Atom and Archetype: The Pauli/Jung Letters, 1932-1958

by C.G. Jung, Wolfgang Pauli, Carl Alfred Meier

In 1932, world-renowned physicist Wolfgang Pauli had already done the work that would win him the 1945 Nobel Prize. He was also suffering after a series of troubling personal events. He was drinking heavily, quarrelling frequently, and experiencing powerful, disturbing dreams. Pauli turned to C. G. Jung for help, forging an extraordinary intellectual conjunction not just between a physicist and a psychologist but between physics and psychology. As their acquaintance developed, Jung and Pauli discussed the nature of dreams and their relation to reality, finding surprising common ground between depth psychology and quantum physics and profoundly influencing each other's work.

This portrait of an incredible friendship will fascinate readers interested in psychology, science, creativity, and genius.

Genres: Psychology, Science, Philosophy, Physics, Nonfiction, Psychoanalysis, Essays

320 pages, Paperback

First published June 19, 1992

About the author

Carl Gustav Jung (/jʊŋ/; German: [ˈkarl ˈɡʊstaf jʊŋ]), often referred to as C. G. Jung, was a Swiss psychiatrist and psychotherapist who founded analytical psychology. Jung proposed and developed the concepts of extraversion and introversion; archetypes, and the collective unconscious. His work has been influential in psychiatry and in the study of religion, philosophy, archeology, anthropology, literature, and related fields. He was a prolific writer, many of whose works were not published until after his death.

The central concept of analytical psychology is individuation—the psychological process of integrating the opposites, including the conscious with the unconscious, while still maintaining their relative autonomy. Jung considered individuation to be the central process of human development.

Jung created some of the best known psychological concepts, including the archetype, the collective unconscious, the complex, and synchronicity. The Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI), a popular psychometric instrument, has been developed from Jung's theory of psychological types.

Though he was a practising clinician and considered himself to be a scientist, much of his life's work was spent exploring tangential areas such as Eastern and Western philosophy, alchemy, astrology, and sociology, as well as literature and the arts. Jung's interest in philosophy and the occult led many to view him as a mystic, although his ambition was to be seen as a man of science. His influence on popular psychology, the "psychologization of religion", spirituality and the New Age movement has been immense.

Reviews

[Kraig Grady · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is for the the die hard Jungian more because of it structure of information than anything. It is enlightening to see how much Pauli had in formulating the idea of Synchronicity and one understands why he is listed as the co-author. Unlike Freud, whose theories were limited by little variation he had in patients, or Lacan, who based his theories on linguistic ideas that Chomsky and others have since dismissed, we are left with this Jung who did not cringe from the developments in Quantum Physics. It says much of Jung that he could travel in this world as easily as that of some of the oldest Alchemical texts we have. We discover in Pauli that even men of science can appear to have abilities beyond the easily explainable and in the case, not always controllable.

[J. Sparks · Rating 5 out of 5]

Another favorite of mine. Not an easy read, but a very important one. Carl Jung, the psychiatrist and depth psychologist, and Wolfgang Pauli, one of the handful of physicists who discovered and elaborated quantum physics, engaged in a lively correspondence over several decades. They discussed the resonance between their respective disciplines, examining how the implications of quantum physics will change the way we see the world and live in it. Pauli's dreams are also included in the correspondence, and they provide a fascinating glimpse into the evolution of the human soul as it seeks to generate and to cope with the birth of a new eon in our age of transition.

[Anton Zlatev · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book exceeded my expectations and God were they high... Exceptional read

[Randy Wilson · Rating 5 out of 5]

I read about this collection of letters between physicist Wolfgang Pauli and Carl Jung and knew I needed to read them. I am looking for a holistic view of the world that includes or accounts for both the subjective and objective.

It sounded like Jung representing the subjective via psychiatry and Pauli representing the objective via physics were creating a synthesis. It turns out most of the leg work was performed by Pauli who definitely takes the lead here. He is the one that poses the dilemma for humans as follows:

‘The socialization of science and power is an expression of the fact that the age of natural science has increasingly experienced a loss of critical spirit. It may well have command of the intellect but it has not found any adequate expression for the spiritual aspect of emotional life.’

The amazing thing is that Pauli understood that Jungian archetypes could serves as spiritual containers for scientific concepts. This was a leap that few scientists are willing to consider but clearly he understood the craving of humans for a unifying and resonating belief system.

Jung is very supportive of Pauli’s ideas and offers insight for Pauli’s dreams but doesn’t have the confidence to push towards a cohesive perspective. Does Pauli ultimately come up with a unifying philosophy? Not really but he gives credibility to the search for one.

[Kyle · Rating 5 out of 5]

The amount of mental energy behind these letters is astonishing, both Jung and Pauli helping each other function better in the respective fields while also giving each other insights into the psyche and subatomic particles. Much of it seems like Pauli writing Jung with an endless supply of dream imagery to interpret, in return for a collection of published theories to be fact-checked for scientific accuracy. Both writers, along with occasional correspondence with Emma Jung and Aniela Jaffé, are warm reminders of some of the most trying times in European (and global) history still had people with the cordiality and curiosity to write a letter to find out more information on a wide array of topics from alchemy to the atomic bomb.

[Sayani · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a combined review of two books:
1. Introducing Jung: A Graphic Guide
2. Atom and Archetype: The Pauli/Jung Letters 1932-58


There's a little Faust in me 🖤

My thought after I finished this introductory book on Carl Jung with beautiful ink drawings and reproductions of old alchemical etchings. Begins with the usual biography and the meeting and rift with Freud but quickly delves into explanatory spreads about instincts and archetypes and the basics of Jungian dream analysis. Particularly interested in active imagination and image associations.

Followed by snippets on introvert and extrovert psychic energies and eight psychological types. Me: introvert feeling type (monks, nuns, musicians 😅). It's all very interesting yet not empirical. Things get unusual in sections where Jung interprets the birth of Christ, the rise of Christianity, and the rise of materialism (the births of Darwin and Marx) through the position of stars in the Pisces constellation (my own) and here my little Faust started whispering in my ear- scientific basis? Astrology? Things get better in the final section.

Synchronicity and post-Einsteinian physics. Just before I arrived at this section, I kept wondering if archetypes are like chemical isotopes. It was a fleeting thought until I discovered a vast correspondence between Wolfgang Pauli and Jung during the 1930s where they discuss the associations and similarities between psychology and physics. The nature of causality in behavior of subatomic particles.

I read about twenty of these letters in Atom and Archetype, the collection of letters between Jung and Pauli. They are dense. Pauli describes images and symbols in his dreams and Jung analyzes them. But they are not empty philosophical hokum. Jung reads the latest in quantum physics and Pauli reads the esoteric. It's my dream relationship: the confluence of the mind and matter. They are respectful and Pauli is just happy that Jung appreciates his attempts at analyses. It's in one of these essays I read isotopes and spectral lines compared to units of a particular individual, the nucleus as the "Self", and resonances as archetypes. I was just one analysis away from Jung-Pauli's. Inner Faust chuckles.

[Da Re · Rating 4 out of 5]

Mind and matter are two sides of the same coin. This is at least the intuition that two of the most brilliant minds of the 20th century on Theoretical Physics and Psychology, respectively, shared and tried to grapple with collaboratively. This collection of letters is the result of them trying to make the parallels at the depths of their fields mutually intelligible and work out their implications. The fundamental double parallel ("quaternio" if you will) looks like this:

Archetype : Energy (both atemporal) :: Self-Consciousness : Sequence of Physical Events (both temporal)

In plain language, this means that there are certain unchanging qualities, archetypes and energy, which seem to share an existence outside of time (and therefore conscious experience as well as physical events). In other words, observation (in the physical as well as psychological sense) cannot happen from a viewpoint of nowhere / -when. In this respect, the apparently incongruent pieces of mind and matter can conjoin to create a whole in their complimentarity.

As a result of 26 years of sending letters back and forth, countless puzzling dreams reports interspersed with mythology and metaphysical speculation, Pauli and Jung are able to piece together this complementarity of viewpoints they share. This book is a fascinating account of how two lucid minds try their best in equating the different languages through which their minds express the apparently same (or at least similar) ideas about reality. At times, the regular reference to esoteric ideas & thinkers can be estranging, though. It entangles the lucid train of thought into a web rather bewildering treatises of unheard-of mystic thought. However, these two men seem to have known what they were talking about. After all, these letters were not written to be published. We should be glad they were published nevertheless, despite the more outlandish passages certainly confusing to everyone but the hardcore mystic.

[Craig Werner · Rating 5 out of 5]

If you don't immediately respond to the pairing of Jung and Pauli, this isn't your book; that's not dismissive, but it's the easiest way to start the review since both the psychologist and the physicist assume a certain "advanced layman's" background. Actually, they don't assume that at all since they were writing to each other, a correspondence that lasted more than a quarter century.

There are very very few examples of such an extended high level discussion of issues with the resonance of the relationship between psychology and physics, and, beyond that of spirit and matter. Popular accounts of the friendship tend to stress the places where the two men's thought converges–especially around the idea of "synchronicity" (shorthanded as the non-causal relationship between events, but the book makes it clear any shorthand is inadequate.). But what struck me most deeply about the letters is their willingness to disagree, demand clarification, challenge. It helped tremendously that I had recently read Jim Baggot and John Heilbron's Quantum Drama, which clarified the stakes of the controversies in physics that Pauli played a central part in.

It was fascinating to see how Pauli went about processing his dreams. His late-life exploration of his experience of what Jung called "individuation"--the path to psychic wholeness--is one of the most moving pieces of Jungian writing I've encountered.

Because the book is a compilation of letters, there are lots of gaps, but both men are carefuly to explain what they're responding to even if the preceding letters date from a year back.

Also worth noting how concerned they were with the political situation of a world that seems almost idyllic in comparison to the one I read it in.

[Adrian Manea · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excellent read, but only if you're familiar with Jung and/or read him in parallel!

Although I do have a degree in Physics and thought I knew a thing or two about the biographies of the researchers involved in the quantum revolution, I had no idea about this side of Pauli. As the editor remarks in the preface, for some letters, the reader must double-check the author, since their ideas reach a great intersection, to a degree I thought it was impossible - at least not for these two brilliant minds.

Excellent, insightful comments from both sides, great communication almost to the point of merging their minds and spirits.

Now I just have to read more Jung. And Pauli. And their joint effort on Kepler, synchronicity and alchemy!

[Get Paid · Rating 5 out of 5]

Easily one of the greatest philosophers that history rarely speaks of a true Einstein of philosophy.

I can only recommend studying as well as reading this literary masterpiece.

[Michael · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book gives you a fascinating ringside seat as a great psychologist and great physicist try to understand each other's worlds and bring them together.