Synchronicity and Psi: How Are They Related?

Carl Jung’s interest in parapsychology was kindled by personal psychic experiences, especially an anomalous banging sound emanating from a bookcase while he was in the company of Sigmund Freud. He also had an interest in Spiritualism and communicated extensively with J. B. Rhine about experimental parapsychology. He credits parapsychology with influencing the development of his theory of synchronicity. The purpose of this paper is to compare and contrast synchronicity experiences with psi experiences. Jung defined synchronicity as “the occurrence of a meaningful coincidence in time” (italics added). Re time, Jung generally viewed the elements of a synchronicity as simultaneous, but he did allow for a temporal relationship akin to precognition. With respect to meaning, Jung insisted that to be synchronicities, coincidences must reflect the activation of “archetypes”, primal themes of good an evil inherited from our ancestors, and be of psychodynamic relevance to the experiencer. Psi experiences are not so restricted. Braude has criticized Jung for erroneously claiming that events can have inherent meaning. This problem can be overcome by saying that events differ in their capacity to evoke meaning in a person. Which events have this capacity must be defined by consensus among Jungian scholars. Jung postulated that one element of a synchronicity must be an experience and the other an objective event; this would seem to exclude pure telepathic experiences as examples of synchronicity. Synchronicity is unpredictable in the same sense that ESP card-guessing subjects cannot reliably predict whether any given response would be a hit. Jung performed an astrology experiment, finding that married couples shared astrological signs relevant to marriage more frequently than chance, but said that such statistical significance was not necessary; parapsychologists would not be so generous. Synchronicity cannot be the consequence of volition, which would seem to preclude most laboratory psi results; however, one can solve this problem by postulating that volition only accompanies psi in experiments. Mansfield, who sees no overlap between psi and synchronicity, subsumes psi under Jung’s principal of “general acausal orderliness”. At the level of physical theory, Jung subsumed synchronicity under quantum mechanics as interpreted by Pauli, and also saw correspondences to relativity theory. Compared to theories of psi, synchronicity theory comes closed to Stanford’s conformance behavior model, but Stanford insists conformance is causal. The controversy over whether it makes sense to consider synchronicity acausal can be viewed as a semantic issue related to different definitions of causality being implicitly adopted by Jung and his critics. So long as synchronicity can be considered to some degree nomothetic, it can be tested empirically. At the physical level, testing can be considered isomorphic to tests of related psi theories such as the observational theories. Assuming a list of archetypes and evoking circumstances can be gleaned from Jung’s writings, the theory can be tested psychologically by comparing test results under synchronicity conducive and non-conducive conditions. Jung suggested that evoking trance-like states and a sense of the miraculous can evoke archetypes. One might also explore manipulation of the archetypal content of ESP targets.