The Synchronicity of Wolfgang Pauli and Carl Jung

By the end of 1930, Austrian-born theoretical physicist Wolfgang Pauli was at the height of his achievements, yet an absolute emotional wreck. His brilliant contributions to science—such as the famous exclusion principle that would eventually earn him a Nobel Prize—had cemented his reputation as a genius. Remarkably, it demonstrated, among other consequences, why the electrons in an atom don’t all cluster together in the lowest energy quantum state and render it unstable. He had also predicted the existence of a lightweight, electrically neutral particle—later dubbed the neutrino—that, while yet to be found experimentally, already offered a way forward in understanding a radiative process called beta decay.

But while the particle world was starting to shape up nicely, Pauli’s own world was crashing around him. His cascade of troubles began three years earlier, when his beloved mother committed suicide, at the age of only 48, in reaction to his father’s infidelity. Within a year his father remarried, wedding an artist who was in her late 20s—around the same age as Pauli at the time. Pauli derided his father’s decision and nicknamed his father’s new wife “the evil stepmother.”

By then, while Pauli’s career was boosted by being appointed to a professorship at the ETH [Swiss Federal Institute of Technology] in Zurich, he had become increasingly disillusioned. For reasons not entirely understood, in May 1929 he abandoned