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At the age of 31, the brilliant quantum physicist Wolfgang Pauli, a close colleague of Bohr and Heisenberg and later the discoverer of the neutrino, approached Carl Jung for an analysis. Pauli's mother had recently committed suicide after discovering that his father was having an affair. Pauli's marriage had broken up, and he had started to drink heavily. He suffered from paranoid thoughts and had begun to pick fights with strangers.
Jung, however, had ideas of his own. He had recently received a copy of a Chinese alchemical text, ‘The Secret of the Golden Flower’, and had been inspired by it to embark on research into Western alchemy. Influenced by the Chinese text, he was coming to think of time as a continuum that could give rise to parallel events that were not connected causally. (This was the phenomenon he would later call ‘synchronicity’, or meaningful coincidence.)
Moreover, since his break with Freud twenty years earlier, Jung had elaborated his notion of an undifferentiated psychic energy not derived from the drives. He hoped that the exciting developments in quantum physics would provide many parallels to his ideas, and the arrival of Pauli may well have seemed a ‘synchronicitous event’ in itself. He decided therefore to stand back from the psychic events taking place in Pauli, and ‘to avoid all personal influence’ he asked one of his students, Erna Rosenbaum, to undertake ‘the observation of the process’ (, Psychology and Alchemy, CW vol. 12, p. 42). ‘I was absolutely sure she would not tamper’, he said.
In the course of five months with Rosenbaum, and then during three months on his own, the energetic Pauli wrote down some four hundred dreams. He then spent two years in analysis with Jung himself, apparently on a once-weekly basis. (In her introductory essay, Zabriskie says he spent two months with