Week 5: Jung and synchronicity
Carl Jung's "meaningful coincidence" — an event linked to your inner state by meaning rather than cause — and whether that's a real category or a good name for a feeling.
Is synchronicity a real category of event, or a name for a coincidence we refuse to let go of?
Carl Jung coined synchronicity to describe a category of event he thought existing psychology had no room for: two things happening together, connected not by cause and effect but by shared meaning to the person experiencing them. His own frequently cited case involved a patient describing a dream about a golden scarab beetle, at the exact moment a real scarab-like beetle tapped on the consulting-room window. Jung treated the coincidence itself as clinically significant — not a distraction from the therapy, but part of it.
This week’s slide deck is where the concept actually gets built, piece by piece, and it’s worth opening before you read further: where synchronicity sits in Jung’s broader theory of archetypes and the collective unconscious (the same “shared symbolic layer” week 4 left as an open question), why he thought existing psychology had no word for what he was describing, and the strongest objections — chiefly, that “meaningfully connected without being causally connected” is doing an enormous amount of unexamined work, and that every example offered in its favour is also fully explicable by base rates and selective memory, as in the activity below.
An unlikely collaborator#
Jung didn’t develop this idea alone, and the person he developed it with is one of the more surprising pairings in twentieth-century intellectual history: the physicist Wolfgang Pauli, a Nobel laureate and one of the founders of quantum mechanics. Pauli was Jung’s analysand in the 1930s, and the two kept up a serious correspondence about the boundary between physics and psychology for years afterward. That collaboration produced a genuinely unusual joint publication in 1952 — a single volume pairing Jung’s essay on synchronicity with an essay by Pauli on the astronomer Johannes Kepler’s own mystical numerology. Pauli’s interest wasn’t casual: quantum mechanics had already forced physicists to accept that some events (which atom decays, and when) have no classical cause, only a probability — and Pauli wondered, seriously, whether acausal meaningful connection might be a comparably real feature of the world rather than a psychological illusion. Historian of science Arthur I. Miller’s Deciphering the Cosmic Number (2009) reconstructs this friendship in full, including how uneasy Pauli’s physics colleagues were about where it led him.
Why causality is the harder habit to break#
Here’s the philosophical difficulty synchronicity runs into, stated plainly. Modern science doesn’t just prefer causal explanations — it’s built on the assumption that if two things are reliably connected, a mechanism exists to find, even if it hasn’t been found yet. Synchronicity asks you to accept a connection with no mechanism in principle, only significance to an observer. Critics raise the standard falsifiability objection: a category that can only be confirmed by feeling significant, and is never expected to produce a testable prediction, is difficult to distinguish from simply naming a psychological experience and treating the name as an explanation. Defenders reply that Jung was never claiming to replace physical causality — only to describe a second kind of connection, operating at the level of meaning to a mind, that causal explanation was never designed to capture in the first place. Neither side has forced a resolution in seventy years, which is itself informative about what kind of claim this is.
The aim is not to debunk Jung in one lecture — plenty of serious people have found the concept useful as a description of a psychological event, whatever its status as a claim about the world. The aim is to hold both readings at once: something real is happening when a coincidence feels significant, and that “something” may be entirely explicable without the coincidence itself carrying any information at all.
Further reading#
- Carl Jung, Synchronicity: An Acausal Connecting Principle (1952).
- Arthur I. Miller, Deciphering the Cosmic Number: The Strange Friendship of Wolfgang Pauli and Carl Jung (2009).
Scarab, revisited#
Open the slides for the full argument, then try the activity below — the same three readings apply to Jung’s own scarab story.
Interpretation test 05
You are thinking, for the first time in years, about an old friend you lost touch with. Ten minutes later, they call. What kind of event is this?
This is Jung's own proposed category: not causal, but not coincidental either — connected by significance to the person experiencing it. It's a genuinely different claim from either of the other two readings, which is exactly why it's controversial: it asks you to accept a kind of connection that isn't causation.
The base-rate argument from week 2 applies directly: across a lifetime of half-remembered old friends, some of them are going to call in the ten minutes after you happen to think of them, purely by chance. You don't remember the thousands of times you thought of someone and nothing happened.
This is the reading Jung's critics reach for most often: look for the ordinary causal link before reaching for an extraordinary one. A shared anniversary, a photo that surfaced online, a mutual contact mentioning them — any of these would make the 'coincidence' fully explicable, just not yet noticed.
Case analysis 05
Hold the friend-calls-back case up against a short checklist before reading the discussion below.
Across a whole life, how many old friends exist to think about, and how many ten-minute windows are there to catch a call in?
Would you remember the times you thought of someone and nothing happened, as clearly as you remember this one?
Is there a mutual contact, anniversary, or online trace that could have cued both of you at once, entirely without coincidence?
All three boxes usually apply at once, which is the actual argument of this week: 'synchronicity' isn't a rival explanation competing with base rates and selective memory, it's a name for how the event feels once those two have already done their work. Whether that feeling deserves its own category, on top of the mechanism, is the real question Jung is asking — not whether the mechanism is real.
How this works
Checking boxes here doesn't score or grade anything — it's just a way of making your own reading explicit before you read the discussion below. The discussion text is fixed and appears the same regardless of what you check.
Teaching team
- Dr Wren Castellan — convenor