Temporality, Shame, and the Problem of Evil in Jungian Psychology

An Exchange of Ideas

Murray Stein, Elena Caramazza

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000198034
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Jungian Psychology
• Index: Psychology

In a unique epistolary style, authors Murray Stein and Elena Caramazza share their rich and reflective conversations surrounding the themes of temporality, shame, and evil through letters, essays, and email correspondence. Ignited by Wolfgang Pauli's "The Piano Lesson, " Stein and Caramazza study the function of temporality and consider the importance of shame and evil to this relationship. In this book Stein shows how Pauli, as a result of his contact with C.G. Jung and analytical psychology, embarked on a thought experiment to merge two currents of scientific thought: quantum physics and depth psychology.

In his work of active imagination "The Piano Lesson, " Pauli playfully brings together the former, which supplies a causal explanation of the mechanics of the material world, and the latter, which supplies an approach to meaning. The problem of how to merge the two currents in one language is presented in Pauli's symbolic solution, piano music, which combines the black and white keys in a single harmony. This music symbolizes a unified theory that combines the explanations of causality and the meaning delivered by synchronicity.

Presenting an original approach to synchronicity and dis-synchronicity, this interdisciplinary and innovative exchange concludes with a script written by Murray Stein, inspired by Pauli, as well as an afterword by influential Jungian scholars. This book will be a key reference for undergraduate and postgraduate courses and seminars in Jungian and post-Jungian studies, philosophy, psychoanalytic studies, psychology, and the social sciences.

Chapter 1

Music for another age

Wolfgang Pauli’s “The Piano Lesson”–Rome, April 2016

Murray Stein

I was delighted to accept your surprising invitation to continue the reflection on synchronicity that I began in the essay, “Synchronizing Time and Eternity,” which you have kindly translated into Italian and published in your journal, Studi Junghiani. In this lecture, I will again turn to Wolfgang Pauli’s “The Piano Lesson” and take the view that this work was an active imagination that had a profound transformative effect on the author. It seems to me, also, that this essay in active imagination and creative thinking by Pauli, which he dedicated to Dr. von Franz, his analyst, offers us a novel and highly suggestive entry point into exploring the question of what it means to live in consciousness of the interpenetration and interplay of causality and synchronicity in the here and now. In the language of Pauli’s essay, this is “piano music,” or what Herbert van Erkelens (2002, p. 120) has proposed to call “symphonicity.” Taking a cue from Beethoven’s comment about his Opus 59 Quartets, that they were written not for the audience in 1806 but for a later age (cited in Dusinberre 2016, p. 6), I am titling this lecture “Music for a Later Age.” I consider Pauli’s proposal for a concept that unifies quantum physics and depth psychology, i.e., causality and synchronicity, time and the timeless, to be something still for the future. It is my conviction that we still have a long way to go before we have integrated the message in this profound proposal for a Weltanschauung that unifies science and spirituality.

Thank you very much for the invitation to share these reflections with you.

The problem of synchronicity

Nearly everyone I ask about it can report a synchronistic experience, and many people feel that such experiences have even changed the very course of their lives. They may not have a theory to explain it, but they know what I mean when I speak of “meaningful coincidences.” Meaningful coincidences have been known and recorded since time immemorial. During religious and mythological ages, they were seen as divine interventions, as messages from the gods, or as blessings, or sometimes as curses. Since the European Enlightenment and the enshrinement of the Goddess Reason, however, moderns have dismissed such coincidences as sheer chance events and devoid of objective meaning. What meaning can be assigned to them is purely subjective and the product of wishful thinking, superstition, paranoia, or fear. It remained for Jung to bring back the notion of objective meaning and to speak of “acts of creation in time” (Jung 1952/1969, par. 965) thus disrupting the modern consensus that causality, chance, and the iron laws of nature leave nothing more to be said about the course of personal and collective life.

Wolfgang Pauli (1900–1958) worked deeply, intensely, and over a long period of time with Jung on the problem of synchronicity and its implications for modernity. In fact, Jung’s major conversation partner on this subject of meaningful coincidence was without any doubt the mathematical genius and Nobel Prize winning physicist, Wolfgang Pauli. To this conversation Pauli brought his acute thinking, famous for its sharp-edged ferocity in arguments with his scientific colleagues. He also contributed something to which Jung was totally tone deaf, the language of mathematics. Pauli had impressed even Einstein when as a youth of eighteen he wrote a detailed review of his paper on the theory of relativity and its mathematical equations. Both men belonged to that elite group of scientists who revolutionized the field of theoretical physics and laid the groundwork for quantum theory and modern cosmology. This was Jung’s impressively substantial conversation partner as he struggled to formulate his theory of synchronicity.

Science in the positivistic sense that it was practiced and taught in the universities was not enough for Pauli. He was a seeker after meaning and wholeness, and he suffered from a severe split in his personality between conscious and unconscious forces. For this latter condition, he sought help in 1933 from the famous psychoanalyst C.G. Jung, a fellow professor at the ETH in Zurich. From the beginning of his analysis, he recorded his dreams faithfully and sought deeper meaning in life than science and rationality had to offer. From his dreams and waking visions as recorded during his early analysis and Jung’s interpretation of them in Psychology and Alchemy, Pt. II (Jung 1968), one could even say Pauli was a mystic in disguise as a scientist, and very well disguised indeed to the outside world. This is certainly not to take away anything from his brilliance as a mathematician and a scientific thinker.

“The Piano Lesson,” composed in the fall of 1953 and so only a few short years before his death in 1958, makes clear Pauli’s continuing dedicated search for a way to combine his scientific and psychological commitments. Even so late in his professional life and after twenty years of contact with Jung, he was suffering from the problem of resolving the differences between what he calls “the two schools,” quantum physics and depth psychology, and struggling with the question of how to bring them together into a single unified theory. This was at the heart of his discussions with Jung as we can see in the correspondence (Meier 2001), and it is the burden of “The Piano Lesson.” As Pauli puts it in this work, science offers “words” of explanation and psychology offers the “meaning” of those words, but how can he combine them into a single language? The symbolic answer is “piano music,” played with both white and black keys. Causality and synchronicity must be married into a single theory.

As Jung and Pauli worked ever more deeply into the interface between quantum physics and depth psychology, they wrestled with the phenomenon of synchronicity and its implications. For science, the psyche and the material world are strictly separated domains. Humans can study the material world and discover its laws, but they are not fundamentally entangled with it. In fact, scientists do everything they can to remove the human factor, i.e., projections, personal and cultural bias, etc. They want to discover the objective laws of nature. Once these laws become known, they can be used to make predictions, to create new technologies, and generally to bring nature under greater human control through manipulation. Synchronicity, however, brings the two domains, psyche and matter, together, but not through intentional ego action. As generally defined, a synchronistic event is, as Atmanspacher and Fach summarize, “a coincidence phenomenon in which ordinarily unconnected mental and physical states are experienced as connected” (Atmanspacher and Fach 2016, p. 79) and I would add: as meaningful. Meaning is an essential feature of synchronicity. The theory of synchronicity is the contribution of psychology to science, but it is not an easy one to digest and integrate. The psyche is indeed entangled with the material world, and this entanglement brings meaning and creativity into play in both domains, but it remained to be worked out how this would look in life as lived and conceived as a whole.

If the factor of synchronicity in a sense transcends the factor of causality, it does not abolish it. Relating these two dimensions and bringing them together into a single unified field theory became the great challenge facing Jung and Pauli. It is comparable to bringing the East and the West into a unified world picture on the one hand, and bringing consciousness and the unconscious together in the realm of psyche on the other. The systems in both cases are incommensurate, as Jung states clearly in a letter to Pauli (Meier 2001, p. 61), and yet they must be brought into a unified whole if a full picture of reality, whether psychic or cosmic, is to be drawn. Similarly, when one consults the I Ching with a Western-trained scientific mind, the two incommensurate systems are brought into play, as Jung demonstrates in his brilliant “Foreword to the I Ching” (Jung 1950/1969, 964–1018). In the correspondence between Jung and Pauli, one finds various proposals for how to diagram a world picture that would include both causality and synchronicity (Meier 2001, pp. 56–61). Jung published their final version in his essay, “Synchronicity: An Acausal Connecting Principle” (Jung 1952/1969, par. 963).

Figure 1.1 A diagram worked out by Jung and Pauli

What synchronicity introduces into the discussion of chance events is “meaning,” by which I designate, following Jung, a realization that derives from and points to something transcendent, spiritual, coming from a source beyond any figures featured in the event. Additionally, synchronicity derives from a source that is autonomous and creative, which lies beyond both psyche and matter. Jung speaks of synchronicities as “acts of creation in time” (Jung 1952/1969, par. 965). It is these three features of synchronicity – the unity of psyche and world, transcendent meaning, and creativity – that challenged the scientific world picture in Jung’s time and does so still also in ours. Synchronicity theory disrupts our modern way of thinking to such a degree that a scientist like Pauli was disturbed to the core of his being by it. In “The Piano Lesson” he tries to find a solution to the question of how these two principles – lawful causality on the one hand, and synchronicity on the other – can be brought together in a unified theory. The further question is: how is this experienced?

The Piano Lesson as active imagination

To understand how Pauli approaches this problem – and perhaps succeeds in solving it for himself, as we shall see – we need to begin by looking at the method he uses for engaging it, i.e., active imagination. Jung developed active imagination as a method in order to create what he called a transcendent function, that is, a bridge or connection between ego-consciousness and the unconscious. When successful, active imagination introduces a disruption in normal ego-consciousness in such a way that it is able to step beyond its usual boundaries and enter into a dialogue with unconscious figures and images. As a result, the ego moves into contact with what Erich Neumann called the archetypal field and the self-field.

Figure 1.2 Eric Neumann, “The Planes of Reality”

Let me take a moment to explain this drawing (Figure 1.2), which Neumann includes in his Eranos paper, “The Psyche and the Transformation of the Reality Planes” (Neumann 1952/1989, pp. 3–62). The diagram represents three fields of knowledge: an ego field, an archetypal field, and a self-field. There are also three stages, or states, of consciousness, which move in the diagram from left to right: a) Constellation of Consciousness, b) Constellation of the Archetypal Field (Embeddedness), and c) Centering of the Personality. The three stages show different levels of relationship among the fields below the ego level and differing degrees of separation between psyche and world above the ego field. As the stages move from left to right, the three fields come closer – you see the bottom levels rising upward. At the top, there are three degrees of separation between psyche and world, and moving from left to right we see this distance closing. Moving from left to right, the bottom rises and the top closes as the state of consciousness achieves what Neumann calls “centering of the personality.” Our interest is in the movement toward awareness of unus mundus, which unites psyche and world through bringing causality and synchronicity together.

The stage on the far left represents modern consciousness, which divides awareness between inner subjective and outer objective spaces, and between conscious and unconscious within the inner realm. There is no connection between them. On an everyday level, most of us live in the state of awareness on the left. Common sense, education, and modern secular attitudes lend their weight to dividing the world and psyche in this way. Occasionally, we may sense ourselves in the middle stage, when material from the archetypal field impinges on our awa...