synchronicity

In his later years Jung lectured on and wrote out his ideas concerning an alleged phenomenon he called "synchronicity". If he's both coherent and correct in his ideas, he's not only given a name to a curious occurrence that may touch our lives at times of high moment, but discovered - or at least, adumbrated for science - a fourth fundamental "principle" of the natural world to go alongside the "principles" of space, time, and causality.

And what is synchronicity? Sometimes Jung spells it out negatively - as an "acausal connecting principle" [as in his major work's title; CW v8 417-531]. This, I think it's fair to say, gets us nowhere fast. Many phenomena which nobody including Jung would describe as synchronistic can after all be brought together under relational descriptions which don't invoke causality: "One punch may be half as powerful than another. The meaning of the French word "chat" is "cat". Tonight is darker than last night. Bob ran faster than Tim in the 100m; James' voice is lower than Geraldine's; the sausage roll is now inside of Tim's stomach." These - half of; meaning of; darker than; faster than; lower than; inside of - terms specify non-causal relations between things and happenings - but aren't examples of synchronicity. Jung alleges too that "we cannot imagine events that are connected non-causally and are capable of a non-causal explanation. But that does not mean that such events do not exist. Their existence - or at least their possibility - follows logically from the premise of statistical truth." [421-2] I hope it's already obvious from the trivial examples just given that this is quite wrong: we can readily imagine events that are connected non-causally, and frequently offer non-cause-citing explanations of them: "Why did you charge him twice as much for this pie? Cos it's twice as big as the other one." Jung: the "connection of events may in certain circumstances be other than causal, and requires another principle of explanation." [421] Yes. And we have plenty of such "principles" to hand. (One further negative angle Jung takes up is: synchronistic phenomena are not "chance" phenomena; they "exceed the limits of probability". I will get to this later.)

When spelling out synchronicity in positive terms, Jung most often refers to matters of 'form' and of 'meaning'. Events which are related synchronistically are "meaningful co-occurrences". Once again, however, this by itself takes us nowhere. Two people express the same meaningful idea ("my cat is very greedy") at the same time. Wow, synchronicity! No! This is all trivial - and not at all what he means. So what does he mean? A quote now from later in his essay: "Synchronicity ... means the simultaneous occurrence of a certain psychic state with one or more external events which appear as meaningful parallels to [it] - and, in certain cases, vice versa." [441] This doesn't yet tell us what kind of meaningfulness is in play, and we shall see later that this is important. It also doesn't help us see why merely chance coincidences of meaning (it's getting late and, whilst it's nice you've invited me round, I'm thinking "I really hope he offers me food soon" only for you to just then say "Would you like to eat soon?") are not to count as synchronistic. But note too the "appear as". In the first of the below examples - and I'm now giving some examples because they give us a better way in to the alleged phenomenon than Jung's attempts at definition provide - it won't count as synchronistic if the fox had been walking along in front of them at this time but out of sight:

I walk with a woman patient in a wood. She tells me about the first dream in her life that had made an everlasting impression upon her. She had seen a spectral fox coming down the stairs in her parental home. At this moment a real fox comes out of the trees not 40 yards away and walks quietly on the path ahead of us for several minutes. The animal behaves as if it were a partner in the human situation. (One fact is no fact, but when you have seen many, you begin to sit up.) [from a letter, 1945]

Two more examples from Jung now: 

A young woman I was treating had, at a critical moment, a dream in which she was given a golden scarab. While she was telling me this dream ... I heard a noise behind me, like a gentle tapping. I turned round and saw a flying insect knocking against the window-pane from outside. I opened the window and caught the creature in the air as it flew in. It was the nearest analogy to a golden scarab that one finds in our latitudes, a scarabaeid beetle, the common rose-chafer (Cetonia aurata), which contrary to its usual habits had evidently felt an urge to get into a dark room at this particular moment. [438]

The wife of one of my patients, a man in his fifties, once told me in conversation that, at the deaths of her mother and her grandmother, a number of birds gathered outside the windows of the death-chamber. I had heard similar stories from other people. When her husband's treatment was nearing its end, his neurosis having been cleared up, he developed some apparently quite innocuous symptoms which seemed to me, however, to be those of heart-disease. I sent him along to a specialist, who after examining him told me in writing that he could find cause for anxiety. On the way back from this consultation (with the medical report in his pocket) my patient collapsed in the street. As he was brought home dying, his wife was already in a great state of anxiety because, soon after her husband had gone to the doctor, a whole flock of birds alighted on their house. She naturally remembered the similar incidents that had happened at the death of her own relatives, and feared the worst. [438]

Consider now one further, rather lovely, example not from Jung:

I had been taking my kids out to the woods to walk in the forest every weekend for a few months. Every time we would go something cool would happen. We would see deer really close. Catch a snake. Find a salamander. See a beaver. Or see some really cool birds of prey (eagle, hawk or owl). Every time something happened. I would always tell my kids seeing these things were blessings from god. I especially thought the birds were symbolic because they resonate with me on a deep and spiritual level.

Then one time we brought walkie talkies and hid from each other. It was so much fun and made me feel like I was a kid again. But nothing “special” with nature happened. I told myself (not my kids) the wonderful fun we all had together was the blessing. But I felt like I was lying to myself.

The next week I was walking in the woods alone. I was on a long walk (7 miles) and had just passed the halfway mark when I thought to myself “Wow, nothing special has happened so far. And probably nothing special was going to happen. I guess I just make up that stuff about god to make me feel like god exists but he probably doesn’t.”

I was walking with my head down looking at the trail, deep in thought as this occurred to me. The INSTANT the thought was complete, I picked my head up from the trail and about 8 feet in front of me, sitting on a branch, only 10 feet off the ground was a beautiful and very big hawk.

It was BY FAR the closest I have ever been to a bird like that. I walk in the woods ALL the time. I have spent hundreds if not thousands of hours walking those trails. I had never seen a hawk like that so close nor on a branch so low to the ground. They perch high in trees. It was staring right at me.

I literally started laughing as I realized. God had just opened the veil of the universe to me for a moment.

The odds of that happening at that exact instant are staggeringly low. It would have been an insane “coincidence” if it happened within 30 minutes. But it happened the very instant my inner monologue had competed.

That was about six months ago. The week before Christmas. I have always believed in god but had some doubt. I no longer have any doubt. I do not claim to know what god is or to understand how god works. But I now have conviction there is a higher power. A power that knows and loves me as an individual.

The following four months I lived in a state of grace. An extended sense of peace and well being that I had only experienced a few other times in my life.

It may not sound so crazy to other people. And I am sure a skeptic could try to rationalize the event. But I know exactly how it happened and exactly what I experienced. I am good at math and understand probabilities. I know for a fact this was no coincidence. [thedmob; reddit]

This theme of 'no coincidence' is interesting in various ways. For one thing, thedmob of course doesn't know for a fact that an experience of thinking 'nothing special happens to me' just before something very special to him happens is not a coincidence. The law of truly large numbers reminds us that rare and intriguing coincidences simply must happen from time to time. But also let's remind ourselves what we mean by saying something is 'no coincidence'. What we mean is: there just must here be a causal relation between the two events. Jung however has introduced synchronicity precisely as the concept of a non-causal principle. (He also, for what it's worth, describes synchronicity as involving coincidence - although this presumably is no nod to chance but is instead a nod to the similar time (the co-incidence or co-occurrence) of the events in question.) And so it's now unclear what it means to talk of there not being a coincidence here. 

We find the same difficulty in Jung's own text too. He spends quite some time talking about the extreme improbability of synchronistic phenomena. (I leave aside his long description of the Rhine zener card experiments since they've not been replicated by other parapsychologists - and for which other explanations (participant fraud; publication bias; statistical errors) are available. ... Note too that Jung's statistical investigations of astrological conjunctions are unfortunately replete with p-hacking and other methodological errors.) For example, he tells us that the incidence of synchronistic events 'exceeds the limits of probability' [427] without telling us where we should place or find these limits when what we're considering are (what he is looking at, namely:) rare singular events rather than patterns in data sets. He shows particular interest in 'phantasms of the living' - as when someone has a vision of their friend dying some distance away at just the moment when they do die. Now, we can of course sometimes find ways to make such stories less unlikely (the person sensed that their friend was near death; they often had visions of people dying but tended to forget them unless they were of something that actually happened; etc), but naturally we'll also recognise - that 'law of truly large numbers' again - that sometimes the most improbable events genuinely do happen. (Of course they do!) Jung reports, for example, that "Dariex found a probability of 1:4,114,545 for telepathic precognitions of death, which means that the explanation of such a warning as due to "chance" is more than four million times more improbable than explaining it as a "telepathic," or acausal, meaningful coincidence." [430] Set aside Jung's shaky understanding of probability theory, and ask instead what it even means to talk of the probability of two events being related not by chance, and also not causally - but meaningfully? Or ask, for that matter, why we should, from the point of view of sheer (im)probability, be more impressed that George has a vision of Betty dying just when she does than that George has, for the first time in his life, a vision of a piece of broccoli just when Betty pops her clogs. The probability of the latter cooccurrence may after all be even lower!

Herein lies the great instability of Jung's theory: it constantly involves us in reasoning of the sort we employ only for causes (this conjunction is very unexpected to occur unless there's a causal relationship) whilst simultaneously denying that causes are what we here have to do with - and whilst also invoking an ill-explicated notion of 'meaningful coincidence' to take causality's place. And so on the one hand Jung's reasoning looks like Paley's when he says 'If we were to encounter a perfectly made watch on the ground, would we really think it just happened to spontaneously self-assemble, or would we instead assume it had a creator?' (And isn't the universe rather like such a watch? And is it not also unreasonable to think it too has no creator?) But then again, it's precisely not the causal powers of agency, but instead symbolic meaning, that Jung imputes to the world about us. The scarab beetle or hawk don't just appear at these troubled moments by chance; they are there to tell us something. It's not just that we may impute meaning to them. It's not just that they happen to pull us out of ourselves; it's not just that what for us are their natural symbolic resonances have a striking effect on us. That, after all, is consistent with their being there at all being, as we say, accidental. Jung's use of causal reasoning - it is beyond improbable that the scarab beetle was at the window at the very moment the patient relays her dream about a scarab beetle - aims to underscore the suggestion that these are no accidents. The difficulty though is that when we say 'the beetle would not have been tapping at the window just then were the patient not to be recounting her scarab dream' we are making a causal claim about why something happened.

It may seem curious that Jung wants his synchronicity to be a fourth fundamental principle of the cosmos when synchronistic events happen so infrequently. Isn't part of the motivation for calling space, time and causality 'fundamental principles' the fact that they're so utterly general? We can, however, understand this elevation of synchronicity to such a grand status if we see Jung as motivated by the difficulty of avoiding the charge of magical thinking here. The kind of relation between inner and outer worlds in which Jung takes an interest is not - Jung would have us understand - merely one of symbolic resonance, nor is it that the one magically gives rise to the other. ('Giving rise to' is an example of what we mean by: a causal relationship.) "But what is it then?" ... "Well, it's difficult to explain in terms we already understand! Which all goes to show that it's a different, altogether new, principle!" ... This however won't do, especially since - as I shall discuss later - we have available plausible psychological or psychiatric explanations as to why someone may be compelled to believe in synchronicity. 

Now I think it's fair to say that, as an attempt to elucidate a cogent meaning of synchronicity, thinking about (the absence of) causality has taken us down a blind alley. What will, I suggest, be a more fruitful track to take, however, is considering the particular manner in which inner and outer worlds are meaningfully involved with each other in the synchronicity experience. Here's another example - this time from both Jung and Freud. We are back in April 1909 when Jung was visiting Freud in Vienna and trying to interest him in synchronistic phenomena. Freud, "because of his materialistic prejudice", rejects them as nonsense, and this angers Jung:

While Freud was going on in this way, I had a curious sensation. It was as if my diaphragm were made of iron and was becoming red-hot - a glowing vault. And at that moment there was such a loud report in the bookcase, which stood right next to us, that we both started up in alarm, fearing the thing was going to topple over on us. I said to Freud: "There is an example of a so-called catalytic exteriorisation phenomenon."

"Oh come," he exclaimed. "That is sheer bosh."

"It is not," I replied. "You are mistaken, Herr Professor. And to prove my point I now predict that there will be another loud report!" Sure enough, no sooner had I said the words than the same detonation went off in the bookcase.

To this day I do not know what gave me this certainty.

At the end of the month Freud wrote to Jung:

I do not deny that your comments and your experiment made a powerful impression upon me. After your departure I determined to make some observations, and here are the results. In my front room there are continual creaking noises, from where the two heavy Egyptian steles rest on the oak boards of the bookcase, so that's obvious. In the second room, where we heard the crash, such noises are very rare. At first I was inclined to ascribe some meaning to it if the noise we heard so frequently when you were here were never again heard after your departure. But since then it has happened over and over again, yet never in connection with my thoughts and never when I was considering you or your special problem. (Not now, either, I add by way of challenge). The phenomenon was soon deprived of all significance for me by something else. My credulity, or at least my readiness to believe, vanished along with the spell of your personal presence ... ... The furniture stands before me spiritless and dead, like nature silent and godless before the poet after the passing of the gods of Greece.

What Jung here calls a "catalytic exteriorisation phenomenon" would, I think, elsewhere be called by him a synchronistic event. The rage state which manifests inside his body and mind somehow also manifests in the outer bang; the occurrence of the latter, whether or not properly thought of as caused by the former, is still in some sense yet its indicator, its expression, its symbolic realisation. Or so the theory has it. But what is this sense? 

An anthropological observation now: the fact is that at least some people just are moved to see natural events as possessing personal significance. It's not just that we can read patterns of significance into what is about us - not just that we can see faces in the clouds or in the leaves (pareidolia). This form of apophenia is widespread - I suspect that everyone is at least capable of it. It's a kind of aspect perception, a form of 'seeing as' ('see the moving dots as a dancing person'), which can vary from the spontaneous to the willed. There is however another form of apophenia, closer to Klaus Conrad's original psychopathological notion, where the meaning that's perceived has a distinctly personal significance. (It's not just that there's the ordinary kind of meaning and that I take it up in a personal manner. It's that what talk of "meaning" means here, in these cases, is: something intrinsically personal.) Versions of this range from the immediate experience of first-personal relevance in delusional perception to the interpretative offerings of the oracle. With the latter we don't immediately see the patterns in the livers or entrails, tealeaves or yarrow stalks, stars above or tarot cards on the table, as saying something about my life. For such an interpretation we have to first seek out the oracle. With the schizophrenic subject who has suffered an autocentric polarisation of his experiential field, by contrast, all the events around him - the changing of the traffic light, the colour of that woman's dress, the message in that number plate - are, in his delusional perception, immediately experienced as relating directly to him (anastrophe). 

We can I think begin to make some empathic sense of this by thinking on the difference between walking in a crowd and hearing our name being called and immediately assuming it's ourself, versus knowing it's someone else, who's being addressed. In the former case we become automatically readied for further address as we become alive to the idea of ourselves as objects of another's attention. We are singled out here as special: nobody else is given this communicative gift; our subjectivity shines. In the latter this whole mode of relating remains unactivated, and we continue to go about our own business. In this latter situation we still encounter meaning in the world - either the meaning we invest in it, or that deposited in it by others, but neither of these types of meaning takes the form of the personal address. We may be addressed as part of a collective (an advertisement or a muezzin making a call to prayer invite anyone to come in to a shop or mosque), but not personally. In the second form of the above two forms of apophenia, however, the meaning which we experience is indeed like that of the personal address.

It's tempting at this point to leave the discussion with the claim that the experience of synchronicity is simply a subclinical form of delusional perception - as if the mere invocation of the latter pathological phenomenon should be enough to discredit the former. This however won't do, since the real discussion here is between those 'romantics' who do think that personal meaning is abroad in the world, and who suspect ideological bias, rather than a straightforward realistic spirit, lurking behind any drawing of a sharp boundary between inner and outer, personal and natural, and those 'naturalists' who confine the meaningful to the intra-human domain. "In truth it isn't that we romantics have projected the inner into the outer; it's instead that you naturalists have leached meaning from the world about us. The world that I live in is a world of signs and wonders, and I pity your impoverished reality in which meanings are confined to the human. And who says that the inner/outer boundary just is as sharp as you want to make it?" Perhaps they shall even claim, in idealist fashion, that the placement of the inner/outer demarcation is not an empirical, but a transcendental, matter: its placement makes for the possibility of certain experiences rather than there being a 'correct' locus for it, a locus to be discovered through and in experience. Whether one lives in a world of spirits, or at least in a world in which meaning is abroad in the world, will then be a matter of what kind of world is 'constructed' rather than of what is 'there anyway'.

 Now, with aspects of the romantic's argument I find I have some sympathy. It isn't enough to just mention pathology. And I'm unconvinced that the proper placement of the ego boundary is a purely empirical matter. (That, for one thing, would seem to allow what I would want to deny: that the synchronicity pundit makes a mistake rather than falls into confusion.) Even so, it seems to me that the synchronicity believer has considerably run ahead of himself. And that this believer, like the believer in what we call 'superstition', is, if not mistaken, then at least seriously confused. (We often just grow out of such confusions as we age, but if their topics become surrounded by enough specialist vocabulary, well-rehearsed dialectical modes, and are embedded in practices, then they can survive.) I've already noted the way in which those of Jung's arguments for synchronicity which invoke probability theory are confused, since they deploy cause-establishing forms of reasoning whilst simultaneously denying that causality is here in play. But notice too how we ordinarily establish whether something has personal significance of a sort that goes beyond what we, the receiver of the message, give it. We ask the one giving the message whether they intended it for us. Note that I don't mention this asking just to point out how we gain evidence that an address had us as its object. I mention it to remind us what it means to talk of our so much as being the object of someone's utterance or note. Ask the scarab beetle what it's intent on knocking on the window was, however, and we come back empty handed. It's simply hard to know what would even count as a criterion of correctness for the claim that the crows on the roof were a portent of one person's death rather than another's. (Is it so much as possible that they land on the wrong house?) 

Zener cards

The naturalist, note, also has a strong theory as to what is going on in synchronicity experiences. We can glean some of this from the thoughtful approach to superstition of Lindeman and Aarnio. Pre-school children, they note, have intuitive knowledge of the essential properties of the physical, biological, and intentional domains. In superstition, however, these become conflated, so that we can “define superstitious, magical, and paranormal beliefs as category mistakes where the [ontologically] core attributes of mental, physical, and biological entities and processes are confused with each other.” Thus thoughts are considered to possess properties of physical objects and so to be transmissible or make objects move (telepathy, telekinesis). Representations take on the property of what they represent (a rabbit's foot doesn't only symbolise happiness, but somehow carries happiness inside itself). Hitler's personality contaminates his sweater so you wouldn't wear it. Written or spoken spells become causally efficacious. Understood as superstition, synchronicity becomes another such fundamental conflation, one in which physical events become like messages, replete now with their own intentionality, and, further, as discussed above, carrying the kind of meaning which is met with in the personal address. Perhaps it is even because the confusions in question touch on such basic, fundamental themes, that people can find it hard to pull them into reflective view.

One final piece of light to shed on the synchronicity experience arises from reflecting once again on Jung's initial formulation. Synchronistic experiences, he says, involve "the simultaneous occurrence of a certain psychic state with one or more external events which appear as meaningful parallels to" it. [441] It is the "appear as" that I want to focus on here. The significant relationship is not between inner emotionally significant events and outer roughly contemporaneous symbolically potent worldly events. There will after all exist, in the world, thousands of contemporaneous events bearing a striking symbolic relationship to any of your inner predicaments. And we do not treat these correlations as instances of synchronicity. No, it is the relationship between a subject's inner experiences and such events as appear to the subject that is typically in play. (Something different obtains when the synchronistic relationship obtains in the other direction, i.e. as when Swedenborg, far from home, has a vision of his home nearly burning down at what turns out to be at the very time this actually happens. My sense is that little justification exists for Jung's inclusion of both forms within the same category.) Synchronicity, that is, is not only an event - but is itself an experience. Those who experience synchronistic events will sometimes go through stretches of many of them. My suggestion is that, during these times, which again are ably understood as sub-clinical delusions of reference, what we have to do with is an ongoing fragility of the ego boundary. Parts of the mind's own meaning-making are now experienced as belonging instead to the world about one. The striking sense of in these moments being as it were 'known' or 'spoken to' by the non-human world results, I suggest, from the self-world synthesis obtaining in an atypical manner. Underlying (what to the naturalist at least is) the apparent epistemological confusion of synchronicity is, then, a deeper ontological confusion: a confusion affecting the very structuration of the self. This also gives us a way to understand the "no coincidence" aspect of the synchronicity experience, since it's no mere coincidence that the mind concurs with what in some sense belongs to it.