The Rhine-Jung letters: distinguishing parapsychological from synchronistic events - J.B. Rhine; Carl Jung

Journal of Parapsychology, The, March, 1998 by Victor Mansfield, Sally Rhine-Feather, James Hall

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 is 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

is largely based upon your ESP experiment which, by the way, is 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 is 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 Along the way, we weave some of the previously unpublished letters into our discussion.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 is also vertical acausality, since there is no transcendent or unconscious cause. Marie-Louise von Franz (1992), whose contribution to synchronicity is 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 is not at all an

expression of personal wishes and goals, but is 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. (p. 231)

Thus, neither the unconscious, nor archetypes, nor some other transcendent principles are causal agents for synchronicity. Synchronicity does not deny causality, however, but is a complementary or compensatory principle. As Jung (1975) said, "It is obvious to me that synchronicity is the indispensable counterpart to causality and to that extent could be considered compensatory" (p. 426). Although easy to state, acausality is mysterious, especially because our commitment to causal processes is so deep and unconscious, so pervasive in our thinking and language. Usually we believe that if there is no causal connection between things, then there really is no connection at all. Fortunately, quantum processes are excellent examples of deeply interrelated but acausal processes in nature, as Jung learned from Wolfgang Pauli (Mansfield, 1995).

Like most of us, Rhine had difficulty accepting the idea of acausal connections. After nearly two decades of correspondence with Jung, and in response to a synchronicity paper by C. A. Meier (no English translation of Jung's synchronicity essay was available then), Rhine wrote on July 17, 1954:

Professor Dr. C. G. Jung

Seestrasse 228

Kusnacht-Zurich

Germany

Dear Professor Jung:

I have just finished a letter, a very tardy one, to Professor Meier,