The Spontaneous Body and the Far East in W. Pauli and C.G. Jung

In 1932, Wolfgang Pauli began a therapy with Carl Gustav Jung for problems with the body. Their dialogue takes the form of an intellectual collaboration, at the crossroads of their two disciplines, to understand the common underpinning of the physical sphere and the psychic sphere, the body and the spirit. Their joint research will last more than twenty-five years, until 1958. .Their work develops around Bohr's concept of complementarity in order to overcome the Cartesian opposition between res cogitans and res extensa. They form the hypothesis that the mind (psychic sphere) and the body (physical sphere) are two aspects of a single reality, “psychoidˮ or “neutral” reality. They refer to certain Far Eastern bodily practices where the body is not something to be mastered: the body testifies to an original spontaneity inscribing the subject in his environment, below the will and the conscious perception.