Synchronicity Cambray.pdf

background to his notion of synchronicity synchronicity.. We We will first look at these explicitly identified sources and later will include some additional sources. Roderick Main 58 has helpfully identified eight areas of influence that contributed to Jung’s thinking about synchronicity, some of which are explicitly used in the monograph, others are not. As the focus of this study is not the same as Main’s, Main’s, the influences I will point to are also different, and even when the same or similar sources are used, what is emphasized is distinct. Citing a long passage from Albertus Magnus on magic, itself borrowing from a treatise of the tenth- to eleventh-century Persian physician/polymath Avicenna, which recognizes the role of emotion as the “cause” of such [magic] [ magic] events, e vents, Jung Jung seeks to provide a venerable philop hilosophical pedigree for his new conception. This continues with a quote from Goethe, “W “Wee all have certain electric elec tric and magnetic mag netic powers within wit hin us and ourselves exercise an attractive attract ive and repelling force, according as we come into touch with something like or unlike.” 59 Although Jung notes that this remains a precursor, as a form of magical thinking, he does not comment on the metaphors used—in the next chapter we will touch upon the late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century’s use of such conceptions from physics to explain psychological states. For the present it should be noted that Goethe’s comments are from the last decade of his life (d. 1832), that is, they precede the scientific formulations of electrical and magnetic phenomena in terms of field theory as first articulated by Michael Faraday in 1845, which we shall see is directly relevant to Jung’s ideas—a precursor that Jung does not explicitly explicit ly identify but that is highly germane. Jung goes on to make passing reference reference to the work of those later nineteenth-century scientists involved in the Society for Psychical Research (SPR), but his main attention is reserved for the I Ching, or Book of Changes,  the ancient Chinese philosophical text with its divinatory method—he had of course also written the foreword to Wilhelm’’s translation Wilhelm t ranslation of the I Ching, where he had presented some of his ideas on synchronicity.60 From his reading Jung was struck by the capacity for an intuitive grasp of the whole of a situation that seemed to be offered in this oracle. For him the Chinese sages accordingly

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Chapter 1