Synchronicity

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Most lives accumulate a few coincidences that refuse to feel like chance: the dream the morning seems to answer, the freshly learned word that returns three times before nightfall. Nearly every divinatory art that human beings have practiced rests on taking such moments at their word. In the twentieth century the feeling behind them received its most ambitious theory. The Swiss psychologist C. G. Jung named it synchronicity: the coinciding in time of an inner state — a dream, an image, a premonition — with an outer event that mirrors it, the two meaningfully related yet without any discoverable causal connection. Where magical thinking posits a hidden cause running between such events, Jung proposed that there is none and that none is needed. “It cannot be a question of cause and effect,” he wrote, “but of a falling together in time, a kind of simultaneity” — an acausal connecting principle, advanced in full awareness of the audacity as equal in rank to causality itself.

His flagship example was his own, and he told it as his own. A young patient, so fortified in Cartesian rationalism that three doctors had made no headway with her, dreamed at a critical point in her treatment that she was given a golden scarab. As she recounted the dream, Jung heard a gentle tapping at the closed window behind him, opened it, and caught out of the air a rose-chafer beetle — the nearest equivalent to a golden scarab in those latitudes — as it flew, against its habits, into the darkened room. Her rationalism needed breaking by something reason could not supply, he judged, and from that hour the treatment began to move. The story rests entirely on his telling. It has carried much of the theory’s fortunes ever since. He liked a French companion case — the poet Émile Deschamps crossing paths with one M. de Fontgibu over plum pudding in 1805, 1815, and again in 1832 — and observed that the longer and stranger such a series grows, the harder it becomes to shrug at.

The idea was born from divination. Jung had spent years experimenting with the I Ching, the Chinese oracle whose hexagrams are cast by the chance fall of yarrow stalks or coins, and had found, to his own satisfaction at least, that its answers fit the questions. Richard Wilhelm’s German translation of 1923 gave him an ally, and when Wilhelm died Jung used his new term in public for the first time, in the May 1930 memorial address, to name the principle on which he believed the oracle’s procedure rested: not causality but the quality of the moment. Then he sat on the idea for two decades. His foreword to the Wilhelm–Baynes English I Ching, written in 1949, cast a hexagram to ask the oracle’s view of the foreword itself, and conceded the epistemic circle openly: the only criterion of a reading’s validity is the inquirer’s own conviction that the text renders his situation truly. The first systematic outline came at the Eranos conference of 1951; the monograph, Synchronicity: An Acausal Connecting Principle, followed in 1952.

It did not appear alone, and the company it kept is the second remarkable fact about it. The 1952 volume Naturerklärung und Psyche — in English, The Interpretation of Nature and the Psyche — held two essays: Jung’s, and a study of how archetypal ideas had shaped Johannes Kepler’s science, argued through Kepler’s dispute with the Hermetic philosopher Robert Fludd, by Wolfgang Pauli. Pauli was no ornamental co-author. He had formulated the exclusion principle at twenty-five, postulated the neutrino in 1930, and taken the 1945 Nobel Prize in Physics on Einstein’s nomination; colleagues called him the conscience of physics, and his verdict on hopeless theorizing — that it was not even wrong — has outlived him. In January 1932 this man had arrived in Jung’s orbit in personal collapse, after a failed marriage, his mother’s death, and a season of heavy drinking; the analysis that followed put more than four hundred of his dreams, anonymously, into Jung’s Psychology and Alchemy. The patient became a collaborator, and the collaboration became a correspondence that ran twenty-six years, from 1932 until Pauli’s death in 1958, published since as Atom and Archetype. Pauli was the theory’s harshest internal critic — he attacked its epistemology and flatly objected to Jung’s statistical experiments with astrology — while pressing toward the position the two came to share: that mind and matter are aspects of a single, psychophysically neutral order of reality, for which they retrieved a term from medieval philosophy, the unus mundus, one world. Archetypes, in this scheme, order both realms at once, and synchronicities are the rare moments when the joint ordering shows itself. “We must postulate a cosmic order of nature beyond our control,” Pauli wrote, “to which both the outward material objects and the inward images are subject.” Scholars have argued that his working model was quantum entanglement — correlation without causation, which physics had just been forced to swallow — taken as metaphor rather than mechanism. Nor can it have hurt that Pauli trailed a legend of his own: the “Pauli effect,” the standing joke that laboratory equipment failed in his presence, which he himself took in earnest as well as in jest. When a vase shattered without cause as he entered the founding celebration of the Jung Institute in Zurich in 1948, he went home and wrote an essay about it.

The scientific verdict has been blunt. Synchronicity has never had scientific standing: the standard objection is that it can be neither tested nor falsified; Jung himself conceded that, viewed statistically, synchronistic events are chance events, and the one quantitative pillar he borrowed — J. B. Rhine’s card-guessing experiments of the 1930s — has aged badly. The strongest statement of the case against is the statisticians Diaconis and Mosteller’s 1989 study of coincidences, which finds that most of them yield to four sober principles: unnoticed hidden causes; the psychology of memory and attention, which files the hits and forgets the misses; the counting of near-matches as matches; and the law of truly large numbers — “with a large enough sample, any outrageous thing is likely to happen.” A one-in-a-million daily event befalls about 250 Americans every day. On this account, sharpened since by work on apophenia and confirmation bias, the mistake in synchronicity is one of address: it posits structure in the world when the phenomenon lives in the perceiver, and at the right scale nothing about a stunning coincidence is surprising at all.

Yet the question has not closed so much as moved. Roderick Main, the concept’s leading academic interpreter, judges the theory “difficult, flawed, prone to misrepresentation” — and nonetheless “one of the most suggestive attempts yet made to bring the paranormal within the bounds of intelligibility.” The Pauli–Jung framework receives serious treatment in current philosophy of mind as a dual-aspect monism, reckoned in some surveys the variant with the most to offer empirically minded discussion; Harald Atmanspacher and colleagues have spent two decades reconstructing and extending it, and clinical researchers keep finding that coincidence experiences cluster around births, deaths, and marriage, and that nearly half of surveyed therapists have met them in the consulting room. Jung would not have been wholly displeased by either camp: he held the perception of meaningful coincidence to be a healthy function of the mind, and its overabundance a mark of delusion. Even Diaconis and Mosteller ended on a double edge, conceding that the world does teem with coincidence and that Jung was right about the experience, if wrong about its source. The statisticians hold that these ordinary sources account for much of the force; those who keep the question open answer that what needed explaining was never the frequency.

On the reading taken here, the dispute is in one sense beside the historical point. Jung’s own list of precursors — the doctrine of correspondences, sympathetic magic, astrology, alchemy, Leibniz’s encounter with the I Ching — is a roll-call of the Hermetic current, and synchronicity is fairly described as the twentieth century’s most serious attempt to give meaningful coincidence, the raw material of every divinatory art, a theoretical home inside psychology and physics at once. Whether the home stands is still argued. What stands without argument is the fact at its center: for twenty-six years a depth psychologist and a Nobel physicist, each at the limit of what his own discipline could say, wrote to each other about whether the world might be ordered as well as caused — a conjunction, as the letters’ publisher put it, not merely of two men but of two disciplines. The theory may not survive. The conversation already has.

→ Related: Carl Jung · I Ching · Divination