The Rupture of Time

Synchronicity and Jung's Critique of Modern Western Culture

Roderick Main

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2004
• ISBN:
  9781135453121
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Mental Health in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

Why was the idea of synchronicity so important to Jung?Jung's theory of synchronicity radically challenges the entrenched assumptions of mainstream modern culture in the West. It is one of the most fascinating yet difficult and discomfiting of Jung's psychological theories.
The Rupture of Time aims to clarify what Jung really meant by synchronicity, why the idea was so important to him and how it informed his thinking about modern western culture. Areas examined include: * how the theory fits into Jung's overall psychological model and the significance of its apparent inconsistencies
* the wide range of personal, intellectual and social contexts of Jung's thinking on the topic
* how Jung himself applied the theory of synchronicity within his critique of science, religion, and society
* the continuing relevance of the theory for understanding issues in contemporary detraditionalised religion. Focusing closely on Jung's own writings and statements, this book discloses that the theory of synchronicity is not an inconsequential addendum to analytical psychology but is central to the psychological project that occupied Jung throughout his professional life. This much-needed clarification of one of Jung's central tenets will be of great interest to all analytical psychologists and scholars engaged with Jungian thought.

Part 1

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The theory of
synchronicity

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Chapter 1

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Synchronicity and analytical
psychology

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The theory of synchronicity emerged within the framework of analytical psychology, and analytical psychological assumptions underpin much of what is most distinctive about the theory. It is therefore appropriate to begin this study by looking in detail at how the theory of synchronicity, as Jung presented it, is embedded within his overall psychological model. Many previous studies from a Jungian orientation have inevitably addressed this relationship, often in an illuminating way (for example, Fordham 1957; Williams 1957; Bolen 1979; Wharton 1986; Aziz 1990; von Franz 1992; Mansfield 1995; Bright 1997). However, the present chapter aims to examine a wider range of aspects of the relationship than previous studies and to do so more systematically. Indeed, it is organised so that it might serve as an introduction not only to synchronicity but also to Jung's basic understanding of analytical psychology. An additional aim is to present the theory of synchronicity in an optimally coherent and integrated form, without for the time being probing too deeply into possible difficulties with it. The justification for such an approach is that the theory touches on so many controversial issues that it is all too easy to be deflected into evaluations or interpretations of it in terms of one's prior understanding of some other field or phenomenon, with the result that the theory of synchronicity itself never comes to be adequately appreciated in its own terms. The acknowledged difficulties with the theory will not be ignored but will be reserved for discussion in Chapter 2.

The following account involves an initial presentation of the theory through defining and illustrating synchronicity. Then comes an exposition of the basic model of analytical psychology that forms both the implicit background of the theory and the explicit framework into which Jung wishes to integrate it. Partly accompanying and partly following this, the chapter looks in detail at how synchronicity works in the light of analytical psychology. It also notes the contribution of synchronicity to some significant and far-reaching modifications of analytical psychology. The chapter concludes by briefly mentioning some alternative theoretical models that have been proposed to explain experiences of meaningful coincidence, since comparison with these highlights what is distinctive about Jung's theory.

Jung's illustration and definition of synchronicity

Jung presents the following incident as ‘a paradigm of the innumerable cases of meaningful coincidence that have been observed not only by me but by many others, and recorded in large collections’ (1951b: par. 983). The account is from his shorter 1951 essay on synchronicity. Another version appears in the 1952 essay (1952b: pars. 843, 845), and my discussion later will also draw on that, when it includes pertinent details not mentioned here. In his 1951 essay Jung wrote:

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 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 (Cetonia aurata), 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.

(Jung 1951b: par. 982)

Jung defined synchronicity in a variety of ways. Most succinctly, he defined it as ‘meaningful coincidence’ (1952b: par. 827), ‘acausal parallelism’ (1963: 342), or ‘an acausal connecting principle’ (1952b). More fully, he defined it as ‘the simultaneous occurrence of a certain psychic state with one or more external events which appear as meaningful parallels to the momentary subjective state’ (ibid.: par. 850). In the above example, the psychic state is indicated by the patient telling Jung her dream of being given a scarab. The parallel external event is the appearance and behaviour of the real scarab. The telling of the dream and the appearance of the real scarab were simultaneous. Neither of these events discer-nibly or plausibly caused the other by any normal means, so their relationship is acausal. Nevertheless, the events parallel each other in such unlikely detail that it is difficult to escape the impression that they are indeed connected, albeit acausally. Moreover, this acausal connection of events is both symbolically informative (as we shall see) and has a deeply emotive and transforming impact on the patient and in these senses is clearly meaningful.

The features of such coincidences that Jung most emphasises are the simultaneity of their component events, their acausality, and their meaning. He frankly acknowledged that the first of these features, simultaneity, is not straightforward. For there are other events that Jung wants to designate as synchronistic where the element of simultaneity is not so apparent, events that either cannot at the time be known to be simultaneous (as, for example, with apparently clairvoyant visions) or seemingly are not simultaneous at all (as, for example, with apparently precognitive dreams). He offers examples of both these kinds of synchronicities. His example involving events whose simultaneity could not be known at the time is the following incident that had also fascinated Kant. It concerns the Swedish mystic Emanuel Swedenborg's well-attested vision of the great fire in Stockholm in 1759. Swedenborg was at a party in Gothenburg about 200 miles from Stockholm when the vision occurred. He told his companions at six o'clock in the evening that the fire had started, then described its course over the next two hours, exclaiming in relief at eight o'clock that it had at last been extinguished, just three doors from his own house. All these details were confirmed when messengers arrived in Gothenburg from Stockholm over the next few days (1952b: pars. 912, 915).

Jung's example involving events that seemingly are not simultaneous at all concerns a student friend of his whose father had promised him a trip to Spain if he passed his final examinations satisfactorily. The friend then had a dream of seeing various things in a Spanish city: a particular square, a Gothic cathedral, and, around a certain corner, a carriage drawn by two cream-coloured horses. Shortly afterwards, having successfully passed his examinations, he actually visited Spain for the first time and encountered all the details from his dream in reality (Jung 1951b: par. 973).¹

In order to account for these further kinds of coincidences, Jung presents, in his 1951 essay, the following three-pronged definition:

All the phenomena I have mentioned can be grouped under three categories:

1. The coincidence of a psychic state in the observer with a simultaneous, objective, external event that corresponds to the psychic state or content (e.g., the scarab), where there is no evidence of a causal connection between the psychic state and the external event, and where, considering the psychic relativity of space and time, such a connection is not even conceivable.

2. The coincidence of a psychic state with a corresponding (more or less simultaneous) external event taking place outside the observer's field of perception, i.e., at a distance, and only verifiable afterward …

3. The coincidence of a psychic state with a corresponding, not yet existent future event that is distant in time and can likewise only be verified afterward.

In groups 2 and 3 the coinciding events are not yet present in the observer's field of perception, but have been anticipated in time in so far as they can only be verified afterward. For this reason I call such events synchronistic, which is not to be confused with synchronous.

(Jung 1951b: pars. 984–5)

The first prong of this definition adequately captures events such as the scarab incident. The second prong aims to capture events such as happened to Swedenborg, where the objective event (the Stockholm fire) occurs at a distance, can only be verified afterwards, but verification of which is ‘anticipated in time’ by a psychic image (Swedenborg's vision). The third prong aims to capture events such as happened to Jung's student friend, where the objective event (encountering the scene in the Spanish city) occurs in the future, can only be verified afterwards, but it is ‘anticipated in time’ by a psychic image (the student's dream).

Jung makes no such attempt to accommodate exceptions when it comes to acausality. As the first prong of his definition states, the possibility of a causal connection between the psychic state and external event of a synchronicity is ‘not even conceivable’.

Regarding the factor of meaning, Jung could rest with noting that experiencers of remarkable coincidences, as a matter of record, often do attribute meaning to them. However, he goes further than this and provides, albeit largely implicitly, a sophisticated theoretical account of why people attribute this meaning. This account converts Jung's work on synchronicity from the level of phenomenological description to that of theoretical explanation. To appreciate this theoretical explanation of the meaningfulness of coincidences requires that we briefly consider Jung's overall psychological model and its principal connections to his theory of synchronicity.

Jung's psychological model and its connections to synchronicity

For Jung, the human psyche consists of consciousness and the unconscious, and his psychological work, including his work on synchronicity, was primarily concerned with elucidating and promoting the relationship between them.

Consciousness

Consciousness, for Jung, is defined in terms of the relationship of psychic contents to the ego. It both is this relationship, insofar as it is perceived by the ego, and is the function or activity that maintains the relationship (1921: par. 700). Consciousness comprises all the experiences, memories, thoughts, imaginings, intentions, and so on, of which the ego is aware, as well as the process that keeps these contents related to and perceived by the ego. Psychic contents of which the ego is not aware, even if they happen to be related to the ego, are unconscious (ibid.). Jung's psychology is much concerned with the development of consciousness; that is, becoming aware of an ever-wider range of one's psychic activity and thereby increasing one's ability to act intentionally in relation to that psychic activity.

Any synchronicity that comes to be recognised as such clearly must involve consciousness. However, synchronicities not only involve but also can enhance consciousness by disclosing its connection both to the unconscious psyche and to the outer world. For example, the scarab coincidence connected the rationalistic conscious attitude of Jung's patient with ‘something unexpected and irrational’ that turned up both from her unconscious, in the form of the dream about a scarab jewel, and from the outer physical world, in the form of the real scarabaeid beetle that appeared at the window.

The ego, or ego-complex, that is so important for consciousness Jung defines as ‘a complex of ideas which constitutes the centre of my field of consciousness and appears to possess a high degree of continuity and identity’ (1921: par. 706). Because psychic contents are only conscious insofar as they are related to and perceived by the ego, Jung notes that the ego is ‘as much a content as a condition of consciousness’ (ibid.). In other words, without the ego one could not be conscious of anything; with it, one can be conscious of, among other things, the ego itself. Jung stresses that the ego is one psychic complex among others, and therefore is not identical with the entire psyche. Nor, though it is the centre of consciousness, is it the centre of the entire psyche, for the psyche consists of the unconscious as well as consciousness (ibid.). The primary role of the ego, for Jung, is to discriminate among objects, qualities and states that originally are psychically undifferentiated. For example, it is with the development of ego consciousness that a child differentiates itself from its parents, an adolescent discriminates moral and social values, and a psychologically maturing adult distinguishes images of people from the real people onto whom those images have been projected.

The relationship between synchronicity and the ego is a delicate one. On the one hand, the discrimination and continuity of the ego are essential for the task of interpreting and integrating the meaning of synchronicities. If Jung's patient does not have a sufficiently consolidated ego either to recognise the relationship between her conscious attitude and the synchronicity or to reflect in a sustained way on its significance, any potential of the synchronicity for promoting her psychological development will be lost. On the other hand, the limited perspective of the ego can obstruct realisation of the meaning of the unconscious contents emerging in the synchronicity. In the case of Jung's patient, the extreme rationalism with which her ego was identified had already made her ‘psychologically inaccessible’ to all forms of treatment. There must have been a risk that the same rationalistic orientation could have been used to explain away rather than explore the implications of her synchronistic experience. However, whether as an aid or an obstruction, the ego comes into operation in synchronicities only after the actual event of the synchronicity has taken place. The synchronicity itself, being acausal, unpredictable, and altogether irrational, bypasses the ego and its mechanisms of defence and control. The ego cannot resist the occurrence of synchronicities but can only take up a position on their acknowledgement and interpretation. In the case of Jung's patient, the content that emerged from the bypassing of the ego also specifically challenged the ego. Jung's statement that, following the synchronicity, the treatment of the patient ‘could now be continued with satisfactory results’ suggests that in this case she managed to rise to the challenge.

The consciousness of people varies not only according to the particular contents of which it is comprised, derived from each person's individual life history, but also according to their psychological type. Jung recognised two basic psychological attitudes and four basic functions of consciousness. The combination of attitude and functions predominant in a person's consciousness determines that person's psychological type. A psychological attitude, for Jung, is ‘a readiness of the psyche to act or react in a certain way’ (1921: par. 687). The two basic such attitudes are extraversion and introversion. Those with an extraverted attitude habitually direct their energy towards objects in the external world, while those with an introverted attitude habitually direct their energy towards objects in the internal world. A psychological function, for Jung, is ‘a particular form of psychic activity that remains the same in principle under different conditions’ (ibid.: par. 731). He identified four such functions: thinking, feeling, sensation and intuition. Briefly, thinking tells us what something is, feeling what its value is, sensation what it is, and intuition what its possibilities are. Thinking and feeling are considered to be rational functions in that they are concerned with judging (this not that, good not bad), while sensation and intuition are considered to be irrational functions in that they are concerned with perceiving (outer facts, inner visions). Both attitudes and all four functions exist in each person, but they can stand in various relations of prominence. One's type is characterised by the combination in one's consciousness of predominant attitude, strongest function (superior function), and next strongest function (secondary function). If the superior function is a rational function, then the secondary function must be one of the irrational functions. The other rational function will then be relatively unavailable to consciousness and be designated as the inferior function. Thus, there are sixteen possible psychological types in Jung's model. For example, one person might be an introverted intuitive type with secondary thinking, another might be an extraverted intuitive type with secondary feeling, and a third might be an extraverted feeling type with secondary sensation. In the case of the first two examples the inferior function will be sensation (since the superior function is the other irrational function of intuition), while in the third example the inferior function will be thinking (since the superior function is the other rational function of feeling).

The particular character of synchronistic events will often depend on the conscious orientation of the experiencer, and this in turn will partly depend on the experiencer's psychological type. Jung's patient would appea...