Healing the Split: How Can Science and Spirituality Join Forces?

This is an excerpt from one of the presentations featured in the Pari Center’s event Bringing Meaning Back to Life, in Pari on September 2-9, 2025.

In his paper Science and Western Thought, which was given in the spring of 1955, the physicist Wolfgang Pauli defined the difference between religion and science as a difference between kinds of knowledge. Religion or ‘knowledge of salvation’ (Heilserkenntnis) asks not why, but how. How can human beings avoid suffering and evil in this terrible world? How are we to proceed in order to see that the chaos and suffering of this world is an illusion and how is one to see the unity—God, Brahman, the One—beyond multiplicity? On the other hand, it is scientific-occidental to wonder: Why is ‘the One’ mirrored in the Many? What is it that mirrors, and what is mirrored? Why did multiplicity arise from the One? What originates the illusion? Pauli felt that it was the destiny of the West to try to unite these two basic attitudes.

In my contribution I would like to focus on this last sentence. How can this be done?

Suzanne Gieser has a PhD in the History of Sciences (specialty history of psychiatry and psychotherapy) and is also a licensed psychotherapist specialized in trauma and supervisor.

She works both with a private practice and as employed at a specialist clinic for sexually traumatized.

She has studied the psychology of C.G. Jung since 1981, and the relationship between Jung and the physicist Wolfgang Pauli. Her book, The Innermost Kernel: Depth Psychology and Quantum Physics. Wolfgang Pauli’s Dialogue with C.G. Jung, was published in English in 2005. She was a senior lecturer and associate professor for ten years at The Institute of Analytical Psychology (IAP), a private institute of Jungian scholarly studies in Stockholm. She is a member of the board at the Swedish C.G. Jung Foundation and is co-founder of the Swedish Association of Imago Therapy. She is the editor of Jung’s 1937 and 1938 seminars in Bailey Island and New York, published in 2019.