Beyond Jung: Jung and Pauli, 3 of 6 – Symmetry: Pauli, and Chinese Woman Dreams

Beyond Jung: Jung and Pauli 3/6

Symmetry: Pauli, and Chinese woman dreams
With Beverley Zabriskie

Saturday November 21, 2026
9:00 am PST | 12:00 pm EST | 5:00 pm GMT | 6:00 pm CET

This session is two hours. All registered participants will receive access to the recordings, so you can attend live or watch at a time convenient to you.

Two intellectual giants, the Nobel Laureate quantum physicist Wolfgang Pauli, although 25 years younger, and the Swiss psychiatrist and analyst, C.G. Jung, exchanged thoughts and feelings about the nature of realities through vibrant letters and their thesis of synchronicity. In their view, a human observance could grant significance, not of cause and consequence, but of correlates and correspondences. When imprinted by emotion, elaborated by imagination, and consolidated by memory, the human capacity for reflection thus created an experience of psyche in the material world.

From their respective poles, Jung’s from the inside-out, and Pauli’s from the outside-in, these men and their collaboration continue to transgress categories and alter our species’ framing of the human position, in space and time, whether held as basic properties, mental constructs or crucial factors of existence.

Each man was transgressive, not bound by the constructs in their fields. Their stretch and grasp crossed false frontiers through their overlapping interests in the underlying patterns in the impersonal and subjective natures of reality. Pauli shared Jung’s perception of an unconscious reality as well as the external, a space he termed ‘a kind of secret laboratory beyond human consciousness.’ (Pauli to Fierz, October 3, 1951, von Meyenn 1996, p. 377). Each of course had limitations. In his science, and hence in self, Pauli insisted on symmetry as fundamental in the physical world. But in the ‘secret laboratory’ his dreams of a dancing and spinning Chinese woman may be seen as his unconscious, internal effort to wrest him from a concept being proven unscientific in favour of symmetry-breaking, allowing a separation of the mental and physical worlds. They may also have prepared him for illness and death. We will evoke his dream imagery as metaphor and reality, addressing both renewal of theory and internal transformation.

Beverley Zabriskie, L.C.S.W. is a Certified Jungian Analyst in New York City, a founding faculty member and former President of the Jungian Psychoanalytic Association (JPA), and past Vice President of the Philemon Foundation which produces the unpublished writings of Jung. Her publications include ‘A Meeting of Rare Minds,’ the Preface to Atom and Archetype. The Pauli-Jung Correspondence, Princeton Press, 2001; ‘Time and Tao in Synchronicity’ in The Pauli-Jung Conjecture and Its Impact Today (2014); ‘Psychic energy and synchronicity,’ Journal of Analytical Psychology, (April 2014).