Soon after he arrived to take up a new post in Zurich in the early 1930s, exhausted and emerging from divorce and a breakdown, the physicist Wolfgang Pauli took the obvious course: he checked himself into the clinic of the local analytical psychologist Carl Jung for a course of therapy. So began one of the most extraordinary partnerships of the twentieth century. Over the following twenty-five years, the two men worked together, not just on Pauli’s emotional problems but on a quest to unify the worlds of science and human psychology. Arthur I. Miller is not the first to mine their extensive correspondence for insights into both men, but his accessible account should bring this odd couple to a wider readership.

Pauli was a leading member of the group of theoretical physicists, including Niels Bohr, Werner Heisenberg and Erwin Schrödinger, who transformed our understanding of the way matter behaves at the subatomic level. Apart from his own discovery of the “exclusion principle”, which underlies our understanding of electricity and magnetism and for which he won a Nobel Prize in 1945, Pauli received the grudging admiration of his colleagues for acting as their most trenchant critic. Yet even at the height of his success he was not a happy man. Working as a junior professor in Hamburg, he spent his days in monk-like devotion to physics, and his nights drinking and roving the “Sankt Pauli” red light district looking for sex “without feeling, without love, indeed without humanity”. This pattern had been established for almost a decade by the time he turned up on Jung’s couch.

Jung, who had by that time broken from his mentor Sigmund Freud and established his own school of analysis, attributed Pauli's fragile state to his over-reliance on rational thought at the expense of feeling. He prescribed Pauli a course of dream analysis, and subsequently used many of Pauli’s dreams as examples in his publications. Miller devotes a central section of the book to describing these dreams and their interpretation, which drew heavily on Jung’s ideas about archetypes and the collective unconscious and his reading of medieval occultists and alchemists.

Pauli certainly gained in self-awareness as a result – a modern therapist might argue that simply giving himself permission to conduct such a thorough self-examination would have been beneficial. But Pauli went further. He wholeheartedly accepted the more controversial aspects of Jung’s theoretical framework, which struck a chord with his own long-standing interest in the mystical significance of particular numbers. Why did his exclusion principle demand that each electron be described by four quantum numbers, and not three as he had previously believed? What was the significance of the number 137, which appears in nature as the fine structure constant that determines the degree of splitting of spectral lines?

Miller traces Pauli’s willingness to entertain non-rational explanations back to his interest in a dispute between the seventeenth-century astronomer Johannes Kepler, who correctly calculated that the orbits of the planets were elliptical and not circular, and the English philosopher Robert Fludd. Both believed in hidden harmonies of nature, but among their differences was whether the number three or the number four held the greatest significance. This was the kind of question that Jung was only too happy to discuss, and after Pauli’s therapy sessions ended, the two men corresponded for decades. While Pauli never accepted the totality of Jung’s beliefs about “synchronicity” – coincidence of thought or action brought about through the collective unconscious – in 1952 they published a book together, The Interpretation of Nature and the Psyche. Pauli’s contribution was an essay on the role of archetypes in Kepler’s theories, and he put forward arguments for the necessity of an irrational element in scientific creativity.

Miller enthusiastically joins in the debate. He is eager to remind twenty-first-century readers that “Jung, Pauli and their contemporaries considered Jung’s research to be quite as important as Pauli’s work in physics”, and certainly seems to be more than open-minded on that point himself. Pauli was intrigued to find, on consulting a scholar of Jewish mysticism, that the word Kabbalah, written as numbers in Hebrew, adds up to 137. Miller agrees that this is “an extraordinary link between mysticism and physics”. Neither does he question Jung’s accounts of Pauli’s dreams: a more rational explanation of the images that successively appear in them might be that Pauli’s increasing preoccupation with Jung’s theories while waking caused him to rehearse versions of them in his sleep. Miller also seems surprisingly little interested in the relationship between Pauli and his parents. Pauli’s mother poisoned herself when his father left her for another woman, but Pauli’s psychological problems clearly date from before this traumatic event, which did not occur until he was twenty-seven.

Miller himself originally trained as a physicist before developing an interest in the history and philosophy of science. His ability to approach his subject from the perspective of both the sciences and the humanities is a great strength. My sympathies, however, lie with Pauli’s loving second wife Franca, who did at least as much as Jung to make him a more or less civilized member of society, and who spent the three decades she survived him trying to delay publication of his correspondence with Jung, in case it damaged his image as a serious scientist.

Arthur I. Miller
DECIPHERING THE COSMIC NUMBER
The strange friendship of Wolfgang Pauli and Carl Jung
336pp. Norton. £18.99 (US $27.95).
978 0 393 06532 9

Georgina Ferry is a science writer and biographer. Her book Max Perutz and the Secret of Life was published last year.

To read this week's Then and Now, a review from 1918 of Unconscious: Studies in Word-Association – Experiments carried out at the Psychiatric Clinic of the University of Zurich under the direction of C. G. Jung, click here.

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