~ Part Two ~
Jung's definitions of synchronicity confront one with an immediate puzzle.
Almost invariably, they highlight the factor of simultaneity, and yet one important category of events which Jung wants to call synchronistic - namely, precognitive experiences - by definition cannot be simultaneous. Jung himself was certainly aware of this apparent contradiction and made an interesting, if ultimately unsuccessful, attempt to resolve it.
In his 1951
Eranos lecture he offers a definition which recognizes three categories of events to which the term synchronicity can be applied. The first category includes happenings such as the scarab incident where a psychic event (the patient's recalling her dream of a scarab) and a physical event (the actual appearance of a scarabaeid beetle) occur at the same time and in the same place (during the analytic session in Jung's consulting room).
Here there is indeed simultaneity between the psychic and physical events (Jung 1951b: 526).
The second category includes happenings where a psychic event occurs and a corresponding physical event takes place more or less simultaneously but at a distance, so that the approximate simultaneity can only be established afterwards (Jung 1951b: 526). Jung cites as an illustration
Emanuel Swedenborg's well-attested vision of the great fire in Stockholm in 1759. Swedenborg was at a party in Gottenburg about two hundred miles from Stockholm when the vision occurred.
He told his companions at six o'clock in the evening that the fire had started, then described its course over the next two hours, exclaiming in relief at eight o'clock that it had at last been extinguished, just three doors from his own house. All these details were confirmed when messengers arrived in Gottenburg from Stockholm over the next few days (Jung 1952: 481, 483).
The third category includes happenings where a psychic event occurs and a corresponding physical event takes place in the future. Here there is not even approximate simultaneity (Jung 1951b: 526). An example mentioned by Jung is of a student friend of his whose father had promised him a trip to Spain if he passed his final examinations satisfactorily.
The friend then had a dream of seeing various things in a Spanish city: a particular square, a Gothic Cathedral, and, around a certain corner, a carriage drawn by two cream-colored horses. Shortly afterwards, having successfully passed his examinations, he actually visited Spain for the first time and encountered all the details from his dream in reality (Jung 1951b: 522).
Jung's emphasis is generally on the first of these categories. He presents the scarab incident as a paradigm case (Jung 1951b: 526) and tries to assimilate the second and third categories to its basic pattern by writing that 'In groups 2 and 3 the coinciding events are not yet present in the observer's field of perception, but have been anticipated in time' (Jung 1951b: 526) - in other words, they are present to consciousness as though actually being perceived (see also Jaffé 1967: 270--1).
When Jung elaborates his thoughts in the 1952 essay, he introduces an important additional factor: a second psychic state (Jung 1952: 441--5). After first speaking, as in the 1951 essay, of the simultaneity of psychic and physical events (Jung 1952: 441), he later shifts to speaking of 'the simultaneous occurrence of two different psychic states' (Jung 1952: 444).
He explains that 'One of them is the normal, probable state (i.e., the one that is causally explicable), and the other, the critical experience, is the one that cannot be causally derived from the first' (Jung 1952: 444--5). If one wonders what has happened here to the physical event, it is understood as the 'objective existence' (Jung 1952: 445) of the 'critical' psychic event.
Jung is now claiming that the synchronicity actually consists of the coincidence not between the critical psychic event and its objective correlate but between the two psychic events:
'An unexpected content which is directly or indirectly connected with some objective external event coincides with the ordinary psychic state: this is what I call synchronicity'
(Jung 1952: 445).
For instance, in the apparently precognitive experience of Jung's student friend, the 'unexpected content' is the dream of the Spanish city with its square, its cathedral, and its carriage drawn by cream-colored horses, while the 'objective external event' with which the content is 'directly or indirectly connected' is the fact of seeing these things in reality.
The 'ordinary psychic state' - the new presence in the definition - we must suppose to be the ongoing state of mind of the student at the time of his dream. It is this ordinary state which is simultaneous with the unexpected content of the dream and which Jung, rather surprisingly, says 'coincides' with it.
This thinking receives unambiguous expression in the definition of synchronicity that occurs in the 'Résumé' added to the 1955 English translation of the principal essay.
With the specific aim of clearing up misunderstandings that had arisen,
Jung writes:
By
synchronicity I mean the occurrence of a meaningful coincidence in time. It can take three forms:
- The coincidence of a certain psychic content with a corresponding objective process which is perceived to take place simultaneously.
- The coincidence of a subjective psychic state with a phantasm (dream or vision) which later turns out to be a more or less faithful reflection of a 'synchronistic', objective event that took place more or less simultaneously, but at a distance.
- The same, except that the event perceived takes place in the future and is represented in the present only by a phantasm that corresponds to it.
Whereas in the first case an objective event coincides with a subjective content, the synchronicity in the other two cases can only be verified subsequently, though the synchronistic event as such is formed by the coincidence of a neutral psychic state with a phantasm (dream or vision).
(Jung 1955: 144--5)
This definition is clearly similar to the three-pronged 1951 definition summarized earlier. Now, however, instead of the coincidence in the second and third cases being between a psychic state and an objective external event which has been 'anticipated in time', it is between one psychic state and another psychic state (a 'phantasm') which is 'a more or less faithful reflection' of an objective external event.
For Jung's purposes, the advantage of introducing the normal psychic state is that it allows him to retain the notion of simultaneity in the case of each of his three categories of synchronicity, for in each case there is both a normal psychic state and an unexpected psychic content occurring simultaneously with it. The simultaneity of these two psychic states is not compromised no matter how great a separation there is either in space or in time between the unexpected psychic content and its corresponding objective external event.
Referring to the occurrence of the unexpected contents which mark the actual synchronicities - of whatever kind - Jung maintains that 'we are dealing with exactly the same category of events whether their objectivity appears separated from my consciousness in space or in time' (Jung 1952: 445).
However, for all its advantage in terms of preserving simultaneity, this definition is itself fraught with problems. First, it means that there are now actually two acausal relationships involved in the synchronicity: that between the two psychic events (Jung 1952: 444--5), and that between the second psychic event and the physical event with which it corresponds (Jung 1952: 447).
Though Jung says of the two critical events - the second psychic event and the physical event - that 'The one is as puzzling as the other' (Jung 1952: 447), he nowhere shows explicit awareness of the fact that he is claiming they are both, in different respects,
acausal.
Second, any acausal relationship that may exist between the two psychic events will be virtually impossible to demonstrate. Since both events are intrapsychic, the possibility of there being some associative causal connection between them can scarcely be even improbable, let alone, as Jung requires, 'unthinkable' (Jung 1952: 518).
At any rate, it is not
acausality of this kind, but of the kind between a psychic and a physical event, that Jung considered to have been so impressively demonstrated by Rhine's experiments.
A third problem is that of identifying the neutral psychic state at all. For example, we are able only to guess about the normal psychic state simultaneously with which the student's dream of the Spanish city took place. In the light of Aziz's work, one might identify this normal psychic state with the conscious orientation of the experiencer (Aziz 1990: 66) - in the student's case, a state of anxiety concerning his impending examinations.
The unexpected content which arises simultaneously with this conscious orientation would, according to
Aziz, be an unconscious compensation serving the purposes of individuation (Aziz 1990: 66--7); the student's dream, for example, might have compensated his anxiety by impressing on him that he would indeed earn the trip to Spain by passing his examinations.
This compensatory relationship between the two psychic events is indeed
acausal in that the conscious orientation does not cause the compensation but only provides the conditions in which it might occur. Again, inasmuch as the compensatory relationship is involved ultimately in the furthering of individuation, it is also meaningful.
However, even if this understanding proves workable up to a point, it also involves at least one notable discrepancy from Jung's explicit statements elsewhere: two psychic states in a compensatory relationship may be meaningfully related in terms of individuation, but they do not in any obvious sense have, as Jung specifies, 'the same or a similar meaning' (Jung 1952: 441). If they did, the one would hardly be compensated by the other.
As noted above, Jung's first theorizing about synchronicity was done with reference to astrology and
the I Ching and focused on the fact that things arising in a particular moment of time all share the characteristics of that moment. It appears to have been this understanding of the role of time, an understanding in which simultaneity does indeed play an essential part, which led Jung to coin the term 'synchronicity', with its emphasis on the element of time (Gk. syn = together, chronos = time).
Later, Jung came to question the notion of qualitative time (Jung 1976: 176) and, under the influence of parapsychology and physics, began to emphasize instead the idea of the psychic
relativization of space and time. That he nonetheless went to such lengths to uphold the component of simultaneity in the concept of synchronicity may have been because he wished to preserve enough of the original meaning of the concept to justify its continued use.
In any case, it is clear that Jung would have done better to drop the notion of simultaneity altogether in relation to synchronistic experiences, and instead to have operated consistently with the more flexible notion of space-time
relativization.
He could in fact have done this and still highlighted the defining factor of time by giving more prominence to his characterization of synchronicities as 'acts of creation in time' (Jung 1952: 517), emphasizing their nature as spontaneous momentary states in contrast to constant or reproducible ones (see below on '
general acausal orderedness').
Acausality
Jung's personal paranormal experiences confronted him with events which seemed inexplicable in terms of normal physical and psychological causes. There was, for example, no apparent cause of the walnut table splitting or the bread knife shattering in a closed drawer.
The impression Jung gained from events such as these, that normal causality was insufficient as a comprehensive principle of explanation, was later reinforced by the results of Rhine's experiments:
since experience [i.e., Rhine's experimental work] has shown that under certain conditions space and time can be reduced almost to zero, causality disappears along with them, because causality is bound up with the existence of space and time and physical changes, and consists essentially in the succession of cause and effect. For this reason synchronistic phenomena cannot in principle be associated with any conceptions of causality. Hence the interconnection of meaningfully coincident factors must necessarily be thought of as acausal.
(Jung 1952: 445--6)
Supporting these conclusions from another angle was Jung's cultural research into such pre-modern concepts as the 'sympathy of all things' and 'correspondences', and especially into the workings of
the I Ching. This research made him aware of the fact that other kinds of connection than causality not only exist but have in fact received wide traditional recognition and been put to orderly cultural use.
Usually, however, when Jung attempts to explain what he means by calling synchronicity an 'acausal connecting principle', his first recourse is to the following argument based on quantum physics.
'The discoveries of modern physics', he informs us, '... have shattered the absolute validity of natural law and made it relative'
(Jung 1952: 421).
Since 'very small quantities [i.e., subatomic particles] no longer behave in accordance with natural laws', it follows that 'natural laws are statistical truths' (Jung 1952: 421).
Further:
The philosophical principle that underlies our conception of natural law is causality. But if the connection between cause and effect turns out to be only statistically valid and only relatively true, then the causal principle is only of relative use for explaining natural processes and therefore presupposes the existence of one or more other factors which would be necessary for an explanation.
(Jung 1952: 421)
This 'other factor' is Jung's 'acausal connecting principle'. He believes the above argument to have proved the existence of the principle in 'the realm of very small quantities' (Jung 1952: 421).
Regarding its existence in the realm normal sensory experience, he says:
We shall naturally look round in vain in the macrophysical world for acausal events, for the simple reason that we cannot imagine events that are connected non-causally and are capable of a non-causal explanation. But that does not mean that such events do not exist. Their existence - or at least their possibility - follows logically from the premise of statistical truth.
(Jung 1952: 421--2)
Presumably Jung emphasized this argument from physics because it promised to give his concept of acausality the greatest degree of scientific respectability and the most fundamental level of epistemological grounding. However, it brings with it several problems of its own. For instance, the fact that Jung's understanding of causality and acausality is so closely tied to physics threatens to make it too restrictive.
He himself clearly intended the notion of acausality to apply to psychological as well as to physical causes: synchronistic events are not caused by psychological states. Yet it is at least questionable whether physical terms alone are adequate to account for the dynamics of psychological causes. As John Beloff points out,
'the concept of cause was not invented by physicists, physics is merely one of the domains for its application, the concept as such is a very basic logical notion of wide generality'
(Beloff 1977: 577)
In response to Jung's claim that Rhine's parapsychological data have furnished 'decisive evidence for the existence of acausal combinations of events' (Jung 1952: 432), Beloff writes that it is,
'nonsensical to say ... that there are events that are related experimentally that are not related causally. For the crux of the experimental method is precisely carrying out certain procedures that we may call A so as to find out whether or not they are necessary in order to obtain a result B'
(Beloff 1977: 577).
If Rhine's experiments are indeed statistically significant and there is no way to account for them in normal causal terms, what they demonstrate, according to Beloff, is the existence not of absolute acausality but of some form of paranormal causality.
Even if one finds reasons to differ from Beloff's understanding of causality, it remains the case that many broader conceptions than Jung's are both possible and have in fact been regularly invoked not only in the ancient world (e.g., Aristotle's material, efficient, formal, and final causes [Ross 1928]) but also in the modern period (e.g., Sheldrake's hypothesis of formative causation [1981]), and not only in the West but also in the East (e.g., in Buddhist philosophy [see Kalupahana 1975]).
Whether one evaluates Jung's concept of acausality favorably or critically, it is important to bear in mind the restricted understanding of causality on which it is based.
Jung's actual argument for acausality involves two stages.
- First, he argues that the inability of modern science to predict the behavior of subatomic particles proves that the relationship between the particles is not simply causal but must also involve some element of acausality.
- Second, he argues that because this acausality exists in the microphysical world of subatomic particles, it ought also to exist in the macrophysical world of normal sensory experience. Both stages of the argument can be challenged.
It is certainly the case that, in Jung's day and still at present, the behavior of individual subatomic particles cannot be predicted other than probabilistically. But from this fact it does not necessarily follow that such behavior involves an element of irreducible acausality. It is true that subatomic randomness may stem from acausality, but then again it may not. And even if it does, this is not because such randomness itself implies acausality.
The acausal cannot simply be inferred from the merely probabilistic: if event A is followed by event B only seventy-five per cent of the time, this does not entail that B is not caused by A. In fact, since B, when it does occur, would not have done so but for A, it is reasonable to think that it has been caused by A.
It is even possible that the behavior of subatomic particles may turn out not to be irreducibly probabilistic but the result of deterministic factors which just happen to be too complex and subtle for scientists to discern at present. Since the emergence of chaos theory in the 1980s, it has become increasingly clear that apparently random or chaotic behavior can be just as much the product of regular causal factors as is conspicuously ordered behavior.
As the mathematician
Ian Stewart has remarked, some scientists now appreciate,
'the ability of even simple equations to generate motion so complex, so sensitive to measurement, that it appears random'
(Stewart 1990: 16), so that they 'are beginning to view order and chaos as two distinct manifestations of an underlying determinism'
(Stewart 1990: 22).
These considerations alone should make one wary of automatically discounting the operation of causality no matter how random and unpredictable certain behavior appears.
However, even without invoking chaos theory as such, a number of eminent physicists have been dissatisfied with the view which sees certain subatomic events as inescapably random and unpredictable. Einstein, for example, famously resisted the view of a universe in which 'God plays dice', that is, allows things to happen by pure chance. He initiated a search for 'hidden variables' - as yet unknown factors which could account causally for the seemingly random behavior of subatomic particles.
More recently this approach was also pursued by
David Bohm who stressed that his was a 'causal interpretation' of quantum phenomena (Bohm 1990: 276--81).
Even a contemporary physicist who personally considers that there are indeed quantum phenomena for which, 'both theory and experiment converge in making the prospect of a causal explanation ... exceedingly unlikely' (Mansfield 1995: 32) nonetheless cautions that 'the key issues [in the acausality debate] are not yet fully resolved'
(Mansfield 1995: 80).
Let us suppose, however, that certain events at the subatomic level are genuinely acausal. Even so, the next stage of Jung's argument - that there must also be acausal events in the macrophysical world - does not follow, as he puts it, 'logically from the premise of statistical truth' (Jung 1952: 422). There is no reason to expect that a property existing on the subatomic level will also exist in the realm of normal sensory experience.
Perhaps what Jung had in mind was that the subatomic indeterminacy which he thought implied acausality could in some way be expected to be scaled up to the level of normal experience. If so, the very way in which probability operates in fact suggests the contrary: the indeterminacy attaching to an individual event on one scale will progressively diminish as one views ever larger aggregates of such events on a higher scale. Acausality on the subatomic level cannot prove or even make probable its existence on other levels.
What it can do, however, is to make its possible existence on those higher levels less intellectually outrageous (cf. Mansfield 1995: 50).
Problematic though the concept of
acausality is, it is certainly not an incoherent or absurd notion. There is strong, if not conclusive, evidence that acausality does indeed exist on the subatomic level, and there are no a priori reasons that it should not also exist on the level of normal sensory experience. On the normal sensory level it may not be possible actually to prove either its existence as understood by Jung or the inappropriateness of explaining it in terms of broader conceptions of causality than Jung's.
Granted this limitation, a case remains for speaking of
acausality in a relative and provisional sense, as applying to the relationship between events within a certain domain of consideration or level of current understanding (see Main 1996: 40--3, 154--5). As the paranormal events experienced and observed by Jung indicate,
acausality appears to be an accurate enough term phenomenologically.
As his definitions of synchronicity also emphasize, it is an extremely useful concept psychologically inasmuch as it shifts attention away from the causes of events and onto their possible meaning.
Meaning
Rather surprisingly, Jung nowhere sets out systematically his thoughts concerning what actually makes synchronicities meaningful. He does, however, provide a substantial clue to his implicit understanding when he states that 'by far the greatest number of synchronistic phenomena that I have had occasion to observe and analyze can easily be shown to have a direct connection with the archetype' (Jung 1952: 481).
Though he appears to recognize not one but several kinds of meaning that can adhere to synchronicities, all of these can ultimately be related back to the single factor of the archetype. Aziz, for example, has identified four levels of meaning referred to by Jung at different times.
These are:
- simply the fact of two or more events paralleling one another (the paralleling is by virtue of a shared content or meaning)
- the emotional charge or 'numinosity' attending the synchronicity (a source of non-rational meaning)
- the significance of the synchronicity interpreted subjectively, from the point of view of the experiencer's personal needs and goals
- the significance of the synchronicity objectively, as the expression of archetypal meaning which is transcendental to human consciousness
(Aziz 1990: 64--6, 75--84; see also Main 1996: 155--79)
Aziz calls this fourth level of meaning the 'archetypal level' (Aziz 1990: 66). It is based on the fact that the archetype represents in itself a form of meaning which is 'a priori in relation to human consciousness and apparently exists outside man' (Jung 1952: 501--2).
Thus in synchronicities 'one and the same (transcendental) meaning might manifest itself simultaneously in the human psyche and in the arrangement of an external and independent event' (Jung 1952: 482).
In fact, each of the other three levels of meaning also depends on the presence of the archetype. The shared meaning by virtue of which two or more events are taken to be in a synchronistic relationship derives from an archetype (e.g., underlying the scarab symbol in both its psychic and its physical appearances is the archetype of rebirth).
Again, the numinous charge of synchronicities derives from the presence of an activated archetype - the association with such numinosity being precisely one of the characteristics of archetypes as presented by Jung (Jung 1952: 436). Third, the subjective level of meaning, insofar as this is evaluated with reference to the process of individuation, will also be based on archetypes, since it is the archetypes - shadow, animus/anima, self, etc. - which essentially govern individuation for Jung.
The appreciation of this archetypal foundation of synchronicities helps resolve a pervasive ambiguity in Jung's use of the phrase 'meaningful coincidence'. On the one hand, the 'meaning' referred to in this phrase is clearly the significance the coincidence has for the experiencer - ultimately, its bearing on the experiencer's individuation.
On the other hand, Jung also often uses the word 'meaning' to refer to the content that the coinciding events have in common: they have 'the same or similar meaning' or 'appear as meaningful parallels' (Jung 1952: 441).
Here what the coincidence might signify for an experiencer is not germane; one can, in fact, replace 'meaning' with 'content'. It is true that the two senses of 'meaning' do not exclude each other - the meaning/content can be meaningful/significant to an experiencer or observer - but it is equally true that they do not entail each other.
That Jung nonetheless moves ambiguously between the two different senses probably stems from the fact that for him the content of synchronicities is generally understood to be archetypal and therefore is bound also to be meaningful in the sense of significant.
The tension between the two understandings of 'meaning' is clearest in the case of parapsychological experiments such as those of Rhine. In these experiments what is important is primarily the paralleling of content between the image constituting the subject's guess and the target object.
It is this paralleling of content which leads Jung to assert that, 'Rhine's results confront us with the fact that there are events which are related to one another experimentally, and in this case meaningfully, without there being any possibility of proving that this relation is a causal one ...'
(Jung 1952: 435).
Whether the coincidence represented by the improbable number of successful guesses is also meaningful in the sense of being significant for the individuation or other personal needs or goals of the experimental subject is a question about which Jung appears to have remained uncertain. On the one hand, he acknowledges that Rhine's experiments 'contain no direct evidence of any constellation of the archetype' (Jung 1952: 440; see also Jung 1976: 399).
On the other hand, he suggests that such a constellation may nonetheless be present inasmuch as 'the experimental set-up is influenced by the expectation of a miracle' and 'A miracle is an archetypal situation' (Jung 1976: 537; see also Progoff 1987: 105--6).
Furthermore, the important emotional factor in the experiments, indicated by the decline effect, may also suggest the presence of an archetypal situation inasmuch as archetypal situations are typically 'accompanied by a corresponding emotion' (Jung 1976: 537).
Jung's astrological experiment
The section of Jung's 1952 essay on synchronicity which was most widely misunderstood when it first appeared was his astrological experiment. Indeed, many writers on synchronicity still tend to side-step this aspect of his work, dismissing it as, for example, 'peripheral' (Aziz 1990: 2) or 'fruitless' (Mansfield 1995: 33).
Others, however, have found Jung's experiment to constitute one of the most interesting and original features of his work and to have suggestive implications for the understanding both of statistics (Fordham 1957) and of astrology (Hyde 1992).
It may be that Jung himself was unclear initially as to what his experiment could be expected to demonstrate. Michael Fordham writes that 'At one time [Jung] really thought that if his [astrological] material proved statistically significant it would prove his [synchronicity] thesis' (Fordham 1993: 105) - a suggestion reinforced by Jung's remark in a letter to
B. V. Raman (6 September 1947) that 'What I miss in astrological literature is chiefly the statistical method by which fundamental facts could be scientifically established' (Jung 1973: 476; see also Hyde 1992: 129--30).
Later, however, Jung was adamant that his experiment, as carried out, was never intended to prove anything about astrology or, through astrology, about synchronicity (Jung 1958a: 494, 497, 498). He had come to appreciate, Fordham suggests, that if the astrological material did prove statistically significant, 'it would make a cause for the data more likely' (Fordham 1993: 105), thereby undermining the synchronicity thesis.
Rather, what Jung hoped was that his experiment would 'on the one hand demonstrate the existence of synchronicity [i.e., allow for its occurrence and make it visible in the form of measurable results] and, on the other hand, disclose psychic contents which would at least give us a clue to the nature of the psychic factor involved' (Jung 1952: 450).
Arguably, he succeeded in both aims.
The key to an appreciation of the experiment is an understanding of Jung's use of statistics - a use which, as Fordham has remarked, is 'highly original and peculiarly his own' (Fordham 1957: 36).
As they are usually employed,
Fordham explains,
Statistics distinguish between two sets of phenomena: those which are sufficiently ordered to indicate causal connections and to which the notion of prediction can be applied with considerable success, and those whose action is random and which as such obey the laws of chance where the notion of prediction is of little use.
(Fordham 1957: 36)
With synchronicities, however, Jung introduces a third set of phenomena, since, 'Considered statistically they will appear as chance, but they will not be due to chance; i.e. he cuts right across the duality chance-cause axiom on which statistics are based'
(Fordham 1957: 36).
Statistically, events are considered to be 'significant' (i.e., not chance) if their improbability rises above a certain level (technically, the 'Null hypothesis').
When they rise above this level of improbability, events are usually expected and found to have a cause. Since none of Jung's astrological results rose to such a level, they were unlikely to have been caused but were indeed chance happenings - which is what, as acausal events, he needed them to be. Thus, Jung's use of statistics 'had an aim exactly the reverse to the usual one. He used them to define the region in which synchronistic phenomena are most likely' (Fordham 1957: 37).
Rather than dismiss his results altogether because they did not rise to the level of statistical significance, Jung took the novel step of using the statistical distribution they presented as a monitor through which to investigate their possible psychological significance.
As he remarks:
'it is just as important to consider the exceptions to the rule as the averages.... Inasmuch as chance maxima and minima occur, they are facts whose nature I set out to explore'
(Jung 1952: 463).
Thus analysis of the three batches of 180, 220, and 83 pairs of marriage horoscopes showed the maximum frequencies to fall on the aspects respectively of moon conjunct sun, moon conjunct moon, and moon conjunct Ascendant. These are precisely the three aspects that astrological tradition would expect to turn up most frequently in marriage horoscopes, as Jung and his co-worker well knew (Jung 1952: 454--5).
Here, however, they have turned up in a way which is entirely random.
The horoscopes 'were piled up in chronological order just as the post brought them in' (Jung 1952: 459), and Jung decided when to begin analyzing the first batch for no better reason than that he was unable to restrain his curiosity any longer (Jung 1958a: 495).
As his subsequent analyses demonstrated, if the horoscopes had arrived in a different order or if he had waited until they had all come in and had analyzed them together, the three traditional marriage aspects would not have shown up with the same remarkable salience (Jung 1952: 479--80, 471--2).
He concludes that, since the resulting figures, actually fall within the limits of chance expectation, they do not support the astrological claim, they merely imitate accidentally the ideal answer to astrological expectation. It is nothing but a chance result from the statistical point of view, yet it is meaningful on account of the fact that it looks as if it validated this expectation. It is just what I call a synchronistic phenomenon.
(Jung 1952: 477)
The fact that the result corresponded to the expectations of his co-worker and himself suggested to Jung that their psychic state might in some way have been involved in 'arranging' it, that there may have existed, in their case as with practitioners in the past, 'a secret, mutual connivance ... between the material and the psychic state of the astrologer' (Jung 1952: 478).
This conclusion was further suggested by his realization that in working on the statistics 'use had been made of unconscious deception', that he had been 'put off the trail by a number of errors' (Jung 1952: 478).
The curious thing about these errors was that they, 'all tend[ed] to exaggerate the results in a way favorable to astrology, and add[ed] most suspiciously to the impression of an artificial or fraudulent arrangement of the facts'
(Jung 1952: 479).
Jung remarks:
I know, however, from long experience of these things that spontaneous synchronistic phenomena draw the observer, by hook or by crook, into what is happening and occasionally make him an accessory to the deed. That is the danger inherent in all parapsychological experiments.
(Jung 1952: 479)
Fortunately, the errors in the astrological experiment were discovered in time and corrected (Jung 1952: 478). However, in the light both of these errors and of the remarkable correspondence between his expectation and the results he obtained, Jung conducted a further experiment to test for indications of possible psychic participation.
He got three people 'whose psychological status was accurately known' (Jung 1952: 473) to draw by lot twenty pairs of marriage horoscopes from a random assortment of 200. In each case, he found that the person's random selection of twenty horoscopes produced maximal figures which, while not statistically significant, corresponded surprisingly well with the known psychic state of the subject (Jung 1952: 473--5).
For example, one woman 'who, at the time of the experiment, found herself in a state of intense emotional excitement' drew horoscopes in which there was 'a predominance of the Mars aspects' (Jung 1952: 474). Inasmuch as 'The classical significance of Mars lies in his emotionality', this result 'fully agrees with the psychic state of the subject' (Jung 1952: 474).
This informal experiment appeared to confirm what had happened under more rigorously controlled circumstances in the main experiment. Without exceeding the levels of dispersion that would be expected due to chance, the data nonetheless patterned themselves in ways which corresponded to a known psychic disposition. If, however, the astrologer's psychic condition can indeed participate in the arrangement of the material being considered, this means that astrology may be more a form of divination and less a form of science than many of its practitioners would like to believe.
This conclusion has in fact been drawn by some astrologers and has led to a serious reassessment of their practice (see Hyde 1992).
The mind-body relationship
The relationship between mind and body is a source of unending perplexity for physicians, psychologists, and philosophers alike. Jung states a version of the problem as follows:
The assumption of a causal relation between psyche and physis leads ... to conclusions which it is difficult to square with experience: either there are physical processes which cause psychic happenings, or there is a pre-existent psyche which organizes matter. In the first case it is hard to see how chemical processes can ever produce psychic processes, and in the second case one wonders how an immaterial psyche could ever set matter in motion.
(Jung 1952: 505--6)
He then suggests, ambitiously, that, 'The synchronicity principle possesses properties that may help to clear up the body-soul problem'
(Jung 1952: 506).
The properties in question are the fact that the psyche can be meaningfully correlated with physical processes without any causal interaction - suggesting that the psyche may not need to be connected with the brain (Jung 1952: 505); and the hypothesis of 'absolute knowledge ... a knowledge not mediated by the sense organs' which provides the means by which this acausal co-ordination of mental and bodily processes can be possible (Jung 1952: 506).
In the light of this suggestion Jung examines a number of cases of out-of-the-body and near-death experiences (Jung 1952: 506--9) which, he concludes, 'seem to show that in swoon states, where by all human standards there is every guarantee that conscious activity and sense perception are suspended, consciousness, reproducible ideas, acts of judgment, and perceptions can still continue to exist' (Jung 1952: 509).
He considers this to 'indicate a shift in the localization of consciousness, a sort of separation from the body, or from the cerebral cortex or cerebrum which is conjectured to be the seat of conscious phenomena' (Jung 1952: 509).
There now seem to be two possibilities: either 'there is some other nervous substrate in us, apart from the cerebrum, that can think and perceive' or else 'the psychic processes that go on in us during loss of consciousness are synchronistic phenomena, i.e., events which have no causal connection with organic processes' (Jung 1952: 509).
Since there is evidence to support both possibilities (Jung 1952: 510--11), Jung remains uncommitted, concluding that 'psychophysical parallelism', by which he here seems to mean the mind-body relationship, is something 'which we cannot at present pretend to understand' (Jung 1952: 511; cf. Jung 1973: 76--7).
In the same period in which Jung was articulating his theory of synchronicity he was also giving serious thought to the possibility of there being a 'subtle body' that somehow mediates between the psyche and the physical body as we normally experience them (see, e.g., Jung 1973: 522--3; Jung 1976: 43--5).
Quite what the implications of this are for the theory of synchronicity is unclear. Jung's colleague C. A. Meier, for instance, considered psychosomatic phenomena to be synchronistic and as such actually to presuppose the existence of the subtle body (Meier 1963: 116).
Another colleague, however, Marie-Louise von Franz, argued that psychosomatic phenomena and other suggestions of the existence of a subtle body indicate rather a causal relationship between mind and body (Franz 1992: 249--51).
In support of her view she refers to Jung's intriguing suggestion - which he admitted was 'highly speculative, in fact unwarrantably adventurous' (Jung 1976: 45) - that the psyche and the body should be viewed as different manifestations of a single energy and their relationship be understood in terms of the transformation of this energy into greater or lesser states of 'intensification' (Jung 1976: 45).
General acausal orderedness
Synchronicities such as Jung's scarab case - presented by him as paradigmatic - typically manifest themselves as random one-off events. However, certain kinds of acausal phenomena display a greater regularity than this. The results of Rhine's parapsychological experiments were sufficiently reproducible to achieve a high level of statistical significance (see Jung 1952: 516).
Also, with mantic methods such as astrology and
the I Ching Jung writes that 'Synchronistic phenomena are found to occur - experimentally - with some degree of regularity and frequency' (Jung 1952: 511). Again, if the mind-body relationship were found to be synchronistic - and Jung is at least open to this possibility - then this too would imply that acausality is not just 'a relatively rare phenomenon' (Jung 1952: 500, n. 70).
Above all, however, the conception of synchronicity as having to do solely with irregular one-off events was called into question for Jung by such factors as the properties of natural numbers and certain quantum phenomena such as 'the orderedness of energy quanta, of radium decay, etc.' (Jung 1952: 517). These are properties of the world which appear to have no deeper cause but are 'Just-So', i.e., acausal (Jung 1952: 516).
In the light especially of this last factor, Jung was forced to consider 'whether our definition of synchronicity with reference to the equivalence of psychic and physical processes is capable of expansion, or rather, requires expansion' (Jung 1952: 516).
He concluded that the definition was indeed too narrow and needed to be supplemented with the broader category of '
general acausal orderedness':
I incline in fact to the view that synchronicity in the narrow sense is only a particular instance of
general acausal orderedness - that, namely, of the equivalence of psychic and physical processes where the observer is in the fortunate position of being able to recognize the
tertium comparationis [i.e., the meaning by which the psychic and physical processes are related].
(Jung 1952: 516)
More specifically, synchronicity in the narrow sense is distinguished from general
acausal orderedness in that phenomena belonging to the latter category 'have existed from eternity and occur regularly, whereas the forms of
psychic orderedness [i.e.,
synchronicities] are acts of creation in time' (Jung 1952: 517).
He then adds:
'That, incidentally, is precisely why I have stressed the element of time as being characteristic of these phenomena and called them synchronistic'
(Jung 1952: 517).
This represents a significant shift of emphasis - if not a different view altogether, and possibly a more coherent view - from his earlier explanation in terms of simultaneity (Jung 1952: 441).
Jung's statements about general
acausal orderedness are few but have attracted interest. For example, Jung several times expresses the view that natural numbers may prove particularly important for an understanding of synchronicity:
'I feel that the root of the enigma', he writes, 'is to be found in the properties of whole numbers'
(Jung 1976: 289; see also Jung 1976: 352, 400).
This hint has been taken up by
von Franz in a number of publications (Franz 1974, 1980, 1992).
Epistemological status of the principle of synchronicity
'Synchronicity', Jung insists, 'is not a philosophical view but an empirical concept which postulates an intellectually necessary principle'
(Jung 1952: 512);
'It is based not on philosophical assumptions but on empirical experience and experimentation'
(Jung 1951b: 531)
From the material before him he claims that he 'can derive no other hypothesis that would adequately explain the facts (including the ESP experiments)'
(Jung 1952: 505).
Notwithstanding this last statement, it is 'only a makeshift model' and 'does not rule out the possibility of other hypotheses'
(Jung 1976: 437).
Other writers, however, have found aspects of the theory of synchronicity to be less free from metaphysical presupposition than these statements imply. Explicitly or implicitly, Jung's claims to an empirical status for his work are invariably based on an appeal to Kant's epistemological distinction between
phenomena (things as they appear to human consciousness) and
noumena (things as they are in themselves) - Jung's professed concern being solely with phenomena (see, e.g., Voogd 1984).
However,
Wolfgang Giegerich has argued that many of the core concepts of Jung's psychology, including the concept of synchronicity, overstep the limits prescribed by Kantian epistemology:
'As long as Jung clings to his label "empiricist first and last," Kant would show him that he has no right to posit, for example, a psychoid archetypal level in which the subject-object dichotomy would be overcome'
(Giegerich 1987: 111).
This issue, as Giegerich implies, goes to the heart of Jung's psychology as a whole. Jung himself does appear to have been aware that his thinking on at least synchronicity sometimes shifts into metaphysics.
In a letter to Fordham (3 January 1957) he congratulates Fordham on his essay 'Reflections on the Archetypes and Synchronicity' (Fordham 1957) and remarks:
I well understand that you prefer to emphasize the archetypal implication in synchronicity. This aspect is certainly most important from the psychological angle, but I must say that I am equally interested, at times even more so, in the metaphysical aspect of the phenomena, and in the question: how does it come that even inanimate objects are capable of behaving as if they were acquainted with my thoughts?
(Jung 1976: 344)
Again, in a letter to
K. Schmid (11 June 1958) Jung first asserts his empiricist position by stating that synchronicity 'is not a name that characterizes an "organizing principle"' but 'characterizes a modality' and therefore 'is not meant as anything substantive' (Jung 1976: 448).
However, he then admits that it can sometimes be legitimate to conceptualize beyond the bounds of what is empirically knowable so long as this conceptualization does not come,
'from my biased speculation but rather from the unfathomable law of nature herself ... from the total man, i.e., from the co-participation of the unconscious [in the form of dreams etc.]'
(Jung 1976: 448).
'This far-reaching speculation', he believes, 'is a psychic need which is part of our mental hygiene', adding, however, that 'in the realm of scientific verification it must be counted sheer mythology'
(Jung 1976: 449).
Thus, he is able to excuse some of his own more incautious statements regarding synchronicity: 'if', he concedes, 'I occasionally speak of an "organizer," this is sheer mythology since at present I have no means of going beyond the bare fact that synchronistic phenomena are "just so"' (Jung 1976: 449).
Again, after quoting a paragraph from his 1952 essay affirming the transcendental nature of the '"absolute knowledge" which is characteristic of synchronistic phenomena' (Jung 1952: 506), he admits that 'This statement, too, is mythology, like all transcendental postulates' (Jung 1976: 449).
AFTER SYNCHRONICITY
Once formulated, the theory of synchronicity provided Jung with insights into a variety of subjects and areas of experience - some of them, not surprisingly, the very ones which had challenged him to develop the theory in the first place.
At the most fundamental level, synchronicity led Jung to speculate about the nature of
reality. The fact, for instance, that in synchronistic events the same archetypal pattern of meaning seems capable of expressing itself independently in both psychic and physical contexts suggested to him that 'all reality [may be] grounded on an as yet unknown substrate possessing material and at the same time psychic qualities' (Jung 1958b: 411).
The synchronistic principle 'suggests that there is an inter-connection or unity of causally unrelated events, and thus postulates a unitary aspect of being which can very well be described as the
unus mundus' (Jung 1954--55: 464--5).
This postulated unitary background to existence, in which the concepts of psyche and matter and space and time merge into a psychophysical space-time continuum, was where Jung considered the archetypes themselves, as opposed to their phenomenal manifestations, ultimately to be located. To express this ambivalent nature - at once psychic and physical yet neither because beyond both - he was led to coin the term 'psychoid'. The ability of the archetype to manifest synchronistically in independent psychic and physical contexts is itself an indicator of its fundamentally psychoid nature.
Regarding the phenomenal world rather than its hypothetical substrate, synchronicity, as a connecting principle complementary to causality, directs attention to a whole dimension of experienceable relationships between events which would be disregarded or marginalized by any exclusively causalistic view. On a general level, this helps create conceptual space for the acknowledgment of radically anomalous or paranormal events which might otherwise be denied.
More specifically, in the field of psychical research, the concept of acausal connection offers a fresh way of looking at the kind of phenomena usually designated as telepathy, clairvoyance, psychokinesis, precognition, and so on. Each of these terms, Jung felt, perpetuates the expectation of finding some kind of energic and hence causal relationship between the events involved, whereas the concept of synchronicity focuses attention on the main relationship actually present in experience, namely, the meaningful coincidence of the events (Jung 1955--56: 464; Jung 1976: 538).
This implies a shift of emphasis away from seeking to discover some mechanism or means of transmission at work in the events and towards a potentially more illuminating exploration of their psychological background and meaning.
Even easier to overlook from the causal perspective are the kinds of meaningful acausal connections which constitute the correspondences upon which divinatory and similar forms of esoteric thinking are based. As Jung's astrological experiment demonstrated, these connections, unlike the more radical anomalies, often do not even achieve the salience of statistical significance, and so would in many cases not be noticed at all if one were not sensitized to their possibility by one's awareness of the principle of synchronicity.
There are also many important implications for the practice of psychotherapy. For example, Jung recognized that states of mind, such as bad conscience, can sometimes express themselves synchronistically in the thoughts and feelings of another person (Jung 1963: 60--1; Jung 1958d: 450--1) or even through the arrangement of events in the environment (Jung 1963: 123--4).
In this light, it is not surprising that the occurrence of synchronicities can play various kinds of role in the transference/counter-transference relationship - sometimes providing crucial insight to either the analyst or the patient (Gordon 1983: 138--44), at other times marking a critical or even fatal moment within the relationship (Jung 1963: 136--7).
Again, Jung points out the possibility, on the part of certain patients, of interpreting genuine synchronistic events as delusions (i.e., the delusion of believing that quite ordinary events have special reference to them).
Therapists capable of understanding synchronicity, 'not as a psychotic but as a normal phenomenon' will be able to avoid the therapeutically negative consequences of the patients' - and, if they are not sensitive to synchronicity, their own - 'morbidly narrow' interpretation
(Jung 1976: 409--10).
Spiritual experience is another area to which Jung's theory of synchronicity has been applied, both by himself directly and by others elaborating on implications of the theory. Thus, the crucial role of synchronicity within Jung's overall psychology of religion has been clearly demonstrated by
Aziz (1990).
In particular, Aziz argues that synchronistic experiences enable one to view Jung's core religious process - individuation - not just intrapsychically but as involving the world beyond the psyche. Synchronicity therefore provides the key to freeing Jung from the criticism of psychological reductionism often leveled at him by theologians (Aziz 1990: 179--84).
On the personal level, Jung's own visionary experiences of union, which attended his near-fatal illness in 1944, can also be understood in the light of synchronicity. Although he does not himself directly apply the concept of synchronicity to these experiences, his characterization of them in terms of 'a quality of absolute objectivity' and of 'a non-temporal state in which present, past, and future are one' (Jung 1963: 275) clearly reflects the 'absolute knowledge' and 'space-time relativity' involved in synchronicities.
In fact, his sense of his visions as representing a kind of mystic marriage between self and world (the
hierosgamos or
mysterium coniunctionis: Jung 1963: 274--5) suggests that they may actually constitute an experiential realization of the unitary dimension of existence (the
unus mundus) towards which he considered the more familiar forms of synchronicity to be pointing.
Jung is more explicit concerning the implications of synchronicity for the question of possible life after death. For epistemological reasons, he does not think one can actually prove that there is survival of death, but he considers it significant that the unconscious psyches of people approaching death generally present dreams and other spontaneous imagery which imply an expected continuity (Jung 1934: 410--11; Jung 1963: 278--80).
The hint provided by this is supported by two different aspects of synchronicity. On a general level, he argues that the space-time relativization involved in synchronicity implies that the psyche 'exists in a continuum outside time and space' (Jung 1976: 561; see also Jung 1934: 412--15; Jung 1963: 282--3).
Although we do not know in detail what 'existence outside time' is like, we can at least infer that it is 'outside change' and 'possesses relative eternity' (Jung 1976: 561) - grounds for supposing that it may not end with the death of the body. More concretely, he considers that certain synchronistic phenomena that occur in relation to death - veridical dreams and apparitions, for instance - can express the idea of survival also in terms of their content (Jung 1963: 289--92).
Jung sometimes refers to synchronistic events as miracles, though it is clear that he does so only in a loose way and certainly without any expectation of having to provide theological backing for his usage (e.g., Jung 1976: 537, 540).
Occasionally, however, he does address the issue of traditionally designated religious miracles and on these occasions sometimes refers to synchronicity. Thus, speaking of the identity of
Christ the 'empirical man' with 'the traditional Son of Man type', he says:
'Wherever such identities occur, characteristic archetypal effects appear, that is numinosity and synchronistic phenomena, hence tales of miracles are inseparable from the
Christ figure'
(Jung 1976: 21).
At other times he suggests that explanations for apparent miracles, such as the case of
Brother Klaus living twenty years without material sustenance, should be sought more specifically in the realm of parapsychology and mediumistic phenomena (Jung 1950/1951: 660). Even here, however, the implication is that the sustained paranormal phenomena constituting the miracle are synchronistic archetypal 'effects' rendered possible by the maintaining of a numinous religious attitude (cf. Jung 1976: 576).
Finally, Jung also had recourse to the concept of synchronicity when attempting to account for the baffling reports of
UFOs. He had kept a close eye on this phenomenon since its emergence in the mid 1940s and recognized that it seemed to have both a physical aspect (the fact that UFOs are not only seen but are sometimes simultaneously picked up on radar) and a psychic aspect (the fact that they 'provoked, like nothing else, conscious and unconscious fantasies' [Jung 1958b: 313]).
He was unable to decide, however, which was primary - whether there were indeed physical events followed by the fantasies, or whether the fantasies and visions were arising independently from an activated archetype (Jung 1958b: 313).
In this perplexity he invokes synchronicity as a third possibility, suggesting that there may indeed be an anomalous physical phenomenon involved but that this meaningfully coincides with, rather than causes, the accompanying fantasizing or myth-making, which does indeed have its own independent reasons for surfacing at this time (Jung 1958b: 313, 416--17).
These examples should suffice to indicate how Jung's theory of synchronicity can provide, if not conclusive explanations, at least some stimulating new perspectives on a wide range of anomalous phenomena.
The theory of synchronicity brings more fully into awareness the experiential reality, the complexity, and above all the potential meaningfulness of paranormal events.
In doing so, it perhaps furthers what Jung once described as the 'uncomprehended purpose' of 'any nocturnal, numinous experience':
'to make us feel the overpowering presence of a mystery ... shaking our certitudes and lending wings to the imagination'
(Jung 1958c: 328--9).
) due to ...probably this thread, my FB activity, and my advertising and leading a chronic pain group in Portland called - Psychedelics for the treatment of Chronic Pain, as well as my endorsement of the safe and practical use of entheogens (psychedelics) for things like pain, depression, anxiety, PTSD, ODC, etc, etc,....it really can help endless amounts of people...but of course it and other substances are Schedule 1 (no medicinal value), which is utter BS and the Govt. knows it...it would hurt big pharma profits too much if you did away with their bread and butter, namely opioids and antidepressants. Not to mention the anti-cancer possibilities that things like CBD and MJ have shown to work. 
