Prior to Carl Jung's work on synchronicity his psychology consisted in ideas based solely on the inner world of the psyche. This was so regardless of whether Jung was thinking about personal psychological phenomena such as complexes or collective psychological phenomena such as archetypes. But when Jung began to collaborate with the Nobel Prize winning physicist, Wolfgang Pauli; his archetypes theory progressed from psychological to psychophysical. Jung and Pauli's ideas resulted in a philosophy of nature. In a brief first part of this essay we will look into Jung's pre-synchronicity view of archetypes. In this part of the essay we will also define the basic definition of synchronicity as in its original psychological definition. We will also outline the usual scarab example in order to give the reader a basic idea of what is meant by synchronicity. Part 1 is a helpful and necessary prerequisite to part 2 which goes beyond the basics in expounding Wolfgang Pauli's contribution to the Jungian worldview.
[...] Pauli's critical contribution is aimed at helping Jung to clear up and define precisely [ ] conceptual formulations.”5 What Jung and Pauli agreed on from the beginning was possibility and usefulness [ ] of a further principle of [the] interpretation of nature other than the causal principle.”6 However, at first synchronicity was applied solely to inner psyche and outer external world. This is now only one part of the equation. There is another part concerning non-psychic acausality. As we can see from this logic, Pauli and Jung were striving for an all-encompassing unified worldview. [...]
[...] As a further consequence of the worldview arising from the discussions of synchronicity, philosophy would be no longer a mere, almost useless, appendage of science, but it would discover its role of active collaborator again, directly helping scientists to approach the study of nature and the construction of a philosophical and scientific worldview.”2 However, I have to unfortunately end on problems that I envisage (and that I think are obvious problems). Ego-differentiation is how the healthy modern individual is psychologically constructed. [...]
[...] He writes that one alternative theory to the archetypes is “that the motifs do indeed arise independently in each individual but this is because all individuals, in their personal lives, are subject to the same basic range of typical experiences.”1 And “another alternative explanation, this time denying the independent origin of the motifs, is cryptomnesia—the possibility that cultural expressions of the motifs may have been observed but then forgotten, or observed subliminally without ever having entered conscious awareness.”2 In other words there are rival theories to the psychological theory. [...]
[...] Jung claims that the female patient in question was “psychologically inaccessible [and incapable of more human understanding.”12 Thus Jung actually says that he wanted and hoped for the unexpected to happen in order to break-through the rational barriers of his patient. Such a happening did occur. Jung writes was sitting opposite her one day, with my back to the window, listening to her flow of rhetoric. She had had an impressive dream the night before, in which someone had given her a golden scarab—a costly piece of jewellery. [...]
[...] Rather than subordinate the archetype to statistics, statistics are subordinated to the universality of the archetypes.8 And Pauli came to embrace the wider definition of synchronicity that encompassed all of nature (beyond just the psychical) as his inclination was search for overall structures and worldviews.”9The shift from the original psychological definition of synchronicity to the all-encompassing unified definition is crucial. Donati makes this clear pointing out that the original version was based on experiences that people have from time to time. [...]
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