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

What had begun as one semester's exploratory testing of Duke students in his psychology classes led to the discovery of a number of students who scored very high when tested individually in separate series. By the end of two years of testing, the overall results were highly significant, even when the experimental conditions were tightened and greater safeguards imposed. By 1932, Rhine and his team felt that they had demonstrated the existence of psychic phenomena, which Rhine named "extrasensory perception." More importantly, they had noted that the subjects' ESP scores showed natural relationships, just as ordinary psychological phenomena do (i.e., performance dropping off with fatigue and picking up with the use of caffeine). Judging just from references to it in the synchronicity essay, the card-guessing test impressed Jung.

Spurred on by their success, positive public reaction, and departmental support, the Duke work expanded to include other independent variables such as distance, time, and psychological factors. Experimental conditions and methodology were refined, largely in response to the extensive criticism the monograph had received from skeptics in the scientific world. With funds raised almost single-handedly, Rhine established the Duke Parapsychology Laboratory in 1935. In 1937, the Journal of Parapsychology was initiated to provide a forum for parapsychology papers that were being rejected by the orthodox publications of the time.

In 1940, Rhine sent Jung a copy of his third and most definitive book, Extra-Sensory Perception After Sixty Years (Pratt, Rhine, Smith, Stuart, & Greenwood, 1940). Written with five colleagues from the Duke Parapsychology Laboratory, this book summarized the extensive work done to that point at the Duke Lab. It answered in some detail all the 35 criticisms current at that time. In response to this book, Jung graciously replied, "Dear Dr. Rhine, Your volume has reached me safely in spite of all the war trouble. It is a most interesting and valuable piece of work you have produced with your collaborators. I'm glad that somebody has undertaken the enormously patient work to produce an unshakable basis for ESP" (C. G. Jung, personal communication, July 24, 1940).

The correspondence between Rhine and Jung continued, sometimes sporadically, over the next two decades, even during the war years. They exchanged their more recent books, usually inquired about the other's health, and frequently expressed appreciation and admiration for the ideas or achievements of the other. On April 1, 1948, Jung (1973) wrote to Rhine about his book The Reach of the Mind (Rhine, 1947):

Dear Dr. Rhine,

I've read your book with greatest interest and I thank you very much

for sending me more than one copy. People read it a lot over here and

I have recommended it to several physicists interested in

psychological and parapsychological matters. I think it is one of the

greatest contributions to the knowledge of unconscious processes. Your

experiments have established the fact of the relativity of time, space and