Synchronicity is the experience of two or more events as meaningfully related, where
they are unlikely to be causally related. The subject sees it as a meaningful coincidence.
The concept of synchronicity was first described by Carl Jung, a Swiss psychologist, in the
1920s. The concept does not question, or compete
with, the notion of causality. It maintains that just as events may be connected by a
causal line, they may also be connected by meaning. A grouping of events by meaning need
not have an explanation in terms of a concrete sense of cause and effect.
In addition to Jung, Arthur Koestler wrote extensively on synchronicity in The Roots
of Coincidence.
Description In his essay, Synchronicity: An Acausal Connecting
Principle, Jung writes:
...it is impossible, with our present resources, to explain ESP, 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.
Jung coined the word to describe what he called "temporally coincident occurrences of acausal
events." Jung variously described synchronicity as an "acausal connecting principle", "meaningful
coincidence" and "acausal parallelism". Jung introduced the concept as early as the 1920s,
but gave a full statement of it only in 1951 in an Eranos lecture and in 1952, published
a paper, Synchronizität als ein Prinzip akausaler Zusammenhänge, in a volume with a related
study by the physicist Wolfgang Pauli. It was a principle that Jung felt gave conclusive
evidence for his concepts of archetypes and the collective unconscious, in that it was
descriptive of a governing dynamic that underlies the whole of human experience and history
– social, emotional, psychological, and spiritual. Concurrent events that first appear
to be coincidental but later turn out to be causally related are termed incoincident.
Jung believed that many experiences that are coincidences due to chance in terms of causality
suggested the manifestation of parallel events or circumstances in terms of meaning, reflecting
this governing dynamic. Even at Jung's presentation of his work on
synchronicity in 1951 at an Eranos lecture, his ideas on synchronicity were evolving.
Following discussions with both Albert Einstein and Wolfgang Pauli, Jung believed that there
were parallels between synchronicity and aspects of relativity theory and quantum mechanics.
Jung was transfixed by the idea that life was not a series of random events but rather
an expression of a deeper order, which he and Pauli referred to as Unus mundus. This
deeper order led to the insights that a person was both embedded in an orderly framework
and was the focus of that orderly framework and that the realisation of this was more
than just an intellectual exercise, but also had elements of a spiritual awakening. From
the religious perspective, synchronicity shares similar characteristics of an "intervention
of grace". Jung also believed that in a person's life, synchronicity served a role similar
to that of dreams, with the purpose of shifting a person's egocentric conscious thinking to
greater wholeness.
A close associate of Jung, Marie-Louise von Franz, stated towards the end of her life
that the concept of synchronicity must now be worked on by a new generation of researchers.
For example, in the years since the publication of Jung’s work on synchronicity, some writers
largely sympathetic to Jung's approach have taken issue with certain aspects of his theory,
including the question of how frequently synchronicity occurs.
One of Jung's favourite quotes on synchronicity was from Through the Looking-Glass by Lewis
Carroll, in which the White Queen says to Alice: "It's a poor sort of memory that only
works backwards."
'The rule is, jam to-morrow and jam yesterday — but never jam to-day.'
'It MUST come sometimes to "jam to-day,"' Alice objected.
'No, it can't,' said the Queen. 'It's jam every OTHER day: to-day isn't any OTHER day,
you know.' 'I don't understand you,' said Alice. 'It's
dreadfully confusing!' 'That's the effect of living backwards,' the
Queen said kindly: 'it always makes one a little giddy at first —'
'Living backwards!' Alice repeated in great astonishment. 'I never heard of such a thing!'
'— but there's one great advantage in it, that one's memory works both ways.'
'I'm sure MINE only works one way,' Alice remarked. 'I can't remember things before
they happen.' 'It's a poor sort of memory that only works
backwards,' the Queen remarked.
Examples
In his book Synchronicity, Jung tells the following story as an example of a synchronistic
event:
My example concerns a young woman patient who, in spite of efforts made on both sides,
proved to be psychologically inaccessible. The difficulty lay in the fact that she always
knew better about everything. Her excellent education had provided her with a weapon ideally
suited to this purpose, namely a highly polished Cartesian rationalism with an impeccably “geometrical”
idea of reality. After several fruitless attempts to sweeten her rationalism with a somewhat
more human understanding, I had to confine myself to the hope that something unexpected
and irrational would turn up, something that would burst the intellectual retort into which
she had sealed herself. Well, I was sitting opposite her one day, with my back to the
window, listening to her flow of rhetoric. She had had an impressive dream the night
before, in which someone had given her a golden scarab — a costly piece of jewellery. While
she was still telling me this dream, I heard something behind me gently tapping on the
window. I turned round and saw that it was a fairly large flying insect that was knocking
against the window-pane from outside in the obvious effort to get into the dark room.
This seemed to me very strange. I opened the window immediately and caught the insect in
the air as it flew in. It was a scarabaeid beetle, or common rose-chafer, whose gold-green
colour most nearly resembles that of a golden scarab. I handed the beetle to my patient
with the words, "Here is your scarab." This experience punctured the desired hole in her
rationalism and broke the ice of her intellectual resistance. The treatment could now be continued
with satisfactory results.
The French writer Émile Deschamps claims in his memoirs that, in 1805, he was treated
to some plum pudding by a stranger named Monsieur de Fontgibu. Ten years later, the writer encountered
plum pudding on the menu of a Paris restaurant and wanted to order some, but the waiter told
him that the last dish had already been served to another customer, who turned out to be
de Fontgibu. Many years later, in 1832, Deschamps was at a dinner and once again ordered plum
pudding. He recalled the earlier incident and told his friends that only de Fontgibu
was missing to make the setting complete – and in the same instant, the now senile de Fontgibu
entered the room. Jung wrote, after describing some examples,
"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."
In his book Thirty Years That Shook Physics – The Story of Quantum Theory, 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, and probably never will, be understood on a purely materialistic
basis. 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!
Criticisms Among some psychologists, Jung's works, such
as The Interpretation of Nature and the Psyche, were received as problematic. Fritz Levi,
in his 1952 review in Neue Schweizer Rundschau, critiqued Jung's theory of synchronicity 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.
In psychology and cognitive science, confirmation bias is a tendency to search for or interpret
new information in a way that confirms one's preconceptions, and avoids information and
interpretations that contradict prior beliefs. It is a type of cognitive bias and represents
an error of inductive inference, or is a form of selection bias toward confirmation of the
hypothesis under study, or disconfirmation of an alternative hypothesis. Confirmation
bias is of interest in the teaching of critical thinking, as the skill is misused if rigorous
critical scrutiny is applied only to evidence that challenges a preconceived idea, but not
to evidence that supports it. Likewise, in psychology and sociology, the
term apophenia is used for the apparent detection of a pattern or meaning, in what is actually
random or meaningless data. Skeptics, such as Robert Todd Carroll of the Skeptic's Dictionary,
argue that the perception of synchronicity is better explained as apophenia. Primates
use pattern detection in their form of intelligence, and this can lead to erroneous identification
of non-existent patterns. A famous example of this is the fact that human face recognition
is so robust, and based on such a basic archetype, that human beings are very prone to identify
faces in random data all through their environment, like the "man in the moon", or faces in wood
grain, an example of the visual form of apophenia known as pareidolia.
It has been asserted that Jung's analytical psychological theory of synchronicity is equal
to intellectual intuition. See also
Apophenia Confirmation bias
Emergence Selection bias
Look-elsewhere effect Leibniz’s monadology as an assault on rationality
Multiple discovery Pareidolia
Pratītyasamutpāda Post hoc ergo propter hoc
Superluminal communication Paul Kammerer, seriality theory
Propinquity References
Further reading Aziz, Robert. C.G. Jung's Psychology of Religion
and Synchronicity. The State University of New York Press. ISBN 0-7914-0166-9.
Aziz, Robert. "Synchronicity and the Transformation of the Ethical in Jungian Psychology". In
Becker, Carl. Asian and Jungian Views of Ethics. Greenwood. ISBN 0-313-30452-1.
Aziz, Robert. The Syndetic Paradigm: The Untrodden Path Beyond Freud and Jung. The State University
of New York Press. ISBN 978-0-7914-6982-8. Aziz, Robert. "Foreword". In Storm, Lance.
Synchronicity: Multiple Perspectives on Meaningful Coincidence. Pari Publishing. ISBN 978-88-95604-02-2.
Carey, Harriet. "Monsieur de Fontgibu and the Plum Pudding". Echoes from the Harp of
France. p. 174. Cederquist, Jan. Meaningful Coincidence. Times
Publishing Limited. ISBN 978-0-462-09970-5. Combs, Allan; Holland, Mark. Synchronicity:
Through the Eyes of Science, Myth, and the Trickster. New York: Marlowe. ISBN 1-56924-599-1.
Franz, Marie-Louise von. On Divination and Synchronicity: The Psychology of Meaningful
Chance. Inner City Books. ISBN 0-919123-02-3. Grasse, Ray. The Waking Dream: Unlocking the
Symbolic Language of Our Lives. Quest Books. ISBN 0-8356-0749-6.
Jaworski, Joseph. Synchronicity: the inner path of leadership. Berrett-Koehler Publishers
Inc. ISBN 1-881052-94-X. Jung, Carl. Synchronicity – An Acausal
Connecting Principle. Routledge and Kegan Paul. ISBN 0-7100-7397-6.
Jung, Carl. Jung on Synchronicity and the Paranormal: Key Readings. Routledge. ISBN 0-415-15508-8.
Jung, Carl. The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious. Princeton University Press. ISBN 0-691-01833-2.
Gieser, Suzanne. The Innermost Kernel. Depth Psychology and Quantum Physics. Wolfgang Pauli's
Dialogue with C.G. Jung. Springer Verlag. Haule, John Ryan. Jung in the 21st Century:
Synchronicity and science. Routledge. ISBN 0-203-83360-0. Koestler, Arthur. The Roots of Coincidence.
Vintage. ISBN 0-394-71934-4. Main, Roderick. Revelations of Chance: Synchronicity
as Spiritual Experience. The State University of New York Press. ISBN 0-7914-7024-5.
Mardorf, Elisabeth. Das kann doch kein Zufall sei.
Mansfield, Victor. Science, Synchronicity and Soul-Making. Open Court Publishing Company.
ISBN 0-8126-9304-3. Peat, F. David. Synchronicity, The Bridge
Between Matter and Mind. Bantam. ISBN 0-553-34676-8. Progoff, Ira. Jung, synchronicity, & human
destiny: Noncausal dimensions of human experience. New York, Julian Press. ISBN 0-87097-056-9.
OCLC 763819. Wilhelm, Richard. Lectures on the I Ching:
Constancy and Change Bollingen edition. Princeton University Press; Reprint. ISBN 0-691-01872-3.
Roth, Remo, F., Return of the World Soul, Wolfgang Pauli, C.G. Jung and the Challenge
of Psychophysical Reality [unus mundus]. Pari Publishing, 2011
Igor V. Limar. Carl G. Jung’s Synchronicity and Quantum Entanglement: Schrödinger’s
Cat ‘Wanders’ Between Chromosomes. NeuroQuantology Journal, 09. pp. 313–321.
External links Tarlacı, Sultan Jung's Error: Synchronicity
A New Theory. New/Yeni Symposium Journal, 44. pp. 151–156.
Carl Jung and Synchronicity The Synchroncity of the Two Octopuses, Rhine
Research Center Summer 2011 Newsletter