Yes that is the book! Having now found my copy of Jung's
Synchronicity: an acausal connecting principle (originally published in the German language in 1952 as
Naturerklärung und Psyche), I take the liberty of transcribing three key passages for the interest and inward digestion of our members and "guests."
First a passage extracted from a point not far from the beginning:
Rhine's experiments show that - in relation to the psyche - space and time are, so to speak, "elastic" and can apparently be reduced almost to vanishing point, as though they were dependent on psychic conditions and did not exist in themselves but were only "postulated" by the conscious mind. In man's original view of the world, as we find it among primitives, space and time have a very precarious existence. They became "fixed" concepts only in the course of his mental development, thanks largely to the introduction of measurement. In themselves, space and time consist of
nothing. They are hypostatized concepts born of the discriminating activity of the conscious mind, and they form the indispensable co-ordinates for describing the behaviour of bodies in motion. They are, therefore, essentially psychic in origin, which is probably the reason that impelled Kant to regard them as
a priori categories. But if space and time are only apparently properties of bodies in motion and are created by the intellectual needs of the observer, then their relativization by psychic conditions is no longer a matter for astonishment but is brought within the bounds of possibility. This possibility presents itself when the psyche observes, not external bodies, but
itself. That is precisely what happens in Rhine's experiments: the subject's answer is not the result of his observing the physical cards, it is a product of pure imagination, of "chance" ideas which reveal the structure of that which produces them, namely the unconscious. Here I will point out only that it is the decisive factors in the unconscious psyche, the archetypes, which constitute the structure of the collective unconscious. The latter represents a psyche that is identical with itself in all individuals. It cannot be directly perceived or "represented," in contrast to the perceptible psychic phenomena, and on account of its "irrepresentable" nature I have called it "psychoid."
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Next a passage extracted from two thirds of the way through:
Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz (1646 to 1716) came up with the idea of
pre-established harmony, that is, an absolute synchronism of psychic and physical events. This theory finally petered out in the concept of "psychophysical parallelism." Leibniz's pre-established harmony and the above-mentioned idea of Schopenhauer's, that the unity of the primal cause produces a simultaneity and interrelationship of events not in themselves causally connected, are at bottom only a repetition of the old Peripatetic view, with a modern deterministic colouring in the case of Schopenhauer and a partial replacement of causality by an antecedent order in the case of Leibniz. For him God is the creator of order. He compares soul and body to two synchronized clocks, and uses the same simile to express the relations of the monads or entelechies with one another. Although the monads cannot influence one another directly because, as he says, they "have no windows" (relative abolition of causality!), they are so constituted that they are always in accord without having knowledge of one another. He conceives each monad to be a "little world" or "active indivisible mirror." Not only is man a microcosm enclosing the whole in himself, but every entelechy or monad is in effect such a microcosm. Each "simple substance" has connections "which express all the others." It is "a perpetual living mirror of the universe." He calls the monads of living organisms "souls": "the soul follows its own laws, and the body its own likewise, and they accord by virtue of the harmony pre-established among all substances, since they are all representations of one and the same universe." This clearly expresses the idea that man is a microcosm. "Souls in general," says Leibniz, "are the living mirrors or images of the universe of created things." He distinguishes between minds on the one hand, which are "images of the Divinity . . . capable of knowing the system of the universe, and of imitating something of it by architectonic patterns, each mind being as it were a little divinity in its own department," and bodies on the other hand, which "act according to the laws of efficient causes by motions," while the souls act "according to the laws of final causes by appetitions, ends, and means." In the monad or soul alterations take place whose cause is the "appetition." "The passing state, which involves and represents a plurality within the unity of simple substance, is nothing other than what is called perception," says Leibniz. Perception is the "inner state of the monad representing external things," and it must be distinguished from conscious apperception. "For perception is unconscious." Herein lay the great mistake of the Cartesians, "that they took no account of perceptions which are not apperceived." The perceptive faculty of the monad corresponds to the
knowledge, and its appetitive faculty to the
will, that is in God. It is clear from these quotations that besides the causal connection Leibniz postulates a complete pre-established parallelism of events both inside and outside the monad. The synchronicity principle thus becomes the absolute rule in all cases where an inner event occurs simultaneously with an outside one.
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And now something from the final page:
Synchronicity is no more baffling or mysterious than the discontinuities of physics. It is only the ingrained belief in the sovereign power of causality that creates intellectual difficulties and makes it appear unthinkable that causeless events exist or could ever occur. But if they do, then we must regard them as
creative acts, as the continuous creation - not only a series of successive acts of creation, but also the eternal presence of the
one creative act - of a pattern that exists from all eternity, repeats itself sporadically, and is not derivable from any known antecedents. We must of course guard against thinking of every event whose cause is unknown as "causeless." This, as I have already stressed, is admissible only when a cause is not even thinkable. But thinkability is itself an idea that needs the most rigorous criticism. Had the atom corresponded to the original philosophical conception of it, its fissionability would be unthinkable. But once it proves to be a measurable quantity, its
non-fissionability becomes unthinkable. Meaningful coincidences are thinkable as pure chance. But the more they multiply and the greater and more exact the correspondence is, the more their probability sinks and their unthinkability increases, until they can no longer be regarded as pure chance but, for lack of a causal explanation, have to be thought of as meaningful arrangements. As I have already said, however, their "inexplicability" is not due to the fact that the cause is unknown, but the fact that a cause is not even thinkable in intellectual terms. This is necessarily the case when space and time lose their meaning or have become relative, for under those circumstances a causality which presupposes space and time for its continuance can no longer be said to exist and becomes altogether unthinkable.
For these reasons it seems to me necessary to introduce, alongside space, time, and causality, a category which not only enables us to understand synchronistic phenomena as a special class of natural events but also takes the contingent partly as an universal factor existing from all eternity, and partly as the sum of countless individual acts of creation occurring in time.
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Thus C. G. Jung the Swiss founder of Analytical Psychology.