| science became a source of inspiration for me but also of structure for my inner world. |
I intended to become a medical scientist, and finally as a mathematics professor at the University of Graz, I realized that goal by working on medical image processing.
I was born in Louisville, Kentucky in the USA, but I lived, studied and worked in many American cities for some decades, including, e.g., at NASA and at Vanderbilt. I was involved in several scientific fields, including psychology, for which I also developed a personal interest, particularly for self-experience according to Sigmund Freud. Then at the end of the 90's I moved to Graz, Austria. After my retirement from mathematics and my encounter with the works of Carl Gustav Jung, I moved to Vienna.
My life in America required an extraverted thinking type, i.e., in the terms of Jungian typology. While some are daunted by mathematics, I hasten to add that colleagues forgave me for my atypically intuitive approach. In fact, experience eventually revealed that I am more genuinely an introverted intuitive type.
The threshold of retirement challenged me to ask what fruits my life might have brought so far. Then the thought occurred to me suddenly:
| Above all it's important to be authentic. |
Yet with this clarity I recognized I was not nearly conscious enough to comfortably see myself as authentic. The insight motivated me to begin working intensively with dreams. I soon realized that mathematics would not unlock mysteries that one senses especially in dreams, but that
| the mathematical experience had been necessary to know the limitations personally. |
Soon after, I began the education in depth psychology at the C.G. Jung Institute in Zurich. Here I would travel full circle after learning about Jung's own encounter with mathematics. For him, Number was the most fundamental archetype of all, manifesting both in psyche and in matter. Yet he believed that mathematics plays merely an ordering role for these apparently disparate phenomena, a role subordinate to their unifying creative source; cf. Pauli-Jung Conjecture. As I passionately delved into these Jungian intuitions, I felt entirely at home.
Meanwhile I have completed my studies in theoretical knowledge for analytical psychology in Zurich including much self-experience. Especially important for the work here is my training in dream groups led by Art Funkhouser.
