Letters of C. G. Jung: Volume 2, 1951-1961
To Carl Seelig
Dear Dr. Seelig, 25 February 1953
I got to know Albert Einstein through one of his pupils, a Dr. Hopf if I remember correctly.
Professor Einstein was my guest on several occasions at dinner, when, as you have heard, Adolf Keller was present on one of them and on others Professor Eugen Bleuler, a psychiatrist and my former chief.
These were very early days when Einstein was developing his first theory of relativity.
He tried to instill into us the elements of it, more or less successfully.
As non-mathematicians we psychiatrists had difficulty in following his argument.
Even so, I understood enough to form a powerful impression of him.
It was above all the simplicity and directness of his genius as a thinker that impressed me mightily and exerted a lasting influence on my own intellectual work.
It was Einstein who first started me off thinking about a possible relativity of time as well as space, and their psychic conditionality.
More than thirty years later this stimulus led to my relation with the physicist Professor W. Pauli and to my thesis of psychic
synchronicity.
With Einstein’s departure from Zurich my relation with him ceased, and I hardly think he has any recollection of me.
One can scarcely imagine a greater contrast than that between the mathematical and the psychological mentality.
The one is extremely quantitative and the other just as extremely qualitative.
With kind regards,
Yours sincerely,
C.G. Jung ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages108-109.
