Franz Writes

We should rather see synchronistic phenomena in terms of the simple actuality or suchness of a contingence that cannot be reduced any further, that is, in terms of an acausal modality.

— Marie-Louise von Franz

Von Franz is pressing against the reflex to make synchronicity mean something — to insert it into a story about what the psyche is trying to say, what the universe is offering, what you are being called toward. That reflex is nearly irresistible, and it is precisely what she is asking you to relinquish. The acausal modality she names does not deliver messages. It delivers coincidence in its strictest sense: a falling-together that cannot be reduced to intention, symbol, or design without importing a cause through the back door.

What resists this is not stupidity but desire — the pull toward a world organized around the self's need for significance. Jung's formulation of synchronicity already tempts that pull by framing the meaningful coincidence as evidence of unus mundus, of a deeper ordering. Von Franz holds the frame but removes the consolation: *suchness* is a term borrowed from Buddhist philosophy precisely because it refuses elaboration. The thing happened. It was acausal. That is the whole of the statement. If something opened in you when you read the passage you drew, that opening is real — but it is not a communication addressed to you. It is contingency making contact with a psyche already primed to receive it, and the difference between those two descriptions is not trivial.


Marie-Louise von Franz·Psyche and Matter·2014