The strange friendship of Wolfgang Pauli and Carl Jung: when physics met psychology

Arthur I Miller recounts the extraordinary friendship between two equally brilliant yet very different men, the physicist Wolfgang Pauli and psychologist Carl Jung.

Arthur I Miller, recounts an extraordinary friendship between two equally brilliant yet very different men, the physicist Wolfgang Pauli and psychologist Carl Jung. Jung and Pauli were a truly unique meeting of the minds. It was, as Jung wrote, to lead both of them into ‘the no-man’s land between Physics and the Psychology of the Unconscious’…the most fascinating yet the darkest hunting ground of our times.

At a key time in his scientific development, the ground-breaking physicist Wolfgang Pauli underwent analysis by Carl Jung. In this event, Prof Miller explores how Jung analysed the dream imagery of one of his most famous patients. Pauli’s unconventional and wild life brought him to the brink of a mental breakdown. He obsessed over how he had made his greatest discovery, feeling that he had tapped into something beyond physics.

It’s the story of two mavericks – Pauli, a scientist who – unlike his peers – was fascinated by the inner reaches of his own psyche and not afraid to dabble in the occult; and Jung, the famous psychologist who nevertheless was sure that science held answers to some of the questions that tormented him. Both made enormous and lasting contributions to their fields. But in their many conversations over dinner and wine at Jung’s Gothic mansion on the shores of Lake Zurich, they went much further, striking sparks off each other as they explored the middle ground between their two subjects.

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