Miller enthusiastically joins in the debate. He is eager to remind twenty-first-century readers that “Jung, Pauli and their contemporaries considered Jung’s research to be quite as important as Pauli’s work in physics”, and certainly seems to be more than open-minded on that point himself. Pauli was intrigued to find, on consulting a scholar of Jewish mysticism, that the word Kabbalah, written as numbers in Hebrew, adds up to 137. Miller agrees that this is “an extraordinary link between mysticism and physics”. Neither does he question Jung’s accounts of Pauli’s dreams: a more rational explanation of the images that successively appear in them might be that Pauli’s increasing preoccupation with Jung’s theories while waking caused him to rehearse versions of them in his sleep. Miller also seems surprisingly little interested in the relationship between Pauli and his parents. Pauli’s mother poisoned herself when his father left her for another woman, but Pauli’s psychological problems clearly date from before this traumatic event, which did not occur until he was twenty-seven.
Miller himself originally trained as a physicist before developing an interest in the history and philosophy of science. His ability to approach his subject from the perspective of both the sciences and the humanities is a great strength. My sympathies, however, lie with Pauli’s loving second wife Franca, who did at least as much as Jung to make him a more or less civilized member of society, and who spent the three decades she survived him trying to delay publication of his correspondence with Jung, in case it damaged his image as a serious scientist.
For the non-physicists, 1/(137) is called the Fine Structure Constant. It turns up in all manner of places in physics, which is why Pauli would have been intrigued.
http://tinyurl.com/mpornc
Oh puhlease. If you are going to elevate Jung like this then presumably you have to deal with, among other things, his flirtation with the Nazis. I quote words by Jung from p 147 of Jeffrey Masson Against Therapy: ‘There is no question but that Hitler belongs in the category of the truly mystic medicine man.’
#2 Thanks for taking on Jung. Many church folks think that he is a religious thinking of sorts and that he helps explain Christianity. There is an excellent book called The Jung Cult by Richard Noll which exposes this proto Nazi. 3/4 of all of Jung’s writing remains under lock and key. He believed in the denegration of history and the need to return to the golden age. He thought Chistianity to be “the Jewish cancer.” He was self initiated into the bull cult of Mithras. Sorry Morton kelsey and John Sandofrd.
#3.
Where do you get your facts? Like to check them myself.
Read Noll’s book. He is an atheist who was head of the history of religion department of, I believe, Harvard. There is a followup book which is similar. I would try Amazon to see what is out there. Apparently, Jung did not like Freud because he was Jewish.