Synchronicity

Jung held that there was both a philosophical and scientific basis for synchronicity.[18] He identified the complementary nature of causality and acausality with Eastern sciences and protoscientific disciplines, stating "the East bases much of its science on this irregularity and considers coincidences as the reliable basis of the world rather than causality. Synchronism is the prejudice of the East; causality is the modern prejudice of the West"^[1] (see also: universal causation). Contemporary scholar L. K. Kerr writes:

Jung also looked to

numinosity. He worked closely with Nobel Prize winning physicist Wolfgang Pauli and also consulted with Albert Einstein. The notion of synchronicity shares with modern physics the idea that under certain conditions, the laws governing the interactions of space and time can no longer be understood according to the principle of causality. In this regard, Jung joined modern physicists in reducing the conditions in which the laws of classical mechanics apply.^[1]

Jung's use of the concept in arguing for the existence of

How are we to recognize acausal combinations of events, since it is obviously impossible to examine all chance happenings for their causality? The answer to this is that acausal events may be expected most readily where, on closer reflection, a causal connection appears to be inconceivable.^[41] It is impossible, with our present resources, to explain ESP [extrasensory perception], or the fact of meaningful coincidence, as a phenomenon of energy. This makes an end of the causal explanation as well, for "effect" cannot be understood as anything except a phenomenon of energy. Therefore it cannot be a question of cause and effect, but of a falling together in time, a kind of simultaneity. Because of this quality of simultaneity, I have picked on the term "synchronicity" to designate a hypothetical factor equal in rank to causality as a principle of explanation.^[42]

Roderick Main, in the introduction to his 1997 book Jung on Synchronicity and the Paranormal, wrote:^[43]

The culmination of Jung's lifelong engagement with the paranormal is his theory of synchronicity, the view that the structure of reality includes a principle of acausal connection which manifests itself most conspicuously in the form of meaningful coincidences. Difficult, flawed, prone to misrepresentation, this theory none the less remains one of the most suggestive attempts yet made to bring the paranormal within the bounds of intelligibility. It has been found relevant by psychotherapists, parapsychologists, researchers of spiritual experience and a growing number of non-specialists. Indeed, Jung's writings in this area form an excellent general introduction to the whole field of the paranormal.

Studies

• A 1989 overview of research areas and methodology in the study of coincidence published by the Journal of the American Statistical Association addresses various potentials in researching synchronicity experiences.^[11]

• A 2009 paper found that, clinically, synchronicity experiences seem to cluster around periods of emotional intensity or major life transitions, such as births, deaths, and marriage.^[44]
• A 2016 study found that clients who have disclosed synchronicity experiences in clinical setting often report not being listened to, accepted, or understood. The study also found that for therapists these experiences often come as a shock and a challenge their own worldviews,^[45] prompting researchers to specify a need to provide accurate and reliable information about synchronicity experiences for mental health professionals.^[46]
• Another 2016 study of 226 therapists found that 44% reported synchronicity experiences in the therapeutic setting, and 67% felt that synchronicity experiences could be useful for therapy.^[47] The study also points out ways of explanations of synchronicity:

  For example, psychologists were significantly more likely than both counsellors and psychotherapists to agree that chance coincidence was an explanation for synchronicity, whereas, counsellors and psychotherapists were significantly more likely than psychologists to agree that a need for unconscious material to be expressed could be an explanation for synchronicity experiences in the clinical setting.^[48]

• A 2018 study shows that the concept of synchronicity finds clinical application in psychotherapies in form of a Jungian-specific approach to interpretation. Already the conceptual idea of synchronicity offers the therapist an additional therapeutic tool to put potentially meaningful experienced coincidences between him and the patient into a subjective narrative, which can be experienced by the patient as meaningful. If a synchronistic moment is sensitively recognized, thematized and interpreted as such, it can have positive consequences for the therapeutic relationship and therapy.^[49][50][51]
• A 2019 study proposed to test whether synchronicity manifests as an objective feature of the physical world. The results of whether
  Fibonacci algorithms would predict increased synchronicity experiences compared to chance showed "a significant difference (p < .10) between observed synchronicity matches and expected frequencies based on chance for the HM [harmonic model] algorithm, and no significant difference in matches predicted by the GSM [golden section model] algorithm".^[46]

Synchronicity is one of the most widely known terms of Jungian psychology. Although generations of scholars from various fields have found the concept intuitively appealing and interpretively useful, there has been little agreement among theorists how synchronicity might operate, and researchers have had difficulty providing empirically testable models.[46]

Despite this, synchronicity experiences and the synchronicity principle continue to be studied within philosophy, cognitive science, and analytical psychology.^[46][14] Synchronicity is widely challenged by the sufficiency of probability theory in explaining the occurrence of coincidences, the relationship between synchronicity experiences and cognitive biases, and doubts about the theory's psychiatric or scientific usefulness.

Psychologist Fritz Levi, a contemporary of Jung, criticised the theory in his 1952 review, published in the periodical Neue Schweizer Rundschau (New Swiss Observations). Levi saw Jung's theory as vague in determinability of synchronistic events, saying that Jung never specifically explained his rejection of "magic causality" to which such an acausal principle as synchronicity would be related. He also questioned the theory's usefulness.^[52]

In a 1981 paper, parapsychologist Charles Tart writes:

[There is] a danger inherent in the concept of synchronicity. This danger is the temptation to mental laziness. If, in working with paranormal phenomena, I cannot get my experiments to replicate and cannot find any patterns in the results, then, as attached as I am to the idea of causality, it would be very tempting to say, "Well, it's synchronistic, it's forever beyond my understanding," and so (prematurely) give up trying to find a causal explanation. Sloppy use of the concept of synchronicity then becomes a way of being intellectually lazy and dodging our responsibilities.^[53]

Robert Todd Carroll, author of The Skeptic's Dictionary in 2003, argues that synchronicity experiences are better explained as apophenia—the tendency for humans to find significance or meaning where none exists. He states that over a person's lifetime one can be expected to encounter several seemingly-unpredictable coincidences and that there is no need for Jung's metaphysical explanation of these occurrences.^[54]

In a 2014 interview, emeritus professor and statistician David J. Hand states:

Synchronicity is an attempt to come up with an explanation for the occurrence of highly improbable coincidences between events where there is no causal link. It's based on the premise that existing physics and mathematics cannot explain such things. This is wrong, however—standard science can explain them. That's really the point of the improbability principle. What I have tried to do is pull out and make explicit how physics and mathematics, in the form of

probability calculus does explain why such striking and apparently highly improbable events happen. There's no need to conjure up other forces or ideas, and there's no need to attribute mystical meaning or significance to their occurrence. In fact, we should expect them to happen, as they do, purely in the natural course of events.^[55]

As theories, the main problem with both synchronicity and seriality is that they ignore the possibility that coincidences are a psychological phenomenon and focus instead on the premise that coincidences are examples of actual but hidden structures in the world.[24]

Examples

Jung

Jung tells the following story as an example of a synchronistic event in his 1960 book Synchronicity:

By way of example, I shall mention an incident from my own observation. A young woman I was treating had, at a critical moment, a dream in which she was given a golden scarab. While she was telling me this dream I sat with my back to the closed window. Suddenly I heard a noise behind me, like a gentle tapping. I turned round and saw a flying insect knocking against the window pane from outside. I opened the window and caught the creature in the air as it flew in. It was the nearest analogy to a golden scarab that one finds in our latitudes, a scarabaeid beetle, the common rose-chafer (Cetonia aurata), which contrary to its usual habits had evidently felt an urge to get into a dark room at this particular moment.

It was an extraordinarily difficult case to treat, and up to the time of the dream little or no progress had been made. I should explain that the main reason for this was my patient's animus, which was steeped in Cartesian philosophy and clung so rigidly to its own idea of reality that the efforts of three doctors—I was the third—had not been able to weaken it. Evidently something quite irrational was needed which was beyond my powers to produce. The dream alone was enough to disturb ever so slightly the rationalistic attitude of my patient. But when the "scarab" came flying in through the window in actual fact, her natural being could burst through the armor of her animus possession and the process of transformation could at last begin to move.^[56]

After describing some examples, Jung wrote: "When coincidences pile up in this way, one cannot help being impressed by them – for the greater the number of terms in such a series, or the more unusual its character, the more improbable it becomes."^[12]: 91

Deschamps

French writer

In his book Thirty Years That Shook Physics: The Story of Quantum Theory (1966), George Gamow writes about Wolfgang Pauli, who was apparently considered a person particularly associated with synchronicity events. Gamow whimsically refers to the "Pauli effect", a mysterious phenomenon which is not understood on a purely materialistic basis, and probably never will be. The following anecdote is told:

It is well known that theoretical physicists cannot handle experimental equipment; it breaks whenever they touch it. Pauli was such a good theoretical physicist that something usually broke in the lab whenever he merely stepped across the threshold. A mysterious event that did not seem at first to be connected with Pauli's presence once occurred in Professor J. Franck's laboratory in Göttingen. Early one afternoon, without apparent cause, a complicated apparatus for the study of atomic phenomena collapsed. Franck wrote humorously about this to Pauli at his Zürich address and, after some delay, received an answer in an envelope with a Danish stamp. Pauli wrote that he had gone to visit Bohr and at the time of the mishap in Franck's laboratory his train was stopped for a few minutes at the Göttingen railroad station. You may believe this anecdote or not, but there are many other observations concerning the reality of the Pauli Effect! ^[58]

In popular culture

In 1983 The Police released an album titled Synchronicity. A song from the album Synchronicity II simultaneously describes the story of a man experiencing a mental breakdown and a lurking monster emerging from a Scottish lake.^{[citation needed]}

Björk wrote a song titled "Synchronicity" for Spike Jonze's Hot Chocolate DVD.^[60]

Rising Appalachia released a song titled "Synchronicity" on their 2015 album Wider Circles.^[61]

See also

• Correlation does not imply causation – Refutation of a logical fallacy
• Ideas and delusions of reference – Phenomenon involving innocuous events
• Look-elsewhere effect – Statistical analysis phenomenon
• Post hoc ergo propter hoc – Fallacy of assumption of causality based on sequence of events
• Synchromysticism – Belief system attributing meaning to coincidences

References

Notes

Citations

1. ^ ^{a b c d e f g} Kerr, Laura K. (2013). "Synchronicity". In Teo, T. (ed.). Encyclopedia of Critical Psychology. Berlin, Heidelberg: Springer-Verlag.
2. ^
   ISBN 978-0-387-71801-9
   .
3. ^ Aziz (1990), p. 191.
4. ^
   ISBN 978-0-670-03292-1
   .
5. ^ Jung (1973).
6. ^ Jung, Carl Gustav, and Wolfgang Ernst Pauli. [1952] 1955. The Interpretation of Nature and the Psyche, translated from German Naturerklärung und Psyche.
7. ^ Main, Roderick. 2000. "Religion, Science, and Synchronicity". Harvest: Journal for Jungian Studies 46(2):89–107. Archived from the original on 8 December 2006.
8. doi:10.1111/j.1468-5922.2007.00705_1.x
   .
9. ^
   ISBN 978-18454-07599
   .
10. S2CID 147210858
    .
11. ^
    JSTOR 2290058
    .
12. ^ ^{a b} Jung, Carl G. [1951] 2005. "Synchronicity". Pp. 91–98 in Jung on Synchronicity and the Paranormal, edited by R. Main. London: Taylor & Francis.
13. ISBN 978-18454-07599
    .
14. ^
    PMID 18844735
    .
15. PMID 19487337
    .
16. ^ Rushnell, S. (2006). When God winks. Atria Books.
17. ^ Koestler (1973).
18. ^
    ISBN 9781576076538
    .
19. ^ Radford, Benjamin. 4 February 2014. "Synchronicity: Definition & Meaning". Live Science. Retrieved 25 June 2020.
20. S2CID 3642342
    .
21. ^
    PMID 15817042
    .
22. ^
    ISBN 9780028659947
    .
23. ^ ^{a b} Marie-Louise von Franz, Man and His Symbols (1964), p. 227
24. ^ ^{a b c} Johansen, M. K., and M. Osman. 2015. "Coincidences: A fundamental consequence of rational cognition". New Ideas in Psychology 39:34-44.
25. ISBN 978-06911-61471
    .
26. ^ Wolfgang Pauli in letter to Jung 1950
27. ^ Brach, Jean-Pierre, and Wouter J. Hanegraaff. (2006). "Correspondences". In Dictionary of Gnosis & Western Esotericism, edited by Wouter Hanegraaff.
28. ^ Robert Todd Carroll, "sympathetic magic" in The Skeptic's Dictionary
29. ^ Atmanspacher, Harald (2012). "Dual-aspect monism à la Pauli and Jung". Journal of Consciousness Studies. 19 (9): 96–120.
30. ^
    ISBN 978-18454-07599
    .
31. ISBN 978-18454-07599
    .
32. S2CID 222005552
    .
33. S2CID 170711587
    .
34. ^ Brown, R. S. 2014. "Evolving Attitudes". International Journal of Jungian Studies 6(3):243–53.
35. ISBN 0-914073-09-5
    .
36. ISBN 978-0-8126-9304-1
    .
37. ^ Main R. 2014. The cultural significance of synchronicity for Jung and Pauli. J Anal Psychol. 59(2):
38. ^ Donati M. 2004. Beyond synchronicity: the worldview of Carl Gustav Jung and Wolfgang Pauli. J Anal Psychol. 49(5)
39. ^ Jung (1973), p. 44.
40. ^ Liz Greene, Jung's Studies in Astrology: Prophecy, Magic, and the Qualities of Time, Routledge, 2018.
41. ^ Jung (1973), p. 8.
42. ^ Jung (1973), p. 19.
43. ISBN 9780691058375
    .
44. ^ Beitman, B. D.; Celebi, E.; Coleman, S. L. (2010). "Synchronicity and healing". In Monti, D. A.; Beitman, B. D. (eds.). Integrative psychiatry. Oxford University Press. pp. 445–483.
45. S2CID 146921408
    .
46. ^
    S2CID 202248836
    .
47. doi:10.1002/capr.12057
    .
48. ^ Roxburgh, Elizabeth. 2013. "An investigation into the prevalence and phenomenology of synchronicity experiences in the clinical setting" Bial.com
49. ^ Reefschläger, Gunnar I. (2018). "Synchronizität in der Psychotherapie : Eine quantitativ–qualitative Untersuchung der strukturellen Beschaffenheit synchronistischer Phänomene im psychotherapeutischen Prozess" (PDF). Opus4.kobv.de. Retrieved 13 March 2022.
50. ^ "APA PsycNet". Psycnet.apa.org. Retrieved 13 March 2022.
51. S2CID 266962164
    .
52. ISBN 978-0-7734-7593-9
    .
53. Journal of the American Society for Psychical Research. 75: 121–141. Archived from the original
    on 2015-09-24.
54. ^ Carroll, Robert T. "Synchronicity". The Skeptic's Dictionary. Retrieved September 26, 2021. Last updated October 27, 2015.
55. ^ Navin, John. 2014. "Why Coincidences, Miracles And Rare Events Happen Every Day" (interview with David Hand). Forbes. Archived 2017-07-29 at the Wayback Machine.
56. ^ Jung (1973), p. 27.
57. ^ Deschamps, Émile (1873). "Œuvres complètes de Émile Deschamps : III : Prose : Première partie" [The Complete Works of Émile Deschamps : III : Prose : First part] (in French). Paris: Alphonse Lemerre. pp. 262–265. Retrieved 16 March 2024 – via Internet Archive.
58. ^ Thirty Years That Shook Physics – The Story of Quantum Theory, George Gamow, p. 64, Doubleday & Co. Inc. New York, 1966
59. ISBN 0-679-74065-1
    . p. 128.
60. ^ "Björk - Synchronicity (Full)". YouTube.
61. ^ Wider Circles at Discogs

Works cited

• Aziz, Robert (1990). C. G. Jung's Psychology of Religion and Synchronicity (10th ed.). Albany:
  ISBN 978-0-7914-0166-8
  .
• LCCN 73011838
  .
• ISBN 978-0-394-71934-4
  .

Further reading

• Aziz, Robert (1999). "Synchronicity and the Transformation of the Ethical in Jungian Psychology"". In Becker, C. (ed.). Asian and Jungian Views of Ethics. Greenwood.
  ISBN 978-0-313-30452-1
  .
• Aziz, Robert (2007). The Syndetic Paradigm: The Untrodden Path Beyond Freud and Jung. Albany: State University of New York Press.
  ISBN 978-0-7914-6982-8
  .
• Cederquist, Jan (2010). Meaningful Coincidence.
  ISBN 978-0-462-09970-5
  .
• Combs, Allan; Holland, Mark (2001). Synchronicity: Through the Eyes of Science, Myth, and the Trickster. New York: Marlowe.
  ISBN 978-1-56924-599-6
  .
• Gieser, Suzanne (2005). The Innermost Kernel: Depth Psychology and Quantum Physics. Wolfgang Pauli's Dialogue with C.G. Jung.
  ISBN 978-3-540-20856-3
  .
• Haule, John Ryan (2010). Jung in the 21st Century: Synchronicity and Science. Routledge.
  ISBN 978-0-203-83360-5
  .
• Main, Roderick (2007). Revelations of Chance: Synchronicity as Spiritual Experience. Albany: State University of New York Press.
  ISBN 978-0-7914-7024-4
  .
• Peat, F. David (1987). Synchronicity: The Bridge Between Matter and Mind.
  ISBN 978-0-553-34676-3
  .
• OCLC 763819
  .
• Sneller, Rico (2020). Perspectives on Synchronicity, Inspiration, and the Soul. Cambridge Scholars.
  ISBN 978-1-5275-5505-1
  .
• Storm, L., ed. (2008). Synchronicity: Multiple Perspectives on Meaningful Coincidence. Pari Publishing.
  ISBN 978-88-95604-02-2
  .
• ISBN 978-0-919123-02-1
  .
• ISBN 978-0-691-61001-6
  .

External links

Wikiquote has quotations related to Synchronicity.

• Carl Jung and synchronicity