What is synchronicity?

Jung, a Swiss psychiatrist, coined “synchronicity” for “a coincidence in time of two or more causally unrelated events which have the same or a similar meaning.”

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Jung first used the term in a memorial address for Richard Wilhelm, delivered 10 May 1930 in Munich, describing the I Ching as resting on a principle “hitherto unnamed” that he tentatively called the synchronistic principle.

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Von Franz worked closely with Jung from 1934 until his death in 1961. Her essays on synchronicity, number and time are collected in Psyche and Matter.

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Pauli, a Nobel laureate in physics, thanked Jung and C. A. Meier for “detailed and essential discussions connected with the psychological aspect of the formation of scientific concepts and their archetypal basis.” His essay on Kepler appeared in 1952 in the same volume as Jung’s synchronicity paper.

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Jung wrote that Pauli “suggested replacing the opposition of space and time in the classical schema by (conservation of) energy and the space-time continuum.” Jung added that this suggestion led him to define causality and synchronicity more closely as the other pair of opposites. Jung also credited Pauli with the phrase “neutral language.”

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In the Kepler essay, Pauli described scientific understanding as resting on a “matching” of inner images in the human psyche with external objects and their behaviour, and wrote that these images agree extensively with the archetypes of Jung’s psychology.

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Pauli wrote that “it would be most satisfactory of all if physis and psyche could be seen as complementary aspects of the same reality,” and added that it was not yet known whether the two stand in a true complementary relation.

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Jung and Pauli wrote to each other over twenty-six years. The letters are published as Atom and Archetype.

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Bohr used “complementarity” for the aspects of atomic phenomena found under mutually exclusive experimental conditions, which “must thus be considered complementary in quite a novel way.” In a 1938 address he likened the relation between “thoughts” and “feelings” to the complementary relations found in atomic physics, and stated that the comparison was not meant to “suggest any closer relation between atomic physics and psychology.”

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Jung wrote that the way synchronistic phenomena cease when an unconscious content becomes conscious “can best be understood in terms of the physicist’s idea of ‘complementarity,’” and quoted Pauli’s statement of the physical side of it. In a note, Jung reported Pauli’s remark that Bohr used “correspondence” as a mediating term. Bohr’s own words on the “correspondence argument” are in “Light and Life.”

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Heisenberg wrote that “natural science does not simply describe and explain nature,” and that it describes nature as exposed to human questioning. His text does not mention Jung or synchronicity.

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Late in life Jung wrote that Einstein had been his dinner guest on several occasions, during Einstein’s years as a professor in Zurich, and that this started him thinking about “a possible relativity of time as well as space, and their psychic conditionality.” The line comes from a letter of 25 February 1953, quoted in the editors’ preface to the 1973 paperback of Synchronicity.

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Jung wrote that decisive evidence for acausal combinations of events had come “mainly through the experiments of J. B. Rhine and his fellow-workers,” in which a subject, screened from the experimenter, tries to guess the geometrical symbols on cards turned up one after another. This records Jung’s reading of Rhine. Rhine’s own papers were not opened.

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Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646–1716)

Jung presented Leibniz’s “pre-established harmony, that is, an absolute synchronism of psychic and physical events,” as an earlier answer to the same question, and wrote that Geulincx and Leibniz “regarded the co-ordination of the psychic and the physical as an act of God.”

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Arthur Schopenhauer (1788–1860)

Jung wrote that Schopenhauer’s treatise, On the Apparent Design in the Fate of the Individual (the title as CW 8 gives it), “originally stood godfather to the views” he was developing, and described its subject as the “simultaneity of the causally unconnected.”

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Arnold Geulincx (1624–1669)

Jung cited Geulincx’s view that thoughts “independent” of the thinker (“cogitationes quae sunt a nobis independentes”) are prompted by God, and named him with Leibniz as holding that God coordinates mind and body.

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Johannes Kepler (1571–1630)

Jung quoted Kepler’s Tertius interveniens (1610) on an “instinctus divinus, rationis particeps” at work in nature. Pauli wrote that Kepler called the primary images that the soul can perceive “archetypal.”

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Hippocrates (the tract De alimento is ascribed to him)

Jung quoted a passage ascribed to Hippocrates on the sympathy of all things: “There is one common flow, one common breathing, all things are in sympathy.”

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Theophrastus (371–288 B.C.)

Jung reported that, according to Theophrastus, “the suprasensuous and the sensuous are joined by a bond of community.”

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Albertus Magnus (c. 1200–1280)

Jung noted that the part played by strong feeling in synchronistic events was already known to Avicenna and Albertus Magnus, and quoted Albertus: “When therefore the soul of a man falls into a great excess of any passion, it can be proved by experiment that it [the excess] binds things [magically].”

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Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa von Nettesheim (1486–1535)

Jung quoted Agrippa’s statement that Platonists agree “as in the archetypal World, all things are in all; so also in this corporeal world, all things are in all.”

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Chinese thought: the I Ching and Richard Wilhelm

Jung called the I Ching “one of the oldest known methods for grasping a situation as a whole,” and wrote that Richard Wilhelm “brilliantly interprets” the Chinese concept of Tao as “meaning.”

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What Jung wrote

Carl Gustav Jung (1875–1961)

Jung separated the regular orderedness of natural numbers and physical discontinuities, which have “existed from eternity,” from a second kind, writing that “the forms of psychic orderedness are acts of creation in time.” He called causeless events “creative acts, as the continuous creation” of a pattern, and in a note described continuous creation as “not only as a series of successive acts of creation, but also as the eternal presence of the one creative act.” The last paragraph of the essay speaks of “the sum of countless individual acts of creation occurring in time.”

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The Latin phrase creatio continua does not appear in the opened text of CW 8. Jung’s English terms are “continuous creation” and “acts of creation in time.”

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What von Franz added

Marie-Louise von Franz (1915–1998)

Von Franz wrote that Jung “believed in a creatio continua, like certain modern physicists.”

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Von Franz wrote that Jung “calls synchronistic events ‘acts of creation in time,’” which she read as meaning “that creation is continually in progress in nature as a creatio continua.” She also wrote that Jung “stresses, however, that this creatio continua should be seen not only as a successive series of creative acts but equally as the eternal presence of the one creative act,” which follows Jung’s note 17.

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Classical background

Augustine (354–430)

Augustine (354–430) called God “the truly eternal Creator of minds.” Jung’s note 17 cites this passage (Confessions 11.31), and von Franz wrote that, in Jung’s usage, the expression “refers to the Augustinian view that God is eternally outside time.”

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