Synchronicity

By George B. Hogenson, Ph.D.
Chicago Society of Jungian Analysts

In a review of The Interpretation of Nature and the Psyche, the collaborative project of Jung and Pauli, the German/American psychiatrist, Walter O. Jahrreiss, gives a succinct summary of the central issue involved in the concept of synchronicity. He writes:

In this volume, the founder of Analytical Psychology, C. G. Jung, and Wolfgang Pauli, physicist and Nobel prize winner, are again working together towards the same goal, the possible integration of a scientifically mathematical way of thinking with another one to which not the quantitative relations of parts are essential but the indivisibility of the whole. In a more recent address, Pauli called such a synthesis of rational comprehension with the mystical experiencing of unity and wholeness “the explicitly formulated or tacitly implied Mythos of our time.” (Jahrreiss, 1957, pp. 437-438)

The talk Jahrreiss references is most likely Pauli’s “Die Wissenschaft und das abendländische Denken” (“Science and Western Thought”), an October 1955 address, published in English in Writings on Physics and Philosophy (Pauli, 2010). Here, Jahrreiss suggests that a starting point for coming to terms with synchronicity is the juxtaposition of Jung’s essay with Pauli’s. In other words, one really must work with both essays in dialogue with one another, rather than as discrete offerings. Jung’s essay is well known in Jungian circles, but less attention is paid to Pauli’s. In approaching Pauli, it is important to understand why he would choose to examine in such detail a dispute that took place over 300 years prior to Jung’s discussion of synchronicity.

In 1984, at a conference held at the ETH in Zurich, the historian of science, Robert Westman, presented the first detailed analysis of Pauli’s essay, and the underlying historical circumstances surrounding the debate between Kepler and Fludd. Westman begins by acknowledging that within the history of science, the reasons for Pauli’s collaboration with Jung are something of a mystery. “Until now,” he writes:

no one has asked publicly why Pauli wrote such an essay, why he encoded his analysis in Jungian terms, and what his relationship to Jung might have been. Nor, surprisingly, has anyone questioned the historical account for evidential accuracy or the terms of the analysis itself. (Westman, 1984, p. 177)

In his analysis of Pauli’s essay, Westman concludes that,

to make sense of the historical controversy, let alone Pauli’s exegesis of it, we must attend closely to the rhetorical categories of the actors and their relationship to epistemology. It will emerge, quite surprisingly (as it did for me), that there is a profound unity in the questions with which Kepler and Fludd were concerned and that the center of a cluster of apparently diverse issues lay in the problem of establishing the connections between pictures, words, and things (Westman, 1984, pp. 177-178).

Kepler (1571-1630), of course, is best known today as the German polymath who first defined the laws of planetary motion, and as such he is regarded as one of the founding figures in modern science. But, not unlike his great successor, Newton, of whom John Maynard Keynes famously remarked, while “not the first of the age of reason. He was the last of the magicians” (Keynes, 2010). Kepler was an adherent to the Hermetic maxim of “as above, so below,” that is the unity of creation and its intelligibility. In this regard, Kepler and Fludd, the alchemist, were of one mind, as Westman makes clear. Kepler’s deviation from Fludd, then was not metaphysical, but as Westman points out, epistemological. For Kepler, mathematical analysis was the key to understanding the natural world, and not simply by way of calculation, but also through understanding the archetypal, in the form of the geometry of the so-called Platonic solids. What this meant was that the Hermetic maxim had to be examined through the lens of mathematics. Fludd (1574-1637), on the other hand, insisted on the role of images as the means of understanding the world. Westman alerts us early in his paper to how he understands Fludd’s point of view. While many commentaries on Fludd’s engravings treat them as symbolic representations, Westman argues that we must “look at the engravings not as illustrations but rather as ways of knowing, demonstration, and remembering” (Westman, 1984, p. 181 emphasis in original).

Jung’s engagement with the image as a central element in his understanding of the psyche is clear throughout his work. I have argued elsewhere that Jung’s focus on the image was critical in his conflict with Freud (Hogenson, 1994) and in the Red Book, he writes “The wealth of the soul exists in images,” (Jung, 2009, p. 232). Regarding synchronicity, the image plays a critical role, but I am not sure this aspect of Jung’s discussion has received the attention it deserves. In line with Westman’s argument that Fludd’s engravings—that is his images—were epistemic in nature, ways of knowing, so for Jung the unconscious image already “knows” the state of affairs that will result in the synchronistic experience: In the case of the scarab beetle, the “dream is a conscious representation arising from an unconscious, already existing image of the situation that will occur on the following day, i.e., the recounting of the dream and the appearance of the rose-chafer” (Jung, 1960, p. §857).

It is impossible in the short compass of this paper to unpack all that this, and similar passages in Jung’s essay imply about synchronicity. But Jung is at pains as the essay continues to reject the notion that the unconscious image is the cause of the synchronicity. “It is difficult to divest conceptual language of its causalistic colouring” he writes. He continues:

Thus the word “underlying,” despite its causalistic connotation does not refer to anything causal, but simply to an existing quality, an irreducible contingency which is “Just-So.” The meaningful coincidence or equivalence of a psychic and a physical state that have no causal relationship to one another means, in general terms, that it is a modality without a cause, an “acausal orderedness.”

Jung goes on in the same paragraph to present one of the most repeated characterizations of synchronicity:

If an external synchronistic process now associates itself with it, it falls into the same basic pattern—in other words, it too is “ordered.” This form of orderedness differs from that of the properties of natural numbers or the discontinuities of physics in that the latter have existed from eternity and occur regularly, whereas the forms of psychic orderedness are acts of creation in time. That, incidentally, is precisely why I have stressed the element of time as being characteristic of these phenomena and called them synchronistic. (Jung, 1960, p. §965)

Jung’s expression, “acts of creation in time,” carries, in the German, a far more theological sense, as in the creation in Genesis, than conveyed by the English translation. Marie-Louise von Franz captures this sense in her discussion of synchronicity in her book C. G. Jung: His Myth in Our Time when she writes that Jung’s expression:

means nothing less than that creation is still continuing today, in the sense of “continuing creation” or creatio continua. These acts of creation take place on the one hand within the pattern of an orderedness existing from all eternity, and on the other hand of a sporadically repeated orderedness. The recognition of such an orderedness affects us as meaning, which is why synchronistic phenomena in earlier times were always taken to be manifestations of divinity, or in China as a sign of the Tao, of universal meaning. (Franz, 1975, pp. 240-241)

Jung touched on this aspect of his project in the section of the essay titled “Forerunners of the Idea of Synchronicity.” In this section, Jung works his way through both his interest in the Chinese tradition, particularly the importance of the I Ching and the work of Richard Wilhelm for his understanding of synchronicity, also the Western tradition of theological argument, and, more to the point of this discussion, the esoteric tradition beginning with Zosimos of Panopolis, to whom Jung would direct more attention in 1954, and moving on through Paracelsus, Agrippa von Nettesheim and on to Leibniz.

So where does this leave us in a discussion of synchronicity? Jung names this lineage, but he does not linger with it: Lao-tzu, Zosimos, Agrippa, and Leibniz function in his essay as forerunners, precedents lending synchronicity historical respectability, rather than as thinkers whose own epistemological and ontological commitments might be examined on their own terms. Yet it is precisely those commitments that determine whether Kepler’s mathematics and Fludd’s images, or Jung’s own insistence that the image already knows, are analogies borrowed for illustration or a mode of thought synchronicity continues to inhabit. As Roderick Main observes in a 2018 survey of the field, “deeper study of the esoteric influences on Jung could be especially valuable in light of the recent burgeoning of high-quality scholarship on Western esotericism” (Main, 2018, p. 142)—a task that, as von Franz’s own gloss on creatio continua suggests, has barely begun. That, I want to suggest, is the work synchronicity still asks of us.

References

Franz, M.-L. V. (1975). C.G. Jung, His Myth in Our Time. C.G. Jung Foundation for Analytical Psychology.
Hogenson, G. B. (1994). Jung’s Struggle with Freud. Chiron Press.
Jahrreiss, W. O. (1957). The Interpretation of Nature and the Psyche. I, Synchronicity: An Acausal Connecting Principle. The Quarterly Review of Biology, 32(4), 437– 439.
Jung, C. G. (1960). Synchronicity: An acausal connecting principle. In CW Vol. 8, The Structure and Dynamics of the Psyche (pp. 419-531). Princeton University Press.
Jung, C. G. (2009). The Red Book—Liber Novus (M. Kyburz, J. Peck, & S. Shamdasani, Trans.). W. W. Norton.
Keynes, J. M. (2010). Newton, the man. In Essays in biography (pp. 363-374). Springer.
Main, R. (2018). Research on synchronicity: Status and prospects. In J. Cambray & L. Sawin (Eds.), Research in Analytical Psychology (pp. 135-156). Routledge.
Pauli, W. (2010). Writings on Physics and Philosophy. Springer.
Westman, R. S. (1984). Nature, art, and psyche: Jung, Pauli, and the Kepler-Fludd polemic. In B. Vickers (Ed.), Occult and scientific mentalities in the Renaissance (pp. 177-229). Cambridge University Press.