Atom and Archetype

An excerpt from the Introductory Essay by Beverley Zabriskie titled, “Jung and Pauli: A Meeting of Rare Minds”:

Readers of the Swiss psychiatrist C. G. Jung are more familiar with Wolfgang Pauli’s unconscious than with his waking life and achievement. Through Jung’s Psychology and Alchemy—an exposition of “the problem of individuation” and “normal development . . . in a highly intelligent person”—depth psychologists have known the Nobel laureate’s dreams, not his professional genius. Meanwhile, the scientists who continue Pauli’s pursuit of the nature and composition of the material universe know little of the quantum physicist’s depth exploration of his unconscious, his fascination with the interface of matter with psyche, and his collaboration with Jung in probing connections that appear to be acausal.

In turn, many who know Jung’s studies of psychic phenomena are not so at ease with his development of the parallels between psychic process and the material matrix in which the mental is embedded. For those who lack Jung’s scientific background and grasp, his claim of an empirical method, his pursuit of the metaphors of alchemy, and his evocation of analogies in physics to psychic mechanisms have seemed far-fetched, tangential, difficult, or unnecessarily encumbering. Yet Jung persisted in pursuing the physical and meditative experiments of the alchemists and in perusing the findings of contemporary scientists. Throughout his career, Jung argued that his work would carry the gravitas of the relevant and enduring only if it had both a place in the history of thought and a context in the modern disciplines.

This collection of letters between Jung and Pauli offers insightful information about a relationship that was valuable for both analytical psychology and quantum physics, two realms of investigation that at first seem to have no point of contact. 

Video Title: Beverley Zabriskie | “Jung & Pauli: A Meeting of Rare Minds” | Speaking of Jung #85. Source: jungianLaura. Date Published: April 21, 2021. Description:

Beverley Zabriskie is a Jungian analyst and author in private practice in New York City.

She began her career as a journalist for Gannett Newspaper and was at Time magazine for seven years as their theater reporter. She then went on to earn a master’s degree from the Wurzweiler School of Social Work and began training as a Jungian analyst at the C.G. Jung Institute Zürich, later receiving her Diploma in Analytical Psychology from the C.G. Jung Institute of New York.

She is a founding faculty member and former president of the Jungian Psychoanalytic Association, past president of the National Association for the Advancement of Psychoanalysis, and past vice president of the Philemon Foundation, publishers of The Red Book and The Black Books of C.G. Jung.

In 2002, she was named Psychoanalytic Educator of the Year for the International Federation of Psychoanalytic Education. Her 2007 Fay Lectures at Texas A&M University – part of the annual Fay Lecture Series in Analytical Psychology – was titled “Transformation Through Emotion: From Myth to Neuroscience.”

Currently, she serves on the Executive Committee of The Helix Center for Interdisciplinary Investigation at the New York Psychoanalytic Institute and sits on the editorial boards of the Journal of Analytical Psychology and the San Francisco Jung Journal: Psyche & Culture.

Mrs. Zabriskie is a very prolific author, having published many journal articles and book chapters including “The Spectrums of Emotion” in Research in Analytical Psychology, “Time & Tao in #Synchronicity” in The Pauli-Jung Conjecture, and “Jung & Pauli: A Meeting of Rare Minds,” the preface to Atom & Archetype: The Pauli-Jung Letters 1932-1958.