Wolfgang Pauli: Our talk yesterday on the "synchronicity"

Dear Professor Jung, Zollikon-Zurich, 7 Nov, 1948

Our talk yesterday on the "synchronicity of dreams and external circumstances (Do you also use this term "synchronous” when there is a gap of 2-3 months between dream and external event?) was of great help to me, and I should like to thank you once again.

As you told me you were very preoccupied at the moment with the rotation symbolism of mandalas, I am taking the liberty of sending you the exact text of one of my dream that occurred about 2 years ago-in which rotation, and hence the concept of space, was the central feature.

It may be useful to you in dealing with these questions that are on your mind at the moment.

Of course, it is about the relativity of the concept of space in relation to the psyche, and if the problem were not important here and now, this dream would not have had such an overwhelming effect on me at the time.

The Kepler lecture, the idea of the neutral language, and the further pursuit of the archetypal background of physical terms were all triggered off in me at the time.

The objectivity of the archetypal background makes it seem very likely to me that the problem of the mandalas, which you mentioned briefly yesterday, and the one that is behind this dream will be one and the same.

As to the phenomenon described by you as synchronistic, I am for the time being using a sort of symbolic aid or working hypothesis which-as the simplest elementary case of the Riemann surface-looks as follows: This is supposed to represent the cross-section of two leaves (to be thought of as continuing perpendicular to the plane surface)

that are generally separated but that connect at the central point marked out (penetrating each other-mathematicians are very generous in this respect)

The number of leaves is arbitrary two simply being the easiest number.

The essential thing is by circling round the central point (perpendicular to the plane surface) one gets from the lower leaf to the upper one (and vice versa).

The "radioactive nucleus" is a symbolic cause, determined by the unconscious, of the "synchronistically" connected phenomena one of which, for example, (lower leaf) consists in the fact that I have a certain dream, the other (upper leaf) in the fact that Mr. or Mrs. X falls ill or dies.

The activity that comes from the central point in the intermediate stratum deals initially with the distinction between "physis” and "psyche" and represents an order that operates outside space and partly outside time as well.

But the presence of this activity described as "radioactivity" by the neutral language that springs up spontaneously from my unconscious-is essentially linked to the condition that archetypal contents (from a deeper, completely timeless stratum) draw near to the conscious (doubling phenomenon), so that the problem of their integration into the conscious has become an immediate one.

Is it not a fact that when one looks more closely at the drawing, the mandala circle is split into two leaves lying on top of each other, which, in accordance with a set pattern, overlap in the center (Self)?

With many thanks,

Yours sincerely,

W Pauli ~Wolfgang Pauli, Atom and Archetype, Pages, 34-35