It greatly impressed the elder physicist, who wrote in astonishment:

No one studying this mature, grandly conceived work could believe that the author is a man of 21. One wonders what to admire most, the psychological understanding for the development of ideas, the sureness of mathematical deduction, the profound physical insight, the capacity for lucid systematic presentation, the complete treatment of the subject matter, or the sureness of critical appraisal.

Indeed, this uncommon fusion of psychological acumen and scientific rigor only intensified as Pauli grew older. Around the time he wrote the paper that spurred Einstein’s praise, Pauli became enchanted with the work of pioneering psychologist William James. After a three-decade immersion in it, and several years after he won the Nobel Prize in Physics, Pauli met the great psychiatrist Carl Jung (July 26, 1875–June 6, 1961), who in turn was deeply influenced by Einstein’s ideas about space and time.

Jung and Pauli struck an unusual friendship, which lasted a quarter century until Pauli’s death and resulted in the invention of synchronicity — acausally connected events, which the observer experiences as having a meaningful connection on the basis of his or her subjective situation, a meeting point of internal and external reality.

Although rooted in Pauli’s interest in dream analysis, their conversations and correspondence went on to explore fundamental questions regarding the nature of reality through the dual lens of physics and psychology. Each used the tools of his expertise to shift the shoreline between the known and the unknown, and together they found common ground in the analogy between the atom, with its nucleus and orbiting electrons, and the self, with its central conscious ego and its ambient unconscious.

Both men were deeply imprinted by this intellectual cross-pollination. In his posthumously published final work, Jung would write:

We do not know whether what we on the empirical plane regard as physical may not, in the Unknown beyond our experience, be identical with what on this side of the border we distinguish from the physical as psychic. Though we know from experience that psychic processes are related to material ones, we are not in a position to say in what this relationship consists or how it is possible at all. Precisely because the psychic and the physical are mutually dependent it has often been conjectured that they may be identical somewhere beyond our present experience, though this certainly does not justify the arbitrary hypothesis of either materialism or spiritualism.

Pauli’s parallel curiosity about mind and matter is perhaps best articulated in by his friend and collaborator Werner Heisenberg — he of uncertainty principle fame — who would later write:

Behind [Pauli’s] outward display of criticism and skepticism lay concealed a deep philosophical interest even in those dark areas of reality of the human mind which elude the grasp of reason. And while the power of fascination emanating from Pauli’s analyses of physical problems was admittedly due in some measure to the detailed and penetrating clarity of his formulations, the rest was derived from a constant contact with the field of creative processes, for which no rational formulation as yet exists.

In their conceptually daring correspondence, collected in Atom and Archetype: The Pauli/Jung Letters, 1932–1958 (public library), the two delve into these parallels between the physical and psychic dimensions of reality. In one of his early letters, Jung considers the analogy Pauli had proposed between the atomic nucleus and the self. He writes in the autumn of 1935:

Generally speaking, the unconscious is thought of as psychic matter in an individual. However, the self-representation drawn up by the unconscious of its central structure does not accord with this view, for everything points to the fact that the central structure of the collective unconscious cannot be fixed locally but is an ubiquitous existence identical to itself; it must not be seen in spatial terms and consequently, when projected onto space, is to be found everywhere in that space. I even have the feeling that this peculiarity applies to time as well as space… A biological analogy would be the functional structure of a termite colony, possessing only unconscious performing organs, whereas the center, to which all the functions of the parts are related, is invisible and not empirically demonstrable.

The radioactive nucleus is an excellent symbol for the source of energy of the collective unconscious, the ultimate external stratum of which appears an individual consciousness. As a symbol, it indicates that consciousness does not grow out of any activity that is inherent to it; rather, it is constantly being produced by an energy that comes from the depths of the unconscious and has thus been depicted in the form of rays since time immemorial.

[…]

The center, or the nucleus, has always been for me a symbol of the totality of the psychic, as the conscious plus the unconscious, the center of which does not coincide with the ego as the center of consciousness, and consequently has always been perceived as being external.

Carl Jung on the cover of TIME magazine, February 1955

Over the following few years, their correspondence focuses primarily on dream analysis — which both Jung and Pauli saw as a means of illuminating scientific motifs in Pauli’s work — but again and again they return to the symmetry of mind and matter. In a letter to Jung from the summer of 1937, Pauli jeers at the narrow materialism of his own field and calls for an openness to other forms of knowing:

Most modern physics also lends itself to the symbolic representation of psychic processes, even down to the last detail. Of course, nothing is further from the thoughts of modern man than the idea of penetrating the secrets of matter in this way … since it seems to him that, relatively speaking, less research has been done on the soul, and it is less familiar than matter.

The following summer, 38-year-old Pauli writes:

After a careful and critical appraisal of the many experiences and arguments, I have come to accept the existence of deeper spiritual layers that cannot be adequately defined by the conventional concept of time.

In 1947, when Jung decided to found an institute dedicated to this field of research, he asked Pauli — who had received the Nobel Prize a year and a half earlier — to be among its sponsors. The physicist gladly agreed. In a letter to Jung from that December, he noted that the parallels between their interests provide “serious evidence that what is developing is indicative of a close fusion of psychology with the scientific experience of the processes in the material physical world.” He peers into that shared future:

It is probably a long journey, one we are only just setting out on, and it will especially entail, as a modifying factor, constant criticism of the space-time concept.

Space and time were virtually turned by Newton into God’s right hand (oddly enough, the position made vacant when he expelled the Son of God from there), and it needed an extraordinary mental effort to bring time and space back down from these Olympian heights. Going hand in hand with this, apparently, is the criticism of the basic idea of classical natural science, according to which it describes objective facts to such an extent that there is absolutely no link between them and the researcher (objectifiability of the phenomena independently of the way in which they are observed.)

Four decades before the revered physicist John Archibald Wheeler (who coined the term “black hole”) made his influential assertion that “this is a participatory universe [and] observer-participancy gives rise to information,” Pauli plants the seed of a grand question:

Modern microphysics turns the observer once again into a little lord of creation in his microcosm, with the ability (at least partially) of freedom of choice and fundamentally uncontrollable effects on that which is being observed. But if these phenomena are dependent on how (with what experimental system) they are observed, then is it not possible that they are also phenomena (extra corpus) that depend on who observes them (i.e., on the nature of the psyche of the observer)? And if natural science, in pursuit of the ideal of determinism since Newton, has finally arrived at the stage of the fundamental “perhaps” of the statistical character of natural laws … then should there not be enough room for all those oddities that ultimately rob the distinction between “physics” and “psyche” of all its meaning…?

If you turn Pauli’s words over in your mind for a few moments, you’d realize just how radical and enormous a proposition this is. Indeed, it was this letter that catalyzed the series of conversations in which Pauli and Jung came up with the concept of synchronicity — the ultimate dependency between the observer and the observed. By the fall of 1948, they were using the term regularly in their correspondence. In a letter from mid-1949, Jung writes to Pauli, enclosing a manuscript of his first paper on the subject:

Quite a while ago, you encouraged me to write down my thoughts on synchronicity… Nowadays, physicists are the only people who are paying serious attention to such ideas.

A few days later, Pauli echoes this faith in interdisciplinary thinking by sharing with Jung one of his great intellectual influences:

The idea of meaningful coincidence — i.e., simultaneous events not causally connected — was expressed very clearly by Schopenhauer in his essay “On the Apparent Design in the Fate of the Individual.”

[…]

This essay of Schopenhauer’s had a lasting and fascinating effect on me and seemed to be pointing the way to a new trend in natural sciences. But whereas [he] wanted at all costs to cling to the rigid determinism along the lines of the classical physics of his day, we have now acknowledged that in the nuclear world, physical events cannot be followed in causal chains through time and space. Thus, the readiness to adopt the idea on which your work is based, that of the “meaning as an ordering factor,” is probably considerably greater among physicists than it was in Schopenhauer’s day.

In a subsequent letter from the autumn of 1950, Pauli — who preferred the term “meaning-correspondence” over “synchronicity” as a way of placing greater emphasis on the meaning of events than on their simultaneity — adds:

In truth, nature is so fashioned that — analogous to Bohr’s “Complementarity” in physics — any contradiction between causality and synchronically can never be ascertained…. How do the facts that make up modern quantum physics relate to those other phenomena explained by you with the aid of the new principle of synchronicity? First of all, what is certain is that both types of phenomenon go beyond the framework of “classical” determinism.

[…]

I nevertheless, as a physicist, have the impression that the “statistical correspondence” of quantum physics, seen from the point of view of synchronicity, is a very weak generalization of the old causality… Although microphysics allows for an acausal form of observation, it actually has no use for the concept of “meaning.”

In the letter, Pauli diagrams the concepts discussed:

Six days later, Jung picks up the thread and crystallizes the definition of synchronicity:

Synchronicity could be understood as an ordering system by means of which “similar” things coincide, without there being any apparent cause.

With an eye to Pauli’s diagram, he considers the role of space and time in synchronicity:

Modern physics, having advanced into another world beyond conceivability, cannot dispense with the concept of a space-time continuum. Insofar as psychology penetrates into the unconscious, it probably has no alternative but to acknowledge the “indistinctness” or the impossibility of distinguishing between time and space, as well as their psychic relativity. The world of classical physics has not ceased to exist, and by the same token, the world of consciousness has not lost its validity against the unconscious… “Causality” is a psychologem (and originally a magic virtus) that formulates the connection between events and illustrates them as cause and effect. Another (incommensurable) approach that does the same thing in a different way is synchronicity. Both are identical in the higher sense of the term “connection” or “attachment.” But on the empirical and practical level (i.e., in the real world), they are incommensurable and antithetical, like space and time.

[…]

I would now like to propose that instead of “causality” we have “(relatively) constant connection through effect,” and instead of synchronicity we have (relatively) constant connection through contingency, equivalence, or “meaning.”

He illustrates this proposition with his own variation on Pauli’s diagram:

In a letter sent twelve days later, Pauli responds by introducing the crucial concept of scale into these considerations of synchronicity:

Synchronicity should be defined in a narrower sense so as to comprise effects that only appear when there is a small number of individual cases but disappear when there is a larger number… In quantum physics, there are not just effects that appear with large numbers instead of with small ones, and not only is the term “meaning” not the right one here (which you have written about at great length) but also the concept of the (psychic or psychoid) archetype cannot be used so lightly in the acausalities of microphysics.

In a letter from October of 1953, more than twenty years into their correspondence and a decade into their shared obsession with synchronicity, Jung writes to Pauli:

It means a lot to me to see how our points of view are getting closer, for if you feel isolated from your contemporaries when grappling with the unconscious, it is also the same with me, in fact more so, since I am actually standing in the isolated area, striving somehow to bridge the gap that separates me from the others. After all, it is no pleasure for me always to be regarded as esoteric. Oddly enough, the problem is still the same 2,000-year-old one: How does one get from Three to Four?

Jung and Pauli unfurl many more fascinating parallels between psychology and physics in the remainder of Atom and Archetype. Complement it with Jung on human nature, then revisit physicist, novelist, and poet Alan Lightman on science and transcendence.

Source: https://www.themarginalian.org/2017/03/09/atom-and-archetype-pauli-jung/

The Strange Friendship of Pauli and Jung - When Physics Met Psychology"

A lecture given by Prof. Arthur I. Miller (University College London) on Thursday 10 December 2009 at CERN.

At a key time in his scientific development, Pauli was undergoing analysis by Jung. What can we learn about Pauli's discoveries of the exclusion principle and the CPT theorem, as well as his thoughts on non-conservation of parity, and his quest with Heisenberg for a unified field theory of elementary particles from Jungs analysis of his dreams? A very different Pauli emerges, one at odds with esteemed colleagues such as Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg.

Source: http://www.arthurimiller.com

Synchronicity and Quantum Entanglement. On the trail of the dialogue by W. Pauli and C.G. Jung

An even more neglected correspondence (1932-58) of the Nobel Prize winner and pioneer of quantum theory, Wolfgang Pauli with the creator of analytical psychology Carl Gustav Jung discussed a new vision of the reality of nature, with the synchronicity of causally unconnected events as a central concept.

This takes place in the 1982 experimentally confirmed quantum entanglement of a concretion. This suggests a continuation and deepening near the Pauli-Jung-Dialog, in the consciousness, appear material world and transcendence on the firm ground of physics in a new light. Take a look behind the scenes of the physics and psychology, and look forward to an exciting lecture by Prof. Dr. Günter Ewald.

A la veille de la première guerre mondiale, suite à sa rupture avec Freud, Carl Gustav Jung entre dans une période de profonde dépression ponctuée de délires mystiques. Jung va choisir de plonger au cœur de son inconscient, au risque de basculer vers la folie. En parallèle à cette expérience mystique hors norme il va rédiger un livre lui aussi hors norme, le "Livre rouge". Il va travailler à ce livre durant 16 ans de 1914-1930.

Ce livre, rendu publique en 2009 seulement et traduit en français en 2011, est actuellement exposé à la fondation Martin Bodmer de Cologny. Charles Mêla, directeur de la fondation, évoque l’histoire de ce livre en parcourant l’exposition temporaire qui lui est consacrée "C. G. Jung, le rouge et le noir".

How are mind and matter related? In the mid-20th century, the psychiatrist and analyst Carl Gustav Jung and the Nobel Laureate physicist Wolfgang Pauli formulated the concept of synchronicity. They sought a philosophical answer to this still unsolved question of how the mental and material, the physical and psychological are related in time. Pauli and Jung’s thesis suggests two types of mind-matter correlations for synchronistic experiences in which meaning is crucial and pivotal.

In this second roundtable on The Pauli-Jung Conjecture,” moderated by Beverley Zabriskie, Harald Atmanspacher and Joseph Cambray will further the April 2014 discussion at the Helix Center (video at www.helixcenter.org/videos/#/03Nq6MCh5Rc ). Edgar Choueiri and Farzad Mahootian will argue its central thesis, that the mental and the material are two complementary and intersecting aspects of one underlying reality. Atmanspacher will outline the speculations emerging from the conjecture’s “dual-aspect monism.” 

Using mental health care data, he will describe relevant psychophysical experiences from clinical settings. Cambray will discuss the significance of Atmanspacher’s research for a re-visioning of contemporary analysis and psychotherapy. Mahootian engages complementarity as an organizing principle in physical and social contexts, specifically in research laboratory settings. Choueiri, whose work focuses on space plasma physics and space exploration, will bring to bear questions which arise from applied science: the potential epiphanic role the theory of synchronicity can play, and the possible degeneration into the apophenia dreaded in experimental physics.

Participants:

Harald Atmanspacher

Physicist, The Collegium Helveticum (ETH Zurich, Switzerland); Privatdozent for theoretical physics, University of Potsdam; Faculty, Parmenides Foundation Munich and the Zurich C.G. Jung Institute

Joseph Cambray

Jungian Analyst; past President of the International Association of Analytical Psychology

Edgar Choueiri

Professor of Applied Physics, Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering and Associated Faculty, Department of Astrophysical Sciences, Program in Plasma Physics, Princeton University

Farzad Mahootian

Faculty of Liberal Studies, New York University; affiliated scholar, Consortium for Science Policy and Outcomes, Arizona State University

Beverley Zabriskie

Jungian Analyst, a founding faculty member and past President of New York’s Jungian Psychoanalytic Association

"I have no doubt that the placing side by side of the points of view of a physicist and a psychologist will also prove to be a form of reflection."

—Wolfgang Pauli

"Since physicists are the only people nowadays who would be able to deal with such a concept successfully, it is from a physicist that I hope to meet with critical understanding, although...the empirical basis seems to lie wholly in the realm of psychic phenomena."

—C. G. Jung

The concept of synchronicity was developed by the Nobel Laureate quantum physicist, Wolfgang Pauli and the Swiss psychiatrist C. Jung in the middle of the twentieth century. It stressed the empirical fact of meaningful coincidence—a special sense of coincidence of two or more causally unrelated events which have the same or similar meaning. Synchronistic phenomena cannot in principle be associated with conceptions of causality, and thus the interconnection of meaningful coincident factors must be thought of as acausal. 

While such occurrences are improbable from the perspective of causality, they are not infrequent. How may such phenomena be noted and approached today? Both physics and explore mind on a with matter, and so operate at the conjunctions of the mental and material. As an emergent meeting in the No-Time of fundamental physics and the tensed Time of daily life, synchronicity moves toward meaning at intersections of the objective and subjective, met both in our experimental sciences and in our felt registers of experience.