they want him to speak about feelings (France being the country of feelings) and about physics and psychology. (In his account of this to Jung, Pauli comments humorously, “In my dreams, by the way, I often speak somewhat better French than I do when I am awake.”) But he is reluctant to speak up, fearing for his reputation among fellow scientists. His heart begins to pound so hard that he wakes up.

Musing over his dream, Pauli interprets the church as a new house, free from any struggle between opposites. Franca is with him. He is at one with himself.

Through analysis, he tells Jung, his function schema has changed. In earlier years his thinking function was dominant, but now that role has shifted to his intuition. Things are going better with his feeling side—represented by France—while extraverted sensation has become the inferior function. In other words, Pauli has become a nicer person, though further removed from reality.

This self-assessment was corroborated by Marie-Louise von Franz, who said of him: “He was highly intelligent, very honest in his thinking, but otherwise a very immature big boy in his feelings…. He had a patriarchal outlook on women. Women were pleasant things to play with, but not something to take seriously.”

Pauli described his dream to Fierz as well as to Jung. Fierz asked rhetorically, “To where is this journey?” He pointed out that the formula Pauli had written on the blackboard referred to optics as well as magnetism. The combined subject is called magneto-optics and concerns how light is transformed when it is passed through a material immersed in a magnetic field. Pauli had made important advances in it, one of which was this formula. Fierz reminded Pauli that magnetism was to do with attraction—the attraction of the north and south poles—while optics refers to visualizations. “What is the connection for us of these magnetic visualizations?” he asked.

“The connection,” he continued, answering his own question, “is an alchemical one which concerns a transformation leading to an unfolding of events. How so and why so, you know much better than others from personal experience. ‘The magneto-optical transformation and the 4 quantum numbers,’ this is the key to your biographical experience.” But Fierz did not know the meaning of the journey in the dream or how it related to the alchemical notion of transformation as Jung reinterpreted it.

In fact Pauli was about to make a very significant train journey.

Brief encounter

Pauli told the story of his journey in three different ways in three different letters: to his friend Paul Rosbaud, the Scientific Director of Pergamon Press; to Fierz; and to Jung. The events took place during a trip to Hamburg between November 29 (full moon night) and December 1. Pauli also described the trip to Bohr. He referred to it only as “this ‘road to yesterday,’” with no details.

Pauli’s trip to Hamburg on November 29 was to give a lecture at the university there on “Science and Western Thought.” He spoke on how important it was to reconcile the rational-critical (that is, Western science) with the mystical-irrational (that is, Eastern thought) to try to create a single framework of the physical and the psychical. It was an important lecture for him because it was one of the very few times he ever spoke in public on this topic. “It is precisely by these means,” he concluded, “that the scientist can more or less consciously tread a path of inner salvation. Slowly then develop inner images, fantasies or ideas, compensatory to the external situation, which indicate the possibility of a mutual approach of poles in the pairs of opposites.”

Early that evening, at precisely 17.00 hours, the phone in his hotel room rang. Pauli picked up the receiver. He recognized the voice immediately. It was the beautiful, blonde girlfriend from his Sankt Pauli days whom he had abruptly dumped when she had become a morphine addict. In writing about this meeting to his friends, he kept the woman’s name a secret.

Ten years earlier, she said, she had seen his name in a newspaper, announcing that he had won the Nobel Prize. But she couldn’t track him down. She didn’t know where he was living. Then she spotted an advertisement in a newspaper saying that he was to give a lecture in Hamburg. His hotel was also named.

Pauli was excited to hear from her and curious as to what had become of her. But he was also apprehensive. Even though so many years had passed since then, he still felt the old dread of mixing his night and day selves. In the end he agreed to meet her on the day he was due to leave, in the lobby of his hotel, the Hotel Reichshof, one of the best in Hamburg.

She was two years younger than he, so she would have been fifty-three. Nevertheless, when she came through the revolving doors he saw that she was still beautiful, blonde, and alluring. “This young woman suddenly appears qua woman. (Regeneration motif! N.B. shortly before, on 4 November, my father died) and she was in good health,” he wrote to Fierz.

For two hours they talked intensely. “A whole lifetime of 30 years passed before me—her cure, a marriage, and a divorce, with war and National Socialism as a historical background.”

Perhaps, he thought, the situation was archetypal, a fairytale “being played out.” After all, November 29, the night that she contacted him, was the night of the full moon. The first time they met, he recalled, had been in his Jekyll and Hyde days in Hamburg:

30 years ago my neurosis was clearly indicated in the complete split between my day life and my night life in my relations with women, but now it was very human.

As for seeing her again—“erotic it was not.” Rather it was a painful reminder of the very different person he had been thirty years earlier:

I saw myself as in a dark mirror, in a time 30 years previous with its sharp cut between the worlds of night and day, which I worked strenuously to maintain—until the breakdown of 1930 came upon me (my great life crisis). In the day calming works, in the night sexual entertainment in the underworld—without feeling, without love, indeed without humanity. “What price glory!”

Pauli told her that he regretted falling out of contact. He recalled how pretty she had been in those days and, he added, now too. A human life unrolled before him. He felt ashamed that he had no more to say. “But should I speak—‘speak, speak’—what should I say,” he thought, in French. As with the “strangers” in his dream who wanted him to speak about his feelings, he was tongue-tied in front of this woman.

“One should not give up hope,” he wrote to Fierz. “I gave up on this young lady in 1925, too early. But, personally, even if she at the time would have been entirely healthy, the life rhythms were not so. (It is very probable, that at that time I kept away from her—I wanted at that time no external connection [no relationship]).”

The woman walked Pauli to his train. When they arrived they were both aware that this was a moment that would not occur again. Pauli told her how pleased he was to have seen her again. He was married, he said, lived in Zürich, and was easily within reach. He thought of kissing her, then hesitated and decided not to. “Now it was as friends—at that time not.”

He described their parting to Jung:

But now it was very human, and as we parted on the platform, it seemed to me like a coniunctio. Alone in the express train to Zürich, my mind went back to 1928 as I took the same route toward my new professorship and my great neurosis. I may be a little less efficient than in those days, but I think the prospects are a bit brighter as regards my mental and spiritual well-being.

Afterward Pauli could not put the meeting out of his mind. In search of a deeper understanding of it he thought back to Fierz’s comment on his dream about the blackboard. Fierz had pointed out the fourness it contained in the four symbols in Pauli’s equation as well as the four quantum numbers. All of a sudden, Pauli realized that this research was part of his tumultuous past, his Hamburg days. The blackboard dream had occurred before the death of his father, a defining episode in his life. Meeting the woman in Hamburg made him realize that he had broken with that past. “There was a transformation in those 30 years, at the [station] platform [where they said goodbye] it had for me somewhat of a humanistic-conciliatoriness, a ‘coniunctio.’…My individual life attained a sense of symmetry between past and present,” he wrote to Fierz. Just as Fierz had suggested, the number four held the key to his “biographical experience.” Pauli’s train ride was not to meet his neurosis but to return home.

“May sometime the preacher of dreams make it possible for you to make a journey as I have made to Hamburg,” Pauli finished his story.