Aniela Jaffe and Wolfgang Pauli Correspondence

To: A. Jaffe March 12, 1951

Dear Mrs. Jaffe,

Many thanks for sending me the Hoyle book review; I have quickly read it through and find that it gives a good picture of Hoyle and his book.

I know Hoyle quite well and attended his lecture in Zurich.

His mixture of fantasy and science I find in poor taste (I regard it as feminine-i.e., more precisely, I see Hoyle as a leeling type).

His "Background Matter" and his continuous creation of matter out of nothing strike me as sheer nonsense.

I see no reason to doubt the conservation of physical energy.

It is clear to me that this type of cosmogony is not physics but a projection of the unconscious.

Which takes me once again to the subject of my own essay on "background physics."!

Partly in connection with this, 1 should like to mention that recently I have thought more about "Symbols of the Nucleus" (according to C. C. Jung, symbols of the "Self" or "imagines Dei," and have had another look at A. Huxley's Perennial Philosophy.

It seems to me to have the same shortcomings as Theologia Deutsch (much admired by Huxley, actually), which I
have recently read: I do not see why the "ground" made the "fall in time" known as creation and how it can have the need to be perceived by human consciousness.

In other words, Huxley's premises are too straight-Buddhist Platonic for me and disregard Cusa's' coincidentia oppositorium and even the paradox of complementary pairs of opposites.

So far I know of only two religious philosophy systems that are logically free of contradiction:

One of them is the static-taoistic one (Lao-tse).

The other an evolutionary one, based essentially on an assumed reaction of human (or even prehuman) consciousness to the "nucleus" (you may say, to the “God-image.”)

In the latter case, I like to imagine it thus: That in this masculine-feminine symbol (cf. the essays by A. Jaffe) it is precisely the feminine part (matter, energy-see my essays on background physics) that captures the timeless-unchangeable in the “Chronos,” whereas the masculine part possibly capture the changeable.

Now I should like to ask you something about this last aspect:

Do you think that this is objectively correct, or do you look on such an idea more as characteristic of a masculine thinking type and his particular psychology?

As ever,

W PAULI ~Wolfgang Pauli, Atom and Archetype, Pages 73-74

Aniela Jaffe to Pauli

My dear Professor, [Kusnacht] 14 March 1951

Many thanks for returning the synchronicity paper.

Prof. Jung has not worked on it recently but is planning to go back to it.

As far as 1 know, however, this has nothing to do with physics.

1 should have returned the enclosure (with letter) a while ago, along with Prof. Jung's thanks.

Please excuse the delay.

I am always behind schedule at the moment.

With best greetings and wishes for a Happy Easter,

Yours sincerely, A. J. ~Wolfgang Pauli, Atom and Archetype, Pages 71-72