Synchronicities and the world-person direction

In a given synchronistic experience, the subject perceives a coincidence in the external world; attached to this experience is an impression of meaningfulness, even a “numinous” feeling. To undergo an experience like that is not deliberate: the subject has not consciously chosen to be aware of the coincidental events, nor of the accompanying feeling of meaningfulness.

Such an episode is then an instance of an unconsciously driven perception; a synchronistic experience is a sub-type of a more general type of experience where any conscious act may be driven unconsciously (similar to compulsive behavior, unbidden memories, sudden appearance of emotion, feelings of deja vu, …). What singles out the experience of synchronicities is that it is specifically a perception of coincidental external events.

In this, it is the converse of compulsive behavior or disruptions of action (including speech action). When something drives us to check whether the stove is turned off, again and again; when we find ourselves slowing down or speeding up our steps against our will; or when slips, hesitations, inability to remember names creeps into our talk — the unconscious intervenes in processes with person-world direction (the person’s will and mind produce effects in the external world, i.e. actions and speech). Conversely, when we suddenly perceive notable coincidences in what happens, the unconscious forces itself into a world-person directed stream: perception and understanding our surroundings. Unconsicous break-ins with that direction seem to be a rare kind, however; most others have person-world direction (which makes it more obvious to interpret them psychologically).

synchronicities

When we try to understand the synchronicities essay, and related writings from Jung’s late period, we face a deep-seated complication: Jung himself thought of his project along the lines of a misleading analogy...

If, as Hillman thinks, there is a particular kind of mystical “knowledge in the soul” which stems from recollections of underworld journeys, then we might ask whether this helps us to further clarify the “why”: namely, why a gradual removal from life and the world (which is what an underworld journey amounts to) is so important for the psyche. I have already traced three theoretical approaches to...

The workings of our social environment are so close before our eyes that we often don’t even notice them; but many of them profoundly shape what we perceive as “reality”. It has proved fruitful to understand this along the lines of an analogy: social interactions share many characteristics with theatrical performances. Thus social interactions are enacted, as if on a stage, and “reality” is of...

I ended an earlier post deriving a (very rough) sketch of an ontological layout that would be consistent with Jungian thought. It would be consistent in the sense that it takes seriously both its methodological fundamental — starting with subjective experience — and its central idea — that our subjective experience is not fully transparent to our conscious personalities. Taking them seriously...

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