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THE RHINE JUNG LETTERS: DISTINGUISHING PARAPSYCHOLOGICAL FROM SYNCHRONISTIC EVENTS

1998; Rhine Research Center; Volume: 62; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

0022-3387

V. N. Mansfield, Sally Rhine-Feather, James A. Hall,

Religious Studies and Spiritual Practices

In his essay Synchronicity: An Acausal Connecting Principle (1978c), Carl Jung repeatedly mentioned J. B. Rhine's experiments and how important they were to him. Jung's two-volume set of letters also contains much of the correspondence between them. However, a more complete set of the letters between Jung and Rhine recently surfaced in the Rhine archives. For example, the following quotation from a letter to Rhine that did not find its way into Jung's two-volume set of letters: I regretted very much not seeing you when you were in Europe. Soon after you left I recovered from my illness and I have been able to finish a paper that largely based upon your ESP which, by the way, intensely discussed over here by psychologists as well as physicists. (C. G. Jung, personal communication to J. B. Rhine, September 3, 1951) The startling revelation that Jung's synchronicity essay is largely based upon your ESP experiment cannot be found in Jung's Collected Works, his published letters, or his autobiography. Here we explore the relationship between these two great pioneers and their work. We attempt to build upon their achievements by developing the recent idea (Mansfield, 1995) that, contrary to Jung and subsequent Jungian writers, synchronicity distinct from parapsychological events. We show how this distinction leads to a deeper understanding of both phenomena and aids in their laboratory study. Along the way, we weave some of the previously unpublished letters into our discussion. SYNCHRONICITY AND UNCONSCIOUS COMPENSATION In synchronicity, according to Jung, an inner psychological state such as a dream, fantasy, or feeling acausally connects to outer events through meaning. Comprehending Jung's definition requires us to appreciate how he understands acausality and meaning. Causality/Acausality Jung uses the term cause in the conventional sense of an efficient cause involving some force, energy, or information traveling from one well-defined object to another. For example, in discussing synchronicity he writes, We must give up at the outset all explanations in terms of energy, which amounts to saying that events of this kind cannot be considered from the point of view of causality, for causality presupposes the existence of space and time in so far as all observations are ultimately based upon bodies in motion. (Jung, 1978c, para. 836) Any classical interaction in physics serves as an example, such as an electric field causing a proton to accelerate, or, psychologically, anger causing blood pressure to rise. In synchronicity, however, no causal connections exist between the inner psychological states and the outer material events: no inner states cause the outer events, or vice versa. We call this horizontal acausality, since the inner states and outer events are on the same epistemic level--both are consciously known. There also vertical acausality, since there no transcendent or unconscious cause. Marie-Louise von Franz (1992), whose contribution to synchronicity second only to Jung's (see her book Psyche and Matter, 1992) clarifies this when she writes: According to the Jungian view, the collective unconscious not at all an expression of personal wishes and goals, but a neutral entity, psychic in nature, that exists in an absolutely transpersonal way. Ascribing the arrangement of synchronistic events to the observer's unconscious would thus be nothing other than a regression to primitive-magical thinking, in accordance with which it was earlier supposed that, for example, an eclipse could be caused by the malevolence of a sorcerer. Jung even explicitly warned against taking the archetypes (of the collective unconscious) or psi-powers to be the causal agency of synchronistic events. …