Meaningful Connections

Many people have experiences in which the outside world meaningfully, but noncausally, relates to their inner psychological states. For example, C.G. Jung writes:

As it is not limited to the person, it is also not limited to the body. It manifests itself therefore not only in human beings but also at the same time in animals and even physical circumstances. . . . I call these latter phenomena the synchronicity of archetypal events. For instance, I walk with a woman patient in a wood. She tells me about the first dream in her life that had made an everlasting impression upon her. She had seen a spectral fox coming down the stairs in her parental home. At this moment, a real fox comes out of the trees not 40 yards away and walks quietly on the path ahead of us for several minutes. The animal behaves as if it were a partner in the human situation.1

No topic in Analytical Psychology is more central to its significance than synchronicity. Yet, no idea within that discipline is more widely misunderstood and abused than synchronicity. We can thus be thankful when, Roderick Main, one of the world’s leading experts on synchronicity, writes about it. Dr. Main is a lecturer at the Centre for Psychoanalytic Studies at the University of Essex in the UK. The Rupture of Time builds on his numerous papers and his previous book, Jung on Synchronicity and the Paranormal (Routledge, 1997). The Rupture of Time is a careful, comprehensive, and scholarly book that makes a valuable contribution to the study of synchronicity and Jung’s use of it as a platform from which to criticise modern culture. Yet, the book’s clarity and balanced treatment of the material also make it attractive to the non-specialist reader.

The book has three main sections. The first section presents the theory of synchronicity. Here Roderick Main also lays out the contradictions and inconsistencies among Jung’s several definitions of synchronicity and does not shy away from the many intellectual difficulties presented by Jung’s often turgid writing on the subject. The definition that Jung emphasises defines synchronicity as the acausal connection of meaning between an inner psychological state and events in the material world. Jung’s paradigmatic example involves a women whose inflexible rationality halts her therapy. She has an impressive dream about a golden scarab. When she tells Jung about the dream, a rose chafer (similar to a scarab) taps on the window of Jung’s consulting room. He opens the window, catches the beetle, and hands it to the woman, saying, “Here is your scarab.” The dream did not cause the rose chafer to enter the room nor did the beetle cause the dream. Here Jung uses “cause” as a classical physicist or a person in normal conversation would use the word. However, both events are meaningful connected to the archetype of rebirth. Here we have an example of how the same archetypal meaning, essential for the women’s individuation, is acausally incarnated in both the inner and outer worlds.

This is mysterious enough, but Jung goes on to expand his definition of synchronicity to include cases where two psychological states meaningfully but acausally connect (a widely separated father and son have a dream embodying the same archetypal meaning) or two physical states acausally connect (quantum mechanical objects exhibit acausal correlations). In the first case, the father’s dream does not cause the son’s nor vice versa, but they do both embody the same archetypal meaning, despite neither dream being physical in the normal sense. While in the second case, Jung seeks to broaden the definition of synchronicity beyond psychology to encompass acausal connections in matter, where one cannot ascribe archetypal meaning to the correlations. As Main carefully points out, there are all sorts of difficulties with these expanded definitions. All this is exacerbated by Jung grouping a hodgepodge (or hotchpotch as they say in the UK) of experiences under the umbrella of synchronicity, ranging from parapsychological phenomena studied in laboratories to out-of-body experiences. Of course, we are grateful to Jung for pioneering the study of synchronicity, but the lion’s share of blame for the difficulty in understanding the idea rests with Jung’s formulation.

The second section of The Rupture of Time examines the many disparate sources from which Jung drew in developing his idea of synchronicity. Jung was deeply influenced by modern physics through his twenty-six year collaboration with the physicist Wolfgang Pauli. However, if you have a little understanding of quantum mechanics and read Jung’s synchronicity essay, you will see why Pauli, Jung’s most important influence in developing synchronicity, characterised Jung’s understanding of physics as being “dreamlike” ² and without an appreciation of the differences between analytical psychology and physics.

The second most important influence on Jung’s development of synchronicity was the laboratory tests of paranormal phenomena pioneered by J.B. Rhine. Jung’s two-volume set of letters³ contains much of the correspondence between them. However, a more complete set of both the letters of Jung and Rhine recently surfaced in the Rhine archives.⁴ The quotation below is from a letter to Rhine that did not find its way into Jung’s two-volume set of letters. Jung writes to Rhine on September 3, 1951 and says,

I regretted very much not seeing you when you were in Europe. Soon after you left I recovered from my illness and I have been able to finish a paper that is largely based upon your ESP experiment which, by the way, is intensely discussed over here by psychologists as well as physicists.

Beyond Pauli and Rhine, Jung appeals to an extraordinary panoply of influences from Western and Eastern philosophy and religion to astrology and the I Ching. Roderick Main shows that the enormous breadth of influences on Jung was one of the reasons his definition of synchronicity was often convoluted.

The third section of The Rupture of Time shows how Jung used synchronicity as a principle from which he made trenchant criticisms of both traditional religious systems and materialistic science—core factors shaping modern culture. Here we also get a deeper sense of how pivotal synchronicity was for Jung’s view of his work and how it relates to modern culture. Roderick Main then considers various forms of “New Age Spirituality” in light of synchronicity and shows how many adherents of these views draw upon synchronicity both intellectually and as a primary form of personal experience of the transcendent. This third section is, in many ways, the most innovative in the book.

Although I appreciate the care and thoroughness of Roderick Main’s treatment and value the book as a significant contribution, I wish he had made a more concerted effort to clarify and limit the idea of synchronicity. He had all the pieces at hand, but did not make this potentially helpful step. I briefly sketch two points whose exploration could help clarify the notion of synchronicity.

First, since 1995,⁵ I have had success convincing Jungians that laboratory tests of parapsychological phenomena such as those pioneered by Rhine, are not synchronicity, largely because they lack any archetypal meaning. Thanks to the worldwide effort to study the modern successors to Rhine’s experiments—the autoganzfeld experiments and the biasing of random number generators—it is now clearer than ever that, as important as these studies are, they are not examples of synchronicity.

My belief in the necessity of distinguishing synchronicity from paranormal phenomena based on meaning was strengthened, well after my initial arguments, when I read the letter from Pauli to Jung dated 28, June 1949. This letter refers to a draft of the synchronicity essay that Jung sent to Pauli for his comments. Pauli writes:

Many thanks for your interesting manuscript and your friendly letter. I should first of all like to point out that the Rhine series of experiments seem to me to be a totally different type of phenomenon from the other phenomena listed by you as "synchronistic." For with the former I cannot see any archetypal basis (or am I wrong there?). This for me, however, is crucial to an understanding of the phenomena in question, as is your earlier observation (Eranos Jahrbuch 1947 [1946]) that their appearance is complementary to the archetypal contents becoming conscious. I regret very much that this aspect is not mentioned at all in your latest work. Perhaps you could make further additions here, for it would make it all easier to understand.6

Surprisingly, after this there are only indirect references to this critical point in the Pauli-Jung letters. From Jung’s synchronicity essay, we can see that, despite all the other influences of Pauli, Jung did not take his advice on this point. This is unfortunate, both for the conceptual clarification it affords and for the possibility of clarifying the experimental situation of synchronicity versus laboratory parapsychology.

The second point whose exploration could help clarify the notion of synchronicity concerns Jung’s attempt to make his definition cover the correlation of two psychic states—for example, the case of two people with dreams that meaningfully connect. This extension opens Pandora’s Box, because now it is difficult to judge whether any two powerful psychological states are synchronistic. However, a small conceptual shift solves this vexing problem.

Begin with the idea that there are three essential attributes of synchronicity: acausality, archetypal meaning, and the internal-external sharing of this same meaning. From most of Jung’s writing and examples, it is clear that he defines synchronicity as involving meaningful connections between two states: a subjective, internal, mental event (a dream, vision, or thought) and another event in the material or physical world (a fox appearing on the path, a rose chafer tapping on the window, or the person you dreamed about appearing on the street the next day). However, rather than focus on the material or physical world as Jung did, note that the essential feature of such correlating events is their being in consensual reality—the public arena where others could verify the existence of such events and analyse them. Then the critical dichotomy in synchronicity is that between a subjective mental state and one in consensual reality, where intersubjective agreement takes place. Synchronicity is arresting and important because the subjective world and the world of consensual reality can have noncausal, but archetypally meaningful connections between them. Let me clarify this with an example.

Consider the case where two people, call them Ann and Bob, have powerful dreams that both incarnate the same archetypal meaning, but have no causal connection. Now it is true that neither Ann’s nor Bob’s dream is in the material or physical world in any normal sense of the word. However, once a dream is reported in conversation or writing this most subjective of experiences becomes part of the realm of consensual reality, something that can be commented upon by third parties. (Of course, the experience of the dream will always remain subjective, even though the report is objective.) Regarding the reported dream, others could say, “Oh, Ann told me about that amazing dream” or “That is not how Bob reported the dream to me.” Thus, the critical point is that one subjective state (say Ann’s dream) meaningfully, but noncausally, correlates with an event in consensual reality (Bob’s reported dream). Not emphasising the connection between the mental and material realms, but instead realising that the essential thing is meaningful connections between the subjective realm and consensual reality makes Jung’s extension of synchronicity to two correlating mental states easily understood.

Let me apply this clarification to show that an example used by the Jungian analyst, Robert Aziz, and employed by Roderick Main is not in fact a case of synchronicity. Just after Jung’s mother died, he reported the following experience in his autobiography,

I went home immediately, and while I rode the night train I had a feeling of great grief, but in my heart of hearts I could not be mournful, and this for a strange reason: during the entire journey I continually heard dance music, laughter, and jollity, as though a wedding were being celebrated. This contrasted violently with the devastating impression the dream had made on me. Here was gay dance music, cheerful laughter, and it was impossible to yield entirely to my sorrow. Again and again it was on the point of overwhelming me, but the next moment I would find myself once more engulfed by the merry melodies. One side of me had a feeling of warmth and joy, and the other of terror and grief; I was thrown back and forth between these contrasting emotions.7

Here is a case of meaningful connections (of unconscious compensation) between two psychological states. However, Jung does not call this a synchronicity experience as Aziz and Main do. More important, it fails to be a synchronicity because it has no connection to either the physical realm or consensual reality. For example, reading Jung’s description we would not expect a microphone near Jung’s ears would record any music. There was no event in the material realm or in consensual reality that correlates with Jung’s grief. Of course, both his grief and the wedding music are in consensual reality in that he wrote about them. Nevertheless, without an objective component, whether in the material realm or consensual reality, correlating with a subjective state this experience cannot be synchronistic—despite how moving and important it was for Jung. However, the quotation above mentions a “devastating” dream that Jung had the night before his mother died. Although not mentioned by Aziz or Main, Jung realised the dream clearly portended a death and could well have been an example of synchronicity.

Jung was a great pioneer who opened up entire areas, such as synchronicity, for exploration. However, like most pioneers, his maps and descriptions of the new terrain were incomplete sketches. In the case of synchronicity, the roughness of his sketches has made further exploration, whether conceptual or experimental, more difficult than need be. Despite all my appreciation of The Rupture of Time, I regret that Main did not do more to clarify these sketches and maps of synchronicity and thereby both simplify and restrict the vast terrain of this important class of phenomena. Nevertheless, Main’s book is an important guide to the breathtaking vistas opened up by synchronicity.

References
1 Gerhard Adler and Aniella Jaffé, eds. C.G. Jung Letters, vol. 1, trans. R.F.C. Hull (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1975) p. 395.
2 C. E. Meier, ed. Atom and Archetype: The Pauli/Jung Letters 1932-1958 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001, p. 57.
3 Ibid. volumes 1 and 2.
4 Victor Mansfield, Sally Rhine-Feather, and James Hall, “The Rhine-Jung Letters: Distinguishing Parapsychological from Synchronistic Events” The Journal of Parapsychology, Vol. 62, 1998, pp. 2-25.
5 Victor Mansfield, Synchronicity, Science, and Soul-Making (Chicago, IL: Open Court Publishing, 1995), chapter 3 and Head and Heart: A Personal Exploration of Science and the Sacred (Wheaton, IL: Quest Books, 2002), chapters 7 and 8.
6 C. E. Meier, ed. Atom and Archetype, p. 36.
7 C.G. Jung, Memories, Dreams, and Reflections, ed. Aniella Jeffé (New York: Vintage Books, 1963) p. 314.

Professor Vic Mansfield is a professor in the Physics and Astronomy Department at Colgate University and author of 'Synchronicity, Science and Soul-Making’.