This event has passed.
Psyche and Physics: Wolfgang Pauli’s dialogue with C.G. Jung
A presentation by Anne di Lauro
Supper (optional): 7:00pm – 7:30pm
To Book:
Pay cash on the day or pre-pay by direct deposit and email your payment receipt and booking information (your name, phone number, and the name of the activity you wish to attend) to
events@jungqld.com.
Direct Deposit Details:
Account Name: C.G. Jung Society of Queensland
BSB: 313 140
Account No.: 12363389
Reference: Please use your name as the reference
It is requested that members include their new membership code when booking for their free Zoom link.
The really great and creative scientists have the same motivation as the alchemist: to find out more about that spirit or divine substance or whatever you may call it, which lies behind all existence.
Marie-Louise von Franz. Alchemical Active Imagination, p. 13
In the quotation above, Jung’s collaborator Marie-Louise von Franz was no doubt thinking of Nobel-prize winning physicist Wolfgang Pauli (1900 – 1958). The one-sidedness of this brilliant young physicist brought him to Jung’s door at the age of 31. Interested by the archetypal material in Pauli’s prolific dreams, Jung had him analysed by one of his pupils in order that he himself would not “contaminate” the material. Jung’s study of this material, in which the identity of the dreamer is not revealed, appears in “Psychology and Alchemy” (CW12). Subsequently, these two original thinkers met and corresponded over a period of 25 years, wrestling with such questions as the parallels between psyche and quantum physics, the influence of archetypal ideas in scientific thinking, the archetypal aspect of numbers, acausality, synchronicity, ultimate reality and cosmic unity. It was Pauli who encouraged Jung to develop his ideas on synchronicity in an essay that was published, along with one by Pauli on the 17 century alchemists Fludd and Kepler, under the title “The Interpretation of Nature and the Psyche”.
In this talk we shall look at Pauli the man, the scientist and the thinker and his quest, via the theories of quantum physics and the ideas of C.G. Jung, for a unified vision of psychic and physical reality. Finally, we shall consider the possible implications of these ideas for us.
Presenter | Anne di Lauro
Australian by birth, Anne obtained a B.A. from the University of Queensland and a Post-graduate Diploma of Librarianship from the University of NSW. After a period working at the State Library of Queensland, she sailed away to see the world. She spent 32 years living overseas, working in library and information sciences for international organisations in Italy, Geneva, Paris and New
York, as well as for national institutions in the UK and Canada.
Having become an avid student of Jungian psychology, on her return to Australia she obtained a Master of Counselling from Queensland University of Technology and combined this qualification with her knowledge of Jungian psychology and her training in Robert Bosnak’s Embodied Imagination method of dream work, to enter private practice as a Jungian-oriented psychotherapist in Brisbane. She retired at the end of 2018. Anne served on the committee of the C.G. Jung Society of Queensland for 15 years, including a period as president. She has given talks to our Society on a variety of subjects including Pinocchio and the Hero’s Journey, James Hillman and the Renaissance, Embodied Imagination, Alchemy, Marie-Louise von Franz, Jung and the East, Jung and Pauli, The Nature of the Psyche according to Jung, The Use of Dreams in Psychotherapy and Archetype, Symbol, Image: finding aliveness in the well of the collective unconscious.