The centrality of ESP-type experiences for Jung’s understanding of the psyche can easily be underestimated — either by dismissing it as some sort of naïve belief in spirits, as Harvard dream-expert J. Allan Hobson puts it (Hobson, 2002; 2005) or by viewing the theory of synchronicity as some late development that arose only in the 1950’s along with the book on UFO’s,[1] perhaps nothing but the self-indulgence of an old man. It therefore seems important to demonstrate that a deep concern with “border zone” phenomena was constant throughout Jung’s professional life.
In 1900, when he began his psychiatric career, parapsychological claims were deemed to be either naïvely exalted fantasies, a sort of superstitious religion, or else were seen as pathological symptoms of interest only to the psychiatrist. Jung wanted to understand them in another sense — as a legitimate phenomenon for psychology, a natural but poorly developed talent of the human psyche. He found incidents of ESP to be more common than is generally believed or admitted, although undeniably irregular and unpredictable. He wanted to know how it is that such phenomena sometimes turn out to be extraordinarily useful and how reality must be structured if such things do sometimes occur.
He bravely made incursions into the border zones of exact science, despite the danger to his reputation, believing that the only way to obtain an adequate picture of the human psyche was to exclude none of its capabilities. In that sense Jung’s persistence represents what is the best in science. Indeed, as we shall see in this chapter and those that follow, Jung has been as much an unrecognized trail blazer in parapsychological studies as he has in evolutionary and biologically sensitive theories of the psyche.
Starting with his roots in the “French School” of dissociation psychology and hypnotic trance, he studied spiritualism with an eye as critical as those of London’s Society for Psychical Research and agreed with the SPR that some mediums were anything but fraudulent. He followed the laboratory work of J. B. Rhine at Duke University, and was delighted to find that ESP adheres to some basic laws that seemed related to his own archetypal studies. In the end, he found not science but mainstream Western metaphysics to be the obstacle to our accepting and developing our inborn capabilities. In collaboration with Wolfgang Pauli, therefore, he proposed a remedy, namely the idea that our public view of reality excludes a necessary principle of nature — the one he calls synchronicity.
Jung and the Irrational
The prototype synchronistic event, the one most often cited, has to do with the analysis of a woman Jung describes as defensively attached to a Cartesian, ego-centered philosophy. In that sense she stands for us all. For the Cartesian subject-object and mind-body dichotomies as well as its mechanistic picture of the world has been the most obstinate problem for biology and psychology. Recently, with the development of quantum mechanics, it has also become a problem for physics.
Jung says his patient was “steeped in Cartesian philosophy” and that her allegiance to it kept her neurotically stuck and unable to get on with her life. Too much of real life was denied and ignored, leaving her brittle and unsatisfied. Jung believed her situation would transform itself if only she could be affected by “something quite irrational” that would “burst through the armor” that was holding her back. He was becoming discouraged, however, when a numinous archetypal reality appeared. The patient was recounting her dream of the previous night in which she had been given a golden Egyptian scarab. Just then a rose chafer began tapping at the window behind Jung’s head. He opened it, grabbed the green-gold beetle — Northern Europe’s closest analogue to the Egyptian scarab — and handed it to the patient, saying, “Here’s your scarab.” The monumental improbability, yet striking aptness of the event opened the woman to the larger perspective she needed (CW 8, ¶843-845).
When a synchronistic event happens, it violates our rational expectations. Jung uses the world irrational to mean not that which is counter to reason, but that which lies outside the rational sphere — not counter-to but alongside-of. What were the odds that the Egyptian symbol of death and transformation would appear just at the critical moment in this woman’s life, when the death of her old attitude had become essential? Apparently the scarab dream alone would not have been enough to break through her Cartesian armor. The synchronistic appearance of the rose chafer, however, seems to have done the trick. The event was irrational in the sense that there were no grounds at all on which it could be predicted or explained.
Jung uses the term irrational also to describe the psychic functions of sensation and intuition. No one doubts that thinking is rational, and Jung counts feeling, too, as a rational means of access to the world. Thinking discovers conceptual order in the world, while feeling orders the world hierarchically, finding that some things feel more pleasant or more threatening than others. With sensation and intuition, on the other hand, there is no rational reason or order to what appears. I look out the window and see a red car turning the corner. Its driver knows where she is going and why. But from my point of view, there is no rational reason there should be a red car going by when I look out the window. The case is similar with intuition — ideas and images simply appear and we do not know how or when they will do it.
Synchronicity is “irrational” in just this sense. These things happen and we don’t know how. But they are strikingly meaningful.
Jung: From Spiritualism to Synchronicity
The early years. Jung’s interest in somnambulistic phenomena evidently began in childhood, with a mother whom he describes as a sort of dual personality: a conventional peasant harboring an uncanny witch whose sudden and unexpected pronouncements were alarmingly accurate. By night he would see ghostly figures floating out of her bedroom (MDR: 18). Moving a generation back, her own mother had the talents of a gifted spontaneous somnambulist (Charet, 1993: 69). In Jung’s generation, his cousin Helly’s talent for mediumship was discovered in 1895, when the twenty year-old Jung instituted familial experiments in “table-turning” that provided the material for his doctoral dissertation at Basel University (Zumstein-Preiswerk, 1975: 35f).
His interest in spiritualism continued in Zurich where he served his residency in psychiatry at the Burghölzli mental hospital. The Basler Nachrichten newspaper carried the text of a lecture he gave in Basel in 1905, where he reports having studied eight different mediums in Zurich. He reviews the history of spiritualism, beginning with the Fox sisters of Hydesville, NY, and discusses a large number of related phenomena, including levitation, clairvoyance and prophecy (CW18: ¶697-740). The tone of his talk is given in the introduction:
The dual nature of spiritualism gives it an advantage over other religious movements: not only does it believe in certain articles of faith that are not susceptible of proof, but it bases its belief on a body of allegedly scientific, physical phenomena which are supposed to be of such a nature that they cannot be explained except by the activity of spirits. Because of its dual nature — on the one side a religious sect, on the other a scientific hypothesis — spiritualism touches upon widely differing areas of life that would seem to have nothing in common (Ibid., ¶697).
He ends his talk with a declaration of faith: “If we wait quietly until the most impressive physical phenomena put in an appearance . . . the exact sciences will surely conquer this field by experiment and verification” (Ibid., ¶740).
Further evidence of Jung’s enduring pursuit of “impressive phenomena,” appears from time to time in the historical record. His mentor in the study of mediums, Theodore Flournoy of Geneva, wrote to William James, March 15, 1910, that he had just observed a psychic named Carancini in the company of Jung and others, and all were agreed that the self-styled medium was “an out-and-out humbug” (LeClair 1966: 228). Fifteen years later, Jung’s signature as an expert witness, along with that of his former chief at the Burghölzli, Eugen Bleuler, declared that the famous Austrian psychic, Rudi Schneider, was not a fraud (Gregory 1985: 73).
In 1919 Jung made a presentation to the Society for Psychical Research in London in which he described the phenomenon of soul-loss as the loss of psychic energy from the ego due to a complex reaction and contrasted that with the experience of spirit-visitation which he ascribed to the irruption into consciousness of an archetype from the collective unconscious. He concluded that such events may be accompanied by “exteriorizations,” the same term he had used in Freud’s study to describe the poltergeists in the bookcase. He went on to say, “But in all this I see no proof whatever of the existence of real spirits, and until such proof is forthcoming I must regard this whole territory as an appendix of psychology” (CW8: ¶600). In a footnote to this statement added in 1948, however, he doubts “whether an exclusively psychological approach can do justice to the phenomena in question.” He cites his study of “nuclear physics and the conception of the space-time continuum [which] opens up the whole question of the transpsychic reality immediately underlying the psyche.”
The reference to relativity (space-time continuum) and quantum mechanics (nuclear physics) in this statement shows that his work formulating the notion of synchronicity was already well underway, though it would not be published for another four years. His exchange of letters with Wolfgang Pauli — the nuclear physicist who helped develop the theory with his criticism and suggestions — had been underway since 1932, according to the Pauli/Jung Letters (PJL).
The 1930’s and after. From the 1930’s onward come most of the stories about Jung’s own medium-like behavior during analytic sessions. Some of these accounts are recorded in the documentary film, Matter of Heart (Whitney & Whitney 1983) in which Jung’s still-living students and analysands were interviewed for their recollections of the famous man. Others can be found in published collections of reminiscences. All of the stories mentioned here have been contributed by distinguished and well-published Jungian analysts.[2]
Marvin Spiegelman’s experience seems to have be relatively common. He gained an interview with Jung and found himself with nothing to say. Then Jung began “to speak from out of himself somewhere. He spoke of his own life.” Strangely, Spiegelman found that Jung’s monologue was addressing all of his own “problems, fears, concerns and deep desires” (Spiegelman, 1982: 87-9). Hilde Kirsch had a meeting with Jung when he was 85 and, trying to spare his energies in view of his precarious health, told him only the first half of her long dream. In response, Jung “just started to talk . . . and told me the second part of my dream which I had not told him.” Liliane Frey-Rohn has a similar story (Whitney & Whitney 1983).
Rix Weaver (Weaver 1982: 91-5) and Jane Wheelwright (Wheelwright 1982: 97-105) tell stories of finding the familiar world dissolve around them when in Jung’s presence. The distinction between self and table was lost, everything became “whizzing molecules” out of which emerged “before my eyes and ears and senses a model of the changed person I was meant finally to become.”
The situation was apparently no less mysterious for Jung than it was for his patients. Jung’s English friend, the physician Eddy Bennet records an interview with Jung in which he describes how he conducted his analytic sessions. Usually he would just wait for the patient to speak, but sometimes he would begin talking without knowing why. The other day he had found himself speaking “about Africa and snakes . . . then it turned out to be absolutely relevant for he discovered that she [the patient] was deeply interested in these things. So we wait and the instincts guide us” (Bennet 1985: 25).
In addressing the students at the C. G. Jung Institute in Zurich in the 1950’s Jung described his method of doing analysis: namely to set the conditions and then wait for what he called the two-million-year-old wise man, the personification of the collective unconscious, to appear.
Analysis is a long discussion with the Great Man — an unintelligent attempt to understand him. Nevertheless, it is an attempt, as both patient and analyst understand it. . . . Work until the patient can see this. It, the Great Man, can at one stroke put an entirely different face on the thing — or anything can happen. In that way you learn about the peculiar intelligence of the background; you learn the nature of the Great Man. You learn about yourself against the Great Man — against his postulates. This is the way through things, things that look desperate and unanswerable. The point is, how are you yourself going to answer this? . . . The unconscious gives you that peculiar twist that makes the way possible (Baynes 1977: 360-1).
It seems that Jung used the emotional atmosphere of his analytic sessions as an opportunity to practice what might be called “active imagination in tandem.” When analyst and analysand enter that meditative space that Husserl called the transcendental ego, images and memories relevant to their joint emotional reality are apt to appear to either or both participants. When they give voice to them, the process intensifies. The collective unconscious constellated in the space between has the wisdom of two million years of human experience, from Homo erectus on down to the present.
In the material just mentioned, Jung’s mediumistic behavior has to do with mind speaking to mind — what the parapsychologists would call telepathy, if they agree that something para-normal has occurred. There were also incidents in which non-human events spoke to mind. A subjective (mental) event could be meaningfully connected with an objective event occurring in the world outside, as was the case when the rose chafer tapped on the window. Whenever these sorts of things happened during an analytic session, Jung interpreted the objective event as a contribution to his dialogue with the patient. His long-time disciple and biographer, Barbara Hannah, gives us a vivid picture of being in analysis with Jung in the garden room of his house on the Lake of Zurich, where he was attentive to every natural event that might add synchronistic commentary: “insects flying in, the lake lapping more audibly than usual” (Hannah, 1976: 202, n. k). He had come to the view that the psyche is not so much a factor locked inside our bodies but “more like an atmosphere in which we live” (Letters, i: 433).
Synchronicity
By the mid 1940’s, particularly after his heart attack and near-death experiences, Jung must have realized that his patient, quiet wait for the day when the exact sciences would “conquer the field” of parapsychology was a dream that would not be satisfied in his lifetime. He had to come up with his own provisional theory and was encouraged by his dialogue with Wolfgang Pauli, who bore tidings from quantum mechanics: that matter is an evanescent condition of energy and that the observer always affects what is observed. Both men became convinced that psychology and “microphysics,” as they called the study of subatomic phenomena, were somehow mutually implicated.
The principle of acausality. The essential element in Jung’s definition of synchronicity is that two or more events may have a meaningful connection without being causally related to one another. According to classical science and common sense, a cause can be identified only when the producer and the receiver of an influence find themselves in the same place at the same time. On a billiard table, for instance, a rolling cue ball strikes a stationary ball and sends it rolling in a particular direction with a particular speed. No cause at all can be discovered in synchronicity, and Jung takes this as definitive, and that is what is difficult to grasp about synchronicity.[3]
Whenever something happens, we look for a cause: “we cannot imagine events that are connected acausally” (CW8: ¶820). This is why we come up with fanciful explanations for telepathy. We speak of sending and receiving “vibes,” for instance, and leave the nature of those vibes undetermined. Someday, we think, someone will discover what they are. In fact, no one has discovered vibes of any sort to explain telepathy. Indeed, if there were some vibratory wave-like transmission, the signal would have to diminish with distance; but distance is not a factor in telepathy or clairvoyance. Jung saw no way out of this unthinkable dilemma and had to admit that there is nothing resembling a cause lying behind synchronicity, even though its occurrence is “not unusual at all, but relatively common” (Ibid., ¶441).
In synchronicity, one of the two linked events can be explained causally while the other cannot (Ibid., ¶855). In the case of telepathy, related images or feelings occur in the minds of two separate people. One of them knows why she is excited, anxious or sad or that she is gazing on a glorious scene; the other does not know why, but may very well intuit that the feelings and images belong to his friend. In clairvoyance, the causally explicable scene is the fire in Stockholm, while the scene that cannot be explained causally is the terrible vision of that fire in the mind of Swedenborg, 300 miles away (Ibid., ¶912).
Some lawful elements. In spelling out the essential characteristics of synchronicity, Jung gives predominance to the work of J. B. Rhine (1895-1980) in the Parapsychology Laboratory at Duke University where, “Decisive evidence for the existence of acausal combinations of events, has been furnished with adequate scientific safeguards” (Ibid., ¶833). Rhine experimented with telepathy using decks of “Zener cards,”[4] each with one of five images on them. One subject gazed on a card, while the other, isolated in another room, attempted to imagine or guess which image it bore. In psychokinesis experiments, subjects tried to influence the roll of dice with their minds. Small but statistically significant results were obtained with both types of experiment. Pauli pointed out the obvious fact that Rhine’s data were far less interesting than Jung’s spontaneous psychic phenomena, and more importantly lacked evidence of archetypal involvement (PJL: 36). He was evidently thinking of such examples as Swedenborg’s vision, the rose chafer or Jung’s waking in a hotel room at two in the morning thinking of the suffering of a depressed patient when he felt a pain shoot through his skull as though he had been shot. A telegram in the morning confirmed his surmise that the man had killed himself with a pistol (MDR, 137f).
Humdrum though they were in comparison, however, Rhine’s results gave Jung some essential, scientifically verified information with which to work. First was the fact that double blind laboratory experiments had proved what Jung himself had not the means to prove, that subjects could regularly score significantly better than chance at ESP tasks (CW8: ¶833). Second, it was discovered that distance had no effect upon performance: neither between separate subjects in telepathy experiments nor between subject and scene in clairvoyance experiments (Ibid., ¶835). Third, time had no effect. Subjects could gain reliable information, mentally, both before and after an event occurred in the physical world or in the mind of another (Ibid., ¶836). Jung summarized these last findings by saying that synchronicity reveals the “psychically conditioned relativity of space and time” (Ibid., ¶840). It was impossible, therefore, that ESP could involve some sort of energy transmission (Ibid., ¶839). Space and time, Jung gathered, consist of nothing at all. We only think they have objective reality because our knowing apparatus, as Kant argued, requires them (Ibid., ¶840).
Probably Rhine’s most significant discovery was “the decline effect”: the observation that one’s level of performance in ESP experiments declines as her boredom increases. Interest and emotional involvement turn out to be of primary importance (Ibid., ¶838); and this is surely the reason spontaneous synchronicities are experienced as huge, numinous events compared to what is produced in the laboratory.
Altered states. A strong point of agreement between Jung and Pauli was precisely that some additional principle, other than causality, is required if we are to understand the nature of synchronicity and that “the psychic state [that is to say the level of interest] of the subject and the investigator” is the best candidate to play that role. Pauli wanted to include it in the definition of synchronicity (JPL, 53f). Jung, who ultimately resisted the suggestion, agreed in principle that strong emotions, and particularly those associated with the archetypes play at least a facilitating role. “Synchronistic phenomena can be evoked by putting the subject into an unconscious state (trance)” (CW8: ¶440). “Every emotional state produces an alteration of consciousness” (Ibid., ¶856). Jung explained that, in the case of the archetypes, numinous emotional effects produce what Janet called a “lowering of the mental level.” This means that psychic energy drains away from consciousness, causing the conscious field to shrink, and the individual’s orientation in the here and now to be reduced. The lost psychic energy flows into the archetypal matter at hand giving it a “supernormal degree of numinosity,” and producing “a favorable opportunity” for something to slip in from the unconscious (Ibid., ¶841). “The subject’s response . . . is the product of pure imagination, of ‘chance’ ideas which reveal the structure of that which produces them, namely the unconscious” (Ibid., ¶840).
When Jung speaks of “chance” ideas, he means to emphasize only that there is nothing “causal” about their entering the conscious field: no clacking billiard balls, no vibes of any sort. But in no sense is there anything arbitrary about them. They are meaningfully connected to something else, and often crucially so. How is it possible that by “pure imagination” and “chance” exactly the right information should appear? When we ask questions like this, we expect an answer that satisfies our search for causes, and Jung has none. Instead he speaks mysteriously of “absolute knowledge,”[5] an “a priori causally inexplicable knowledge of a situation” (Ibid., ¶857), “a knowledge not mediated by the sense organs” (Ibid., ¶948) but is “immediate” and characteristic of the unconscious (Ibid., 856). He seems to be saying (here and elsewhere) that the unconscious, by its nature, is capable of knowing anything in the universe, and that this is the foundation of synchronicity. Furthermore, to be in touch with absolute knowledge, one must usually be in an altered state of consciousness. When an archetype is constellated, we are in an altered state that may on occasion be open to absolute knowledge.
The Synchronistic Nature of “Psychoid” Process
The archetypes do not only open the mind to absolute knowledge by altering the conscious state. They also have an organizing function. They work out of sight of the ego, setting lower level (unconscious) operations in order and gathering them into a shape that later may become visible to the conscious mind (Ibid., ¶440). The archetypes have, in short, the very nature that we have been calling top-to-bottom structure. It is only as we approach the ego-conscious “top” that numinous patterns are recognized or projected. “Below” that are neural networks, autonomic nervous system balance, hormones, and the like. Because such lower-level processes are incapable of becoming conscious, in the late 1940’s Jung began referring to them as psychoid activities. They are psyche-like but will never become conscious.
On introducing the term, psychoid, he was careful to note that it is only to be used an as adjective, so as not to suggest that some additional entity may be present. The word simply describes those processes in an organism that are “quasi-psychic, such as the reflex-process” (Ibid., ¶368). In principle, psychic process can be represented to the ego in symbolic form, while psychoid process is “irrepresentable” (Ibid., ¶840).
Jung was uncharacteristically careful in his definition of psychoid, probably out of fear that he would be accused of promoting “vitalism,” the idea that living bodies possess some additional feature, over and above chemical substances and physical forces. It might be a soul, a fiery fluid, or even some principle by which the matter of a body is organized. Hans Driesch had used the term, psychoid, as a noun to mean a directing principle in a living body — and he was a notorious vitalist. On the other hand, Eugen Bleuler had used the term, too, also as a noun, to refer to all of the “sub-cortical processes [in the brain] so far as they have an adaptive function” (Ibid., ¶368). It appears that Jung wanted to locate his use of the term somewhere between Bleuler and Driesch. Psychoid processes do not have to be confined to the brain, but they have to contribute to the end result that may become conscious. Jung does not wish to add a new element or process to the organism, only to indicate that psyche-like processes go very deep down into the internal workings of the organism. He saw this move as a modest effort to name something that everyone sees but never thinks to mention.
The psychology of an amoeba. How far down psychoid processes may go is suggested by a claim Jung made in 1927, speaking on the evolutionary nature of the psyche at a symposium entitled “Man and Earth.” Jung called his contribution “The Earth-Dependency of the Psyche”[6]:
The collective unconscious, however, . . . is not individual but common to all men, and perhaps even to all animals . . .
This whole psychic organism corresponds exactly to the body . . . still preserves elements that connect it with the invertebrates and ultimately with the protozoa. Theoretically, it should be possible to “peel” the collective unconscious, layer by layer, until we come to the psychology of the worm, and even of the amoeba (CW8: ¶321-2)]
The idea that an amoeba “has a psychology” certainly suggests a new approach to the realm of the psychoid. Evidently we should look to how an amoeba behaves, how it “lives its world.” For an amoeba does indeed inhabit a meaningful but evidently tiny world.How is it that an amoeba, a single-cell organism without anything like neural structure, can have psychoid processes? In his 1952 synchronicity essay, Jung answered that question, “We must ask ourselves . . . whether the coordination of psychic and physical processes in a living organism can be understood as a synchronistic relation” (Ibid., 948). As a form of synchronicity, psychoid process would be acausal. The standard Western view is rather different. It conjures up a Cartesian type of “soul,” a separate and radically different kind of substance when it considers the mind-body problem. In our need to find a cause, we imagine the mind somehow piloting the brain, much as we imagine vibes in telepathy. Jung wants to say there is no separate mind substance and no billiard-ball or vibratory causality. There is synchronicity harmonizing acausally, according to the principle of meaning.
Thus the internal process of an amoeba, which we usually describe as evidence of its life and which mainstream science analyzes in causal terms (the interaction of proteins, amino acids, electrolytes, and the like), Jung says ought to be seen as synchronistic. As a medical man himself, he surely does not wish to deny that molecules are interacting in a causal fashion, according to the laws of physics. All that is true enough. Jung points, rather, to what mechanistic science overlooks, the organismic process of the amoeba: the fact that it seems to “know” that nourishment is nearby and “knows” how to extend its pseudopodia to move in the right direction and engulf the morsel when it gets there. As a whole organism, it also “knows” how to metabolize the food it has found. Jung wonders how the amoeba manages to organize its millions of simultaneous chemical interactions in a manner that always serves its wholeness if it does not possess psychoid capabilities. There has to be some sort of primitive proto-knowing, a teleological factor in all of biology (Ibid., ¶931).
If “proto-knowing” and “teleology” seem dangerously absurd, Jung struggles to remind his readers that psychoid process is too primitive ever to become conscious and it cannot look forward further than the next instant. Its working is limited to the roughly immediate now. Hence the term syn-chron-icity.
Unconscious “absolute knowing” is inherently synchronistic, both when a human psyche has a vision of fire in a distant city and when the molecules that comprise an amoeba organize themselves for the good of the living whole. In the case of the amoeba, however, Jung wonders whether “meaning” is the right word to name the connecting principle. Perhaps it should be “equivalence” or “conformity” (Ibid., ¶942, n.71). Jung’s struggle to find the right language to avoid giving the wrong impression makes it clear that he is trying to describe a continuity of psyche-like functioning in all life forms. With the term synchronicity, the acausal ordering principle, he attempts to describe the living process of beings living their worlds.
Pauli objected to the term acausal, calling it “imprecise.” He said that Jung’s ordering factor itself “could be taken as the cause and that synchronistic events just appear to be acausal.” Apparently he was trying to save Jung’s position from being ridiculed by physicists, who would find “acausality” to be the sticking point, because he goes on to say that there are no causal chains to be followed in quantum mechanics. And this, he admitted, might well bring twentieth-century physicists closer to acknowledging “meaning as an ordering factor” than they had been in Schopenhauer’s day (JPL, 38).[7] Evidently, Jung was striving to avoid ridicule from biologists, while Pauli had the scorn of physicists in mind.
Psyche and brain are not identical. The idea of biological processes as humble as those of an amoeba having a psychoid nature surely leads to a rejection of the standard Western view that psyche and brain are identical in substance but separate in experience. For the notion of psychoid process implies that even “irrepresentable” activities can have a kind of proto-subjectivity. Jung does not avoid the issue but makes it clear in the concluding section of the synchronicity essay, “We must completely give up the idea of the psyche’s being somehow connected with the brain, and remember instead the ‘meaningful’ or ‘intelligent’ behavior of the lower organisms, which are without a brain” (Ibid., ¶947).
In 1952 he could make the claim on evolutionary and biological grounds, through the theory of psychoid processes operating synchronistically, but the phenomena of parapsychology had long inclined Jung to assert the psyche’s “independence” of the brain. In 1896, F. W. H. Myers had listed nine reasons for rejecting neural explanations for ESP, including evidence that brain waves cannot explain clairvoyance, that telepathy is unaffected by distance, that the physical processes of the brain can not produce precognition, and that telepathy often takes place when the organism is in an enfeebled state (Gauld, 1968: 295).
Very likely Jung was familiar with some of these arguments, when as a freshman at Basel University he told his Zofingia brothers, “The soul is an intelligence independent of space and time” (CWA: 29). Almost forty years later, in an article titled “The Soul and Death,” he said: “The psyche’s attachment to the brain can be affirmed with far less certainty today than it could fifty years ago. Psychology must digest certain parapsychological facts, which it has hardly begun to do as yet” (CW8: ¶812).
Strictly speaking, psychoid processes alone cannot make psyche as “independent” of the brain as some of Jung’s statements seem to imply, for many of them are found in the brain. Because psyche belongs to the body as a whole — just as the organismic processes of amoeba function holistically to constitute a sort of proto-self — the brain must be merely a very significant contributor to psyche. At the very least it sorts out and analyzes with its parallel and redundant circuitry all the psychoid activities going on in a vertebrate life form, as it responds to its environment and to its internal states. Surely the causal processes of the brain play a significant role in making the psyche conscious — or at least in refining what it is conscious of.
This last possibility was the choice William James favored. He called it the “transmissive theory.” He thought the brain works by molding pre-existing consciousness into various forms — either by gathering scattered “particles” of consciousness or by responding to an already unified psyche (Bernard, 1998: 176). Perhaps this is what Jung had in mind when he remarked at the end of Memories, Dreams, Reflections that the brain may function as a “transformer station.”
An Appeal to Chinese Metaphysics
As a philosophy, synchronicity challenges Western assumptions — not only on account of its mind-boggling notion of non-causal influence — but perhaps especially because of the quality that I (not Jung) have called “organismic.” This is the notion that in every instant everything that happens is meaningfully connected to everything else. This principle is probably least objectionable when applied to an amoeba, where everything occurring inside its cell wall and just outside it holds together as an interconnected whole. The amoeba acts as an organism, and the molecules that comprise it all act as one, even as they fulfill their separate functions.
It requires a much greater stretch to accept the challenge that some synchronistic “organismic” structure lies behind telepathy or clairvoyance. What organismic unity connects Swedenborg’s mind with a fire 300 miles away? We may be able to countenance the instantaneous unity of an amoeba’s molecules, but what is it about a man’s mind and a distant city’s fire that they should be united? What is it about their synchrony — their merely occurring at the same time — that welds them into a kind of organism?
Jung’s efforts to avoid being labeled a vitalist will probably fail to convince most mainstream biologists. No one doubts that a protozoan is an organismic whole. But Western science ignores this fact or postpones considering it in the hope that someday someone will explain it employing nothing but the mechanics of its chemical subunits, following the laws of cause and effect. Our unexamined metaphysics tells us that causal mechanics is the only acceptable explanation for any scientific problem. This means we must always begin with the smallest parts, as close to the ultimate units as we can get, and hope eventually to find how they constitute a whole. This procedure has not worked for consciousness, for parapsychology, for the phenomenon of organism, or indeed for life itself. There are huge gaps in our understanding of reality. Jung’s doctrine of synchronicity introduces a new descriptive principle alongside causality, one that addresses all four gaps. But, however modestly he has put it forward, it is a new metaphysics, and the Western world has a hard time with it. Indeed, the fact that synchronicity gives priority to the organism over its constituent parts — and what the whole has that the parts do not, namely life and consciousness — probably means that most mainstream biologists will see Jung’s proposal as a symptom of vitalism.
Aware of the metaphysical challenge he was bringing, Jung devoted a section of his essay on synchronicity to alternative metaphysical systems (Ibid., ¶863-71). Primarily, he appeals to the metaphysics of the I Ching, the ancient Chinese “Classic of Changes.” In place of Western atomism, our concern with analyzing things down to the building blocks that comprise them, the Chinese begin with a holistic assumption. “Unlike the Greek-trained Western mind, the Chinese mind does not aim at grasping details for their own sake, but at a view which sees the detail as part of a whole” (Ibid., ¶863).
I Ching. The I Ching is a divination tool founded on the idea that everything that happens in a given moment has the same character. It proposes an orderly rule-bound method of producing a chance event (counting yarrow stalks or tossing coins). Each result produces a “yin” or a “yang” cipher, a single short line that is either continuous or broken. The procedure is repeated six times, and the resulting six lines constitute one of sixty-four possible “hexagrams”; the book itself contains symbolic commentaries on each of the sixty-four. They speak of the weather; the seasons of the year; difficulties in politics, the family, or the army; or the relationship between features of the landscape, mountains, chasms, lakes, and the like.
One consults the oracle by carefully composing a question, perhaps about the nature of some challenge one is facing, then throws the coins and ponders the commentary. Generally the serious user of the I Ching will find the practice brings new dimensions of the issue to mind, allowing it to be seen with new eyes. The earliest layers of contribution to the commentaries probably were shamanic, but the ideas have been largely overlain and reinterpreted with Taoist, Confucian, and Buddhist ideas. They reflect the traditional mind of China.
According to the Taoist foundation of the I Ching, everything that happens in the cosmos is a momentary expression of the ever-changing relation between the Tao’s two constituents, yin and yang. In every moment, therefore, the cosmos is like an amoeba and its molecules: all the pieces contribute to a whole that vastly transcends their sum. For this reason, the personal issue I bring to the oracle belongs to the same moment in which my coins fall into particular combinations of heads and tails. Those combinations point to a particular commentary which describes the moment.[8] When I read the commentary, I read it as a description of my issue, a contribution from a school of wisdom that will help me appreciate the matter in a broader context and raise to consciousness aspects of my previously unexamined attitude.
Regarding the fact that “the coins fall just as happens to suit them,” Jung explains: “Two Chinese sages, King Wen and the Duke of Chou, in the twelfth century before our era, sought to explain the simultaneous occurrence of a psychic state with a physical process as an equivalence of meaning. In other words, they supposed that the same living reality was expressing itself in the psychic state as in the physical” (CW8: ¶865). It will be difficult to find a more perfect fit for the theory of synchronicity than the metaphysics of the I Ching.
Other metaphysical precursors. Jung discusses the Tao Te Ching according to the interpretation of his friend, the German Sinologist, Richard Wilhelm, who said that in “the Chinese view there is in all things a latent ‘rationality.’” Jung takes this to suggest meaningful coincidence; but I think it goes further than that and suggests that all matter has some sort of inherent aptitude for belonging to organism, for entering the psychoid sphere of nature. In the Western view, consciousness is completely foreign to matter; and this is what makes it impossible to imagine how consciousness can appear when matter’s organization becomes highly complex, as in the human brain. If there was nothing of latent capacity for consciousness in the parts, how could it appear in the whole? In the Chinese view, apparently, what Jung calls psychoid potential is latent in all things (Ibid., ¶917-24).
Much more attention is paid to Western writers from the ancient Greeks to the Renaissance, and especially Johannes Kepler and G. W. Leibniz (Ibid., ¶925-46). For example, Hippocrates: “There is one common flow, one common breathing, all things are in sympathy. The whole organism and each one of its parts are working in conjunction for the same purpose.” The alchemist Agrippa von Nettesheim, “As in the archetypal World, all things are in all; so also in this corporeal world, all things are in all, albeit in different ways . . .”
Primarily, however, Jung speaks of Leibniz and his doctrine of pre-established harmony. The “monads” that are the units in Leibniz’s philosophy — also called “souls” in the case of living organisms — are “windowless.” They have no conscious perception of what is outside of themselves, and yet they do not fall into chaos, for they move in a universal harmony set by God. Jung says:
The synchronicity principle thus becomes the absolute rule in all cases where an inner event occurs simultaneously with an outside one. As against this, however, it must be borne in mind that the synchronistic phenomena which can be verified empirically, far from constituting a rule, are so exceptional that most people doubt their existence. They certainly occur much more frequently in reality than one thinks or can prove, but we still do not know whether then occur so frequently and so regularly in any field of experience that we could speak of them as conforming to law. We only know that there must be an underlying principle which might possibly explain all such (related) phenomena (Ibid.: ¶938)
This passage leaves little doubt that Jung really would like to claim synchronicity as a universal principle, and not merely an explanation of parapsychology. Synchronistic events are more common that anyone can prove, but we cannot claim they occur regularly despite being noticed only occasionally. In a footnote to this passage, Jung wants to “stress the possibility that the relation between soul and body may be understood as a synchronistic one.” That would make synchronicity common rather than rare.
Synchronicity as a Cosmic Principle
There are other indications that Jung wanted to make synchronicity a cosmic principle but feared that he had insufficient evidence. In fact, if it is not a cosmic principle, it has nothing to say to the gaps — consciousness, organism, life, and (by the way) parapsychology — in the Western metaphysics that has dominated our thinking since the collapse of alchemy in the seventeenth century. In Mysterium Coniunctionis (1955/56), his last great work, Jung described the rise of empirical science out of alchemy as “the great schism” (CW14: ¶101). Imagination was severed from sensory perception as matter became dead and the mythic realities of the alchemists became superstitions or deliberate obfuscations. Something crucial was lost when we turned to empiricism and mechanical atomism. We lost a sense of wholeness and mythic depth, while we gained remarkable mastery. It was very much the same observation Lévy-Bruhl made when comparing “primitive thinking” with that of the contemporary West (Lévy-Bruhl, 1922).
Cosmic aspirations. In his essay on synchronicity, Jung presents five lines of argument that imply he saw synchronicity as a cosmic principle and wished to be able to say so directly. When we add to these passages evidence from his correspondence with Pauli, the theme becomes undeniable.
1. The first argument is from the nature of “absolute knowledge.” Jung has demonstrated with numerous examples that the psyche sometimes seems to exhibit knowledge of matters that cannot be available to it by ordinary causal means. Such things happen frequently enough that we have to take them seriously. They are, in fact, “characteristic of synchronistic phenomena, a knowledge not mediated by the sense organs.” But if the psyche can, in principle, know anything in the universe, regardless of space and time, some “self-subsistent meaning” must exist. Apparently this means that meaning and the possibility of connection pre-exists the occasional moment when Swedenborg has a vision and Stockholm is burning 300 miles away (CW8: ¶948).
2. The second argument is from the nature of the psychoid dimension. He says that the archetype’s psychoid nature makes it “transgressive,” meaning that “it does not confine itself to the psychic sphere but can occur in circumstances that are non-psychic” (Ibid., ¶964). This comment is clarified by a passage in a letter from Jung to Pauli where he calls the archetype’s psychoid nature “transcendental.” It participates in both the physical sphere and the psychic (PJL, 69). In a passage from an earlier letter, he muses on the role the archetype plays in synchronistic events. He says there are three possibilities. Maybe “psyche casts a spell on mass . . . or mass bewitches psyche,” but more likely the psychoid nature of the archetype allows it to transgress the dividing line between realms and “assimilate” the physical and the psychic. In “a so-called numinous moment,[it] causes a joint field of tension” (PJL, 62f). All of this implies that matter (or mass) is susceptible in principle to the psychoid archetype. Matter, then, is not “dead.” Some sort of psychoid susceptibility must be everywhere in the universe, making synchronicity a universal principle.
3. The third argument appears to be based on an analogy with quantum mechanics. Everything in the quantum realm is in constant flux, energy turning into one sort of particle, which winks back into energy and remerges as another sort of particle. Consequently nothing is definite, one can only speak of probabilities. Similarly, Jung argues, “The archetype represents psychic probability . . . It is a special psychic instance of probability in general, which is made up of the laws of chance [and] lays down rules for nature just as the laws of mechanics do” (CW8: ¶964). Here the archetype again bridges the psychic and physical realms, organizing both. On account of this psychoid activity, synchronicity would be a universal principle. Matter is always responsive to the psychoid archetype.
4. The fourth argument derives from the correspondence with Pauli in which they frankly speak of two meanings of synchronicity, a “narrower” one and a “holistic” one. The distinction first appears in a letter from Pauli, where the “narrower sense” refers to “a small number of individual cases” when a meaningful connection is noticed. Pauli is surprised by Jung’s recent remarks which suggest that “synchronicity . . . comprises every acausal and — I should like to add — holistic system.” Jung seems to include even the data of quantum mechanics within the realm of synchronicity (PJL, 63). Jung responds that synchronicity in the narrower sense is a special case — the numinous moment when an acausal incident “occurs (by chance) in the psychic sphere” (PJL, 69). In the end, this view was published in the synchronicity essay (CW8: ¶965).
5. The fifth and most persuasive argument is based on statements and diagrams that clearly claim synchronicity to be a universal dimension of nature. For example, “Synchronicity ascribes to the moving body a certain psychoid property which, like space, time, and causality forms a criterion of its behavior” (Ibid., ¶947). Later Jung says that synchronicity “supplements” “space, time, and causality, the classical triad of physics” and draws one of his “quaternity” diagrams, crossing vertical and horizontal lines with each of the four ends labeled.
He says that the vertical space-time axis stands for the “irrepresentable continuum,” by which he evidently means Einstein’s universe: the gravity field that is usually pictured as a flexible membrane pressed down into bowls here and there by the mass of each sun, planet, and black hole. Acting on the entities of this material universe are the principles located on the horizontal axis, causality and synchronicity. This clearly places the psychoid, organismic effects of synchronicity on a par with the billiard-ball and vibratory effects of causality (Ibid., ¶961).
Pauli objected to Jung’s diagram of universal principles, saying that a “modern physicist” would find space and time separated at opposite ends to be “particularly unacceptable.” He proposed replacing Jung’s vertical axis with an opposition between “Energy (conservation)” and “Space-time continuum” (PJL, 56f).
Jung accepted and published a wordier version of Pauli’s diagram, but without much enthusiasm (Ibid., ¶963).
In the end it seems obvious that both Jung and Pauli were inclined to see synchronicity as more than an uncertain talent unique to the human psyche. They decided the psychoid principle had to be an inherent quality of the universe. Nothing would be exempt from its effects, although those effects might often go unnoticed.
Field Theory and the Holistic Universe
The idea that synchronicity should be a universal principle, a quality affecting the cosmos as a whole and everything in it, may seem quite radical and even unwise for one whose reputation as a scientist is so frequently questioned. It is worth pointing out, therefore, that the course of Jung’s thinking on this matter is very much in line with the way science has solved some of the biggest conundrums it has faced over the past two centuries. This topic will be taken up at greater length in Chapter 14, but it might be appropriate to outline the argument here.[9]
Each of the scientific mysteries has had to do with what appeared to be action-at-a-distance, which is the heart of the issue in parapsychology. The first to be solved was that of magnetism. Michael Faraday (1791-1867) performed a number of ingenious experiments that showed magnetic force to be induced by electric current and to occupy a field that takes the form of a doughnut (a toroid). This holistic solution, the idea of an electromagnetic field of force, was inspired by the philosophy of Leibniz, who, in turn had been inspired by Chinese metaphysics. Historically, the second problem to be solved was Newton’s embarrassing discovery that apparently massive bodies exert an invisible force upon one another across immense distances. Secretly he thought of gravity as “eros” and feared that it must be impossible. Einstein reshaped that problem, under the influence of Faraday’s brilliant inspiration. The space-time continuum is a gravity field.
The third problem has to do with the mysteries of quantum mechanics, where everything is thoroughly uncertain: where subatomic particles pop in and out of existence with lightning speed, and each of them spends some of its time as every other type of particle and in every possible combination. Schrödinger’s wave equation allows physicists to calculate the probabilities, only, regarding which type of particle will emerge from the chaos under given conditions. Furthermore, “paired” particles at “impossible” distances from one another act as though they are communicating, though no influence could be transmitted fast enough (the speed of light would be too slow). This is called the principle of quantum non-locality. Quanta act as though they are everywhere and nowhere (non-local) and so does psyche, as we have seen through our inspection of amoeba. Physics now makes sense of the chaos of subatomic matter/energy exchanges by conceiving of it as a quantum field.
The progression has been: (a) Chinese metaphysics to (b) Leibniz’s universal harmony to (c) Faraday’s electromagnetic (EM) field to (d) Einstein’s space-time gravity field to (e) Schrödinger’s description of what amounts to a quantum field. With this as a background, it seems typically clever of Jung to appeal to the metaphysics of the I Ching to describe what we might wish to call a psychoid field. If so, we can complete the Pauli-Jung discussion of synchronicity’s place in the universe with a quaternity of fields.
The visible world and its extension (X-rays, radio waves, etc.) is described by the horizontal axis. It is where locality, the transmission of “vibrations” and billiard-ball causality describe the effects we experience. The vertical axis describes the extremes of non-locality. The top gives us the unimaginable chaos out of which the manageable bodies and radiations of everyday life precipitate. The bottom of the vertical axis is responsible for meaning, consciousness, and organism. Its psychoid nature gives us an ordered cosmos of nested hierarchies.
§- 1958. CW10: ¶589-824.
§- For a fuller treatment of this material and what it means, practically, in analytic practice, see Haule, 1999c.
§- Colin Wilson goes to far as to accuse Jung of lying about acausality. He says there is causality there, all right, but Jung does not want to admit it. Having thereby eliminated the hard part, Wilson has opened himself a path to demonstrate what a crackpot Jung really was (C. Wilson, 1984: 113-6).
§- Invented jointly by Rhine and Karl Zener at Duke University in 1930. Charles Richet of the “French School” of dissociation psychology had used similar cards in the same way as early as 1884 (Guiley, 1991). The five Zener designs consist of bold line-drawings of a square, a circle, a plus sign, a five-pointed star, and a set of wavy lines.
§- Jung tells Pauli that the idea of absolute knowledge came to him while reading Hans Driesch (1867-1941), the founder of experimental embryology. The study of the drastic and amazing changes an embryo undergoes seemed quite miraculous in the days before molecular biology. No doubt the observations Driesch made in his laboratory led him to doubt the foundations of Western science, for he eventually rejected the mechanistic view of science (billiard balls) and embraced a vitalistic philosophy (the idea that there is some sort of “life principle” that accounts for the difference between living and non-living beings and that drives the living process). Jung asserts to Pauli his resistance to vitalism, but is interested in Driesch’s later work in parapsychology (PJL, 133).
§- “Die Erdbedingtheit der Psyche.” In a later version (1931), he called it “The Structure of the Psyche.”
§- Schopenhauer had proposed that an unconscious “will” drives everything.
§- There are, in fact, more than sixty-four types of moment, in that many nuances of each are possible. I have decided not to complicate the description by distinguishing, for instance, between “young yin” and “old yin,” etc.
§- This argument is heavily indebted to Dusek, 1999.
