Pauli’s Life Crisis

Pauli and Jung first met in 1931, when Pauli sought help for acute depression.

Pauli says in a much later letter to Jung that his neurosis had already been quite apparent in 1926, while he was living in Hamburg.

His exclusive preoccupation with scientific interests had suppressed all other human qualities and in particular harmed his emotional life.

An expression of this was the vivid contrast between light and dark in his personality and in his relationships with women.

He developed a classical Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde personality: on the one hand he was the super intelligent famous conscience of Science, on the other an alcoholic ruffian who frequented bars and often got into fights.

He felt lonely and had the impression that everybody was against him.

Pauli also had at this time a very prejudiced view of women.

Women should keep out of science: the few who entered the field either did so only to find successful husbands or became transformed into unwomanly, ice-cold monsters.

This scorn for women was in contrast with his total emotional dependence on them.

This condition worsened considerably after the suicide of Pauli’s mother in 1927.

He had had a positive relationship to her and hated his father.

This hatred was now intensified and focused on both the father and the younger woman whom he had married.

In the light of Jung’s psychology, Pauli gradually understood that his contempt for women was based on the repression and projection of a part of his own personality, his dark feminine side (to use Jung’s term, his anima), which had not been allowed to develop.

The dark anima manifested as the prostitute in Pauli’s night life.

The light part of the anima had successfully been contained in his scientific pursuit, while the higher part of his personality, the Self, had been projected unto his physics teachers.

During his analysis Pauli devoted most of his efforts to expanding his neurotic and one-sided intellectual personality.

A large part of the work involved differentiating and integrating his anima.

As for many other men, this meant maturing emotionally and developing a more balanced relationship to sexuality and women.

When Pauli had worked through this basic side of his anima problem, however, he noticed that this set of eroto-sexual problems hid something much larger – a totally different way of looking at reality.

With Pauli’s permission Jung later published parts of the material from the analysis.

There he presented Pauli as an intellectual young man of striking intelligence who had sought Jung’s help because his neurosis had gained control of him and gradually undermined his morale.

In February 1932, Pauli began to undergo analysis with a female pupil of Jung’s, Dr. Erna Rosenbaum, a novice at the time.

She is described as a young Austrian, pretty, fullish, always laughing.

Pauli wrote her a letter introducing himself and the circumstances on 3 February 1932.

He informed her that Jung had quickly passed him a note with her name and address on after a lecture that Pauli had attended.

A week earlier he had consulted Jung about certain neurotic phenomena that were also linked to the fact that success in the academic world comes more easily to me than success with women. As it is the other way around with Mr. Jung, he seemed to me the right man to give me medical treatment.

Jung was obviously of another opinion and told Pauli that this female analyst was chosen because of his problems with women.

Elsewhere Jung explains the decision not to treat Pauli himself.

Because of Pauli’s extraordinary personality and the fact that he seemed to be chock-full of archaic material he wanted to make an interesting experiment and ensure that his development proceeded without any personal influence from Jung’s part.

In this way he would get that material absolutely pure and receive as objective a process as possible.

The doctor was for the most part just to observe the process.

In addition to their regular appointments Pauli – true to form – wrote long letters to his analyst, even excusing himself for writing so much.

He was apparently satisfied with this arrangement, he felt no need to meet his analyst more frequently.

Somehow it now functions smoothly by itself – so it seems to me – and I do not need too much enlightenment at present.

After five months Dr. Rosenbaum moved to Berlin, and contact was kept by correspondence only for another three months.

The greater part of this analytical work consisted in writing down and reporting dreams, which were then passed on to Jung.

Jung makes a point of mentioning that he did not meet Pauli at all during the first eight months of his therapy.

Thus 355 out of a thousand dreams over a ten-month period were dreamed without any contact with him.

Nor was there any need for interpretation of the dreams, thanks to the dreamer’s excellent scientific training and ability, as Jung puts it.

Jung found it important to add that Pauli’s educational background was not historical, philological, archaeological or ethnological and that all references to material from these fields had come to the dreamer from the unconscious.

As mentioned above a selection of dreams and fantasy material from Pauli’s analysis was then included in Jung’s lectures on the symbolic manifestations of the individuation process.

The material was first made public in a lecture at the Eranos Conference of 1935 and again a few years later in the Terry Lectures, given at Yale University in 1937.

The lectures were enlarged and eventually published under the titles Psychology and Alchemy and Psychology and Religion.

At Pauli’s request his identity was not revealed.

There is no surviving correspondence between Pauli and Jung during the war years 1941–45 and it is most probable that they did not write to each other during this time.

Paul1 resumes the correspondence in October 1946, while the discussions reach their most intensive in 1950, 1953 and 1957.

It is difficult to decide what the personal relationship between Paul1 and Jung was like.

The letters bear witness to mutual respect and sympathy.

In a recent biography of Jung their relationship is singled out as having occupied a unique position in Jung’s mature intellectual life.

Paul1 is said to have been Jung’s only friend who enriched Jung’s thinking and broadened his outlook.

We get a fairly good impression of Paul1’s reading of the works of Jung from Pauli’s library, donated to the CERN and kept in La Salle Pauli.

There we find seventeen works by Jung, most of them containing marginal notes by Paul1

This list is not complete, however; for example, essays by Jung that were published in the Eranos Yearbooks need to be added.

Jung’s book Wandlungen und Symbole der Libido (The Psychology of the Unconscious, later Symbols of Transformation) contains many notes, but is never discussed by Pauli1 in his letters.

This was probably the first book he read by Jung before they met and he started his analysis.

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