Wolfgang Pauli
1900–1958 · Austrian–Swiss
Quantum physicist and collaborator with Jung on dreams and synchronicity, bridging physics and depth psychology.
In the record
- Born
- 1900, Vienna
- Died
- 1958, Zurich
- Training
- University of Munich (Ph.D. 1921, Arnold Sommerfeld); University of Göttingen (Max Born); University of Copenhagen
- Affiliation
- ETH Zurich (1928–1958); Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton (1935, 1940–1946); University of Hamburg (1923–1928)
Key works
- Theory of Relativity (1981)
- General Principles of Quantum Mechanics (1980)
- Lectures on Physics (2000)
- The Interpretation of Nature and the Psyche (1955)
- Atom and Archetype: The Pauli/Jung Letters, 1932–1958 (2001)
- Writings on Physics and Philosophy (1994)
Sebastian reads Pauli
Pauli matters to depth readers for one reason above all others: he is the physicist who could not explain his own dreams by physics, and who was honest enough to say so. When Jung and Pauli collaborated, the traffic ran in both directions — Jung borrowed Pauli’s complementarity principle to sharpen the intuition behind synchronicity, while Pauli found in Jungian psychology a language for what quantum mechanics had already implied: that the observer is not outside the system, that psyche and matter share a border neither discipline can patrol alone. What Pauli brought that Jung could not supply was a first-rate scientific conscience — he was not willing to let synchronicity remain a beautiful hunch, and his pressure on Jung produced a more rigorous formulation than Jung would have reached alone. Read Pauli when a question opens at the joint between world and soul — not to dissolve that joint into mysticism, but to hold it honestly, as Pauli did, as an unresolved and possibly unresolvable asymmetry at the heart of modern knowledge.