Synchronicity

Synchronicity is the acausal connecting principle by which psychic and physical events coincide in meaning without standing in a causal relation. The concept is Jung’s, articulated in his 1952 essay “Synchronicity: An Acausal Connecting Principle”; the extended scholarly elaboration is marie-louise-von-franz‘s across Number and Time, On Divination and Synchronicity, and the essays collected in Psyche and Matter.

Von Franz quotes Jung’s most precise formulation: synchronicity is an instance of “general acausal orderedness — that, namely, of the equivalence of psychic and physical processes where the observer is in the fortunate position of being able to recognize the tertium comparationis… This form of orderedness differs from that of the properties of natural numbers or the discontinuities of physics in that the latter have existed from eternity and occur regularly, whereas the forms of psychic orderedness are acts of creation in time” (von Franz 2014). Acausal orderedness is the genus; synchronicity is the species in which the orderedness is a singular creative act.

Her extension of the concept proceeds through number — the natural numbers as “the archetype of order which has become conscious” — through the divinatory techniques by which cultures have attempted to read the orderedness (the I Ching, astrology, geomancy), and through the commentary of the seventeenth-century Chinese philosopher Wang Fu-Chih, whose account of a continuum “ordered in itself” she treats as an exact parallel to Jung’s concept of the unus-mundus (von Franz 2014).

Relationships

• unus-mundus
• archetype
• number

Primary sources

• von-franz-psyche-and-matter (von Franz 2014)
• von-franz-cg-jung-his (von Franz 1975)