Dear Professor Jung, Zollikon-Zurich, 23 June 1950
I would like to thank you most heartily for your letter.
What I found particularly interesting was your interpretation regarding the two boys in the dream, with the older one as the "ego" and the younger one as the "shadow."
I accept that as totally plausible, but it is perhaps difficult to prove such an assumption beyond any doubt.
The motif of two (youngish) men, of whom only one speaks to me, is a familiar one; it has occurred repeatedly in earlier dreams.
As to my conscious difficulties with the time concept, they related to the question of to what extent and how accurately a time coincidence is actually necessary for there to be a "meaningful coincidence: Is it not so that the "anima" has "knowledge" of meaningful wholenesses precisely because she lives outside physical time (i.e., in the unconscious)?
I have always been fascinated by the paradox that on the one hand the anima as the inferior function is most "contaminated" with the unconscious, and on the other hand, as a result of her closeness to the archetypes, seems to have superior knowledge.
I am in no doubt that the aim of the "stranger" is to convey a holistic concept of nature (not expressed in the conventional scientific point of view).
It is true that I regard the interpretation of modern physics in the narrowest sense as correct within the confines of its field of application but as basically incomplete.
My resistance to the archetype and its tendencies is correspondingly weakening.
Last autumn I had a dream in which "he" brings me a thick manuscript; I have not yet read it, for it first had to be seen by strangers in the background.
In my experience, the best thing to do in such cases is simply to wait and see.
At any rate, there is no shortage of "not yet assimilated thoughts" with me.
Best wishes for your recovery.
I am still looking forward to your lecture on synchronicity.
Yours ever gratefully,
W. PAULI ~Wolfgang Pauli, Atom and Archetype, Page 46
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