The archetypal idea of a “hidden meaning behind chaotic events in life” appears when subjects find themselves in certain types of situation: when it seems that “there is no way out”. Jung says this both in the synchronicities essay and in the spirit essay. Yet there is a third line of thought in his work which arrives at the same point, but via an entirely different route.
Jung’s two essays on synchronicities and on spirit in the fairy tale have a striking claim in common: that there is a “hidden meaning [Sinn] behind the chaotic events in life”. It will be interesting to compare how the two essays introduce the core finding: there is an interesting commonality, and one important difference.
I have explored, in some depth now, a particular archetypal idea: that “there is a hidden meaning behind chaotic life”. The way I have explored it was through Jung’s essay on spirit, which deals explicitly with it. But there is a connection between this idea and synchronicities, which Jung, it seems, didn’t make.
Synchronicities are something that "appears” in an individual person’s life, usually at some particular stage or around some event. Therefore, we can assume that there are certain patterns in people’s lives when archetypes are triggered, resulting in greater likelyhood of experiencing synchronicities.
Jung’s essay on synchronicities is centered around the notion of causality: he points out certain phenomena that (according to him) cannot be causally explained, and in general he claims that the law of causality is insufficient as a principle for scientific explanation. What does he actually mean by terms such as ‘causal’ and 'causality'?
The notion of projection is a broad umbrella which covers a variety of different ways in which unconscious contents might appear, to a subject, as something they notice in the external world. Presumably, some archetypal structures are best expressed in personified form, whereas others lend themselves to a different, more abstract representation: as relationships, as connections.
Jung says that synchronistic phenomena appear when an archetype of the collective unconscious is triggered (or ‘constellated’). He also points out that this usually goes along with projections. Interestingly, the mirror theory of eros arrives at a similar result.
Let’s say we understand the collective unconscious as a set of patterns, called archetypes, of psychological processes. A subject’s psychology may, in a given situation, start to conform to such a pattern. What is such a 'triggering' like?
If archetypes are patterns, the obvious question is: patterns of what?
Several of my difficulties in understanding the supposed “psychological relativity” of time and space had to do with the weird nature of the collective unconsciousness, as Jung conceives of it. Let’s catch up with some of that.
Leif Frenzel is a writer and independent researcher. He has a background in philosophy, literature, music, and information technology. His recent interest is Jungian psychology, especially synchronicities and the relationship between consciousness and the unconscious.