Synchronicity and the I Ching: Jung, Pauli, and the Chinese woman

The capacity of the human mind to discover and invent both imagistic analogies and mathematical structures to represent reality is strikingly juxtaposed in the ancient Chinese text of the I Ching. Its emphasis on containing all sorts of opposites and its plastic appeal to multi-valenced experience has kept it alive through millennia and across cultures. Jung was introduced to its Taoist wisdom by the Sinologist Richard Wilhelm. The Nobel Laureate quantum physicist Wolfgang Pauli became familiar with its philosophy and mathematics through his reading of Schopenhauer and Leibniz. In their correspondence about the nature of the unconscious and synchronicity, Pauli and Jung also exchanged their musings on Pauli's dreams of a Chinese woman, her role in his psyche and his scientific theories(1).     

Jung's psychoid concept and Bion's proto‐mental concept: a comparison

Jung and Bion both developed theoretical concepts propounding a deeply unknowable area of the psyche in which body and mind are undifferentiated and the individual has no distinct identity, from which a differentiated consciousness arises. In Jung's case, this is enshrined in his psychoid concept and the associated notion of synchronicity and, in Bion's case, in his proto‐mental concept and his ideas on group dynamics. It is by means of these two concepts that Jung and Bion approach and locate a combined body‐mind, a monism, in which body and mind are seen as different aspects of the same thing. This paper reviews the claim that although the two concepts are associated clinically with very different situations, their commonality may arise from a similar intellectual basis: both men appear to have been influenced by the same source of vitalist ideas in philosophy including Henri Bergson, and Jung's ideas also exerted a direct influence on Bion.     

Leibniz on Natural Teleology and the Laws of Optics

This essay examines one of the cornerstones of Leibniz's defense of teleology within the order of nature. The first section explores Leibniz's contributions to the study of geometrical optics, and argues that his "Most Determined Path Principle" or "MDPP" allows him to bring to the fore philosophical issues concerning the legitimacy of teleological explanations by addressing two technical objections raised by Cartesians to non-mechanistic derivations of the laws of optics. The second section argues that, by drawing on laws such as the MDPP, Leibniz is able to introduce a thin notion of teleology that gives him the resources to respond to the most pressing charges of his day against teleological explanations within natural philosophy. Finally, the third section argues that contemporary philosophers have been overly hasty in their dismissal of Leibniz's account of natural teleology, and indeed that their own generally thin conceptions of teleology have left them with few well-motivated resources for resisting his elegant position.     

A REAPPRAISAL OF LEIBNIZ'S VIEWS ON SPACE, TIME, AND MOTION

Leibniz has been widely praised for maintaining against the Newtonians of his day the view that space and time are relative. At the same time, he has been roundly criticized for allowing that we can distinguish absolute from merely relative motion. This distribution of applause and criticism, I will argue, is in a measure unjustified. For on the one hand, those arguments, found in his correspondence with Clarke, by which Leibniz seeks to reject the view that space and time are "something absolute" are for the most part unsatisfactory, and on the other hand, Leibniz was not so naive as his critics have supposed in allowing absolute motions. Sections I - V of this essay will be concerned with the former issue; Leibniz's views on motion will be taken up in Section VI. The chief interest in all of this for present-day philosophers may lie, not so much in the historical issues concerning Leibniz and the Newtonians, but in a meta-philosophical question which inevitably arises from the historical issues, namely, the question whether developments in science can undermine the soundness of philosophical arguments which appeal to ordinary usage.     

LEIBNIZ ON BODY, MATTER AND EXTENSION

This paper explores Leibniz's conception of body and extension in the 1680s and 1690s. It is argued that one of Leibniz's central aims is to undermine the Cartesian conception of extended substance, and replace it with a conception on which what is basic to body is force. In this way, Leibniz intends to reduce extension to something metaphysically more basic in just the way that the mechanists reduce sensible qualities to size, shape and motion. It is also argued that this move is quite distinct from the reduction of body to monads and their appetitions and perceptions, so prominent in his later writings.     

Queering gender: anima/animus and the paradigm of emergence

An exploration into the world of the queer others of gender and sexuality moves us beyond the binary opposition of male/masculinity and female/femininity in our understanding of gender and expands the meaning of gender and sexuality for all humans. A revision of Jungian gender theory that embraces all genders and sexualities is needed not only to inform our clinical work but also to allow us to bring Jungian thought to contemporary gender theory and to cultural struggles such as gay marriage. The cognitive and developmental neurosciences are increasingly focused on the importance of body biology and embodied experience to the emergence of mind. In my exploration of gender I ask how gender comes to be experienced in a developing body and how those embodied gender feelings elaborate into a conscious category in the mind, a gender position. My understanding of emergent mind theory suggests that one's sense of gender, like other aspects of the mind, emerges very early in development from a self-organizing process involving an individual's particular body biology, the brain, and cultural environment. Gendered feeling, from this perspective, would be an emergent aspect of mind and not an archetypal inheritance, and the experiencing body would be key to gender emergence. A revised Jungian gender theory would transcend some of the limitations of Jung's anima/animus (A/A) gender thinking allowing us to contribute to contemporary gender theory in the spirit of another Jung; the Jung of the symbolic, the mythic, and the subtle body. This is the Jung who invites us to the medial place of the soul, bridging the realm of the physical body and the realm of the spirit.     

Learning from the patient: The East,synchronicity and transference in the history of an unknown case of C.G. Jung

This article presents the history of one until now unknown case of C.G. Jung: Maggy Reichstein. Born in Indonesia in 1894 in a very aristocratic family, she brought her sister to Zurich to be treated by Jung in 1919, and later she herself was in analysis with him. Jung used her case as example in his lecture in 1937 on the realities of practical psychotherapy, relating it to the process of transference and countertransference. Jung deepened his studies in Eastern psychology after a series of dreams she had, which culminated in the Yoga Kundalini Seminars. She was also the case presented in his article of 1951 on the concept of synchronicity. Jung wrote that her case, concerning synchronicity, remained unique in his experience. Jung also published some of her mandalas. He considered her able to understand his ideas in depth. Reichstein was for Jung an important case, which challenged and triggered his interests in different subjects.     

The timeliness and timelessness of the 'archaic': analytical psychology, 'primordial' thought, synchronicity

In 1930 Jung gave a lecture entitled 'Archaic Man' to the Lesezirkel in Hottingen. Following recent work on this text by two commentators, this article uses their interpretations as a springboard for a complementary reading, which emphasizes the fundamental significance of this paper as bridging the earlier and later stages in the development of analytical psychology, and examines closely the opposition between 'archaic'-'modern' in Jung's paper; indeed, in his work as a whole. In contrast to Lévy-Bruhl, Jung rejects the label of 'mysticism' as applied to the 'primitive' point of view, and his anti-mystical stance can be explained in terms of his dialectical conception of the relationship between Self and World. On this account, the subject and the object--the psyche and the external world--are more closely (inter)related than conventional (modern) epistemology and ontology generally believe. This conception of the relation between the subjective and the objective foreshadows his later, and controversial, concept of synchronicity, which is, Jung insists, a way of apprehending the world in terms of its meaning. Concluding with a survey of the status of the 'primordial' in some other texts by Jung, this article aims to foster further debate on one of Jung's most complex and fascinating texts.     

One Thousand Dreams

The dreams in Psychology and Alchemy were important to Jung because they portray a natural process in the unconscious in which the mandala symbolism gradually takes form, with emphasis on a centre. The dreamer is led through a labyrinth of archetypal symbolism which lays in evidence the dynamic structure of the psyche.
Jung was obviously not permitted to reveal the identity of the man behind the dreams. This paper introduces the historical dreamer, Wolfgang Pauli (1900-1958), together with a sample of his significant dreams as discussed by Jung. The intent is to bear witness to the suffering which hides behind the archetypal imagery, as well as the transformative power of the archetype, lending support to Jung's statement that 'behind every neurosis there is a religious problem'.
Pauli was a genius, who as a Nobel laureate ranked with the top physicists of this century. As a one-sided intellectual atheist alienated from his feelings, in his early thirties he met with an emotional crisis, which led him to Jung for treatment. The dreams that Pauli experienced at that time carried him through a depth experience, a nekyia, that transformed his attitude toward life. They were also a precursor to a dream life that stimulated his investigation of non-causal influences common to quantum physics and (analytical) psychology, i.e. the 'psychophysical problem', including synchronicity.
A legacy of Pauli's life was to show that the non-rational unconscious can give meaningful expression to the functioning of a scientific mind.     

On Kant’s Knowledge of Leibniz’ Metaphysics—a Reply to Garber

Daniel Garber has put forward an argument that aims to show that Kant’s understanding of Leibniz’ metaphysics should be discounted because he could only have had access to a small and narrow sample of Leibniz’ works from around 1710–1714. In particular, Garber argues that as Kant could not have read Leibniz’ correspondence with Arnauld or his correspondence with Des Bosses he could not have had an adequate conception of Leibniz’ understanding of the relation between substance and body. I will show that Kant could have read some of the Arnauld correspondence and practically all of the Des Bosses correspondence, as well as a number of other related texts that are important for understanding Leibniz’ metaphysics, over a decade before writing the Critique of Pure Reason. Garber’s historical-textual argument for dismissing Kant’s account of Leibniz’ metaphysics is therefore seriously misleading.     

Jung and Chinese Religions: Buddhism and Taoism

This article introduces the close relationship between Jung and Chinese religions, compares Jung’s psychological theories to Chinese religious thoughts taking Buddhism and Taoism as examples, and draws the following three conclusions. First, although Jung never went to China, Jung’s interest and studies in Chinese religions continued throughout his life. Second, there are important similarities and differences between Jung’s unity of opposites and Buddhism’s “Middle Way,” Jung’s synchronicity and Karmic harmony, Jung’s Self and Buddhism’s Self, and Jung’s individuation and Buddhism’s meditation. Third, there are significant, close relationships between Jung’s concepts of synchronicity, Self, and his three principles of psyche and parallel concepts in Chinese Taoism.     

Leibniz's Rigorous Foundation Of Infinitesimal Geometry By Means Of Riemannian Sums

In 1675, Leibniz elaborated his longest mathematical treatise he everwrote, the treatise ``On the arithmetical quadrature of the circle, theellipse, and the hyperbola. A corollary is a trigonometry withouttables'. It was unpublished until 1993, and represents a comprehensive discussion of infinitesimalgeometry. In this treatise, Leibniz laid the rigorous foundation of thetheory of infinitely small and infinite quantities or, in other words,of the theory of quantified indivisibles. In modern terms Leibnizintroduced `Riemannian sums' in order to demonstrate the integrabilityof continuous functions. The article deals with this demonstration,with Leibniz's handling of infinitely small and infinite quantities,and with a general theorem regarding hyperboloids.     

Jung and Pauli

In his early theories of the structure of the psyche, psychic energy and psychodynamics, Jung was influenced by William James's understanding of the complementary insights of depth psychology and the discoveries of subatomic physics, and his concept of field in physics and the study of the subconscious. In his relationship with Freud, Jung initially struggled with a sexually-based drive theory. But he gradually came to conceive libido as a quantitative concept, a psychic analogue of physical energy. In their own languages, both C. G. Jung and Nobel physicist Wolfgang Pauli explored the evolution of scientific thought from the naive insights about process in alchemy through Newtonian causality, space-time theories of relativity to quantum mechanics. Jung had access to thirteen hundred of Pauli's dreams. The first four hundred were basis for his research into alchemical symbolism in a modern psyche. In a later collaboration, Pauli supported Jung's synchronicity principle as scientific, and Jung fostered Pauli's understanding of the archetypal and collective factors in the psyche. They each explored the interconnections between the energies of psyche and matter, and the possibilities of acausal order and synchronicity. Pauli's ground-breaking discoveries gave scientific demonstration of alchemical intuitions. Through him, alchemical and archetypal insights entered the discourse of physics. Through Jung, the apprehensions of microphysics entered our psychological language and thought.     

Synchronicity and the meaning-making psyche

This paper contrasts Jung's account of synchronicity as evidence of an objective principle of meaning in Nature with a view that emphasizes human meaning-making. All synchronicities generate indicative signs but only where this becomes a 'living symbol' of a transcendent intentionality at work in a living universe does synchronicity generate the kind of symbolic meaning that led Jung to posit the existence of a Universal Mind. This is regarded as a form of personal, experiential knowledge belonging to the 'imaginal world of meaning' characteristic of the 'primordial mind', as opposed to the 'rational world of knowledge' in which Jung attempted to present his experiences as if they were empirically and publicly verifiable. Whereas rational knowledge depends on a form of meaning in which causal chains and logical links are paramount, imaginal meaning is generated by forms of congruent correspondence-a feature that synchronicity shares with metaphor and symbol-and the creation of narratives by means of retroactive organization of its constituent elements.     

My Art by the Numbers

The author explains his affinity for numbers as it relates to his work as an artist spanning his long career. This affinity helped him invent one of the first systems for making four-color digital prints. Having been only recently introduced to the book Number and Time, by Marie-Louise von Franz, the author finds that he is in full agreement with her depth psychology theories on number. Recounting a synchronicity that he experienced while writing this paper helped the author to understand Jung’s concept of the unus mundus, as explained by von Franz in Number and Time. He speculates that number archetypes must have evolved in human consciousness over very long periods of time and writes about the number zero as a “recent” example. The author also describes his experience of a spontaneous mathematical vision that led him to create an algorithm, which in turn led him to realize that crystals having fivefold symmetry could exist in nature, which was considered impossible at the time. The author discusses his new inventions of quasi-periodic and random tile patterns, which were inspired by 15th-century Islamic tile patterns, as they related to the aperiodic patterns invented by Roger Penrose in the 20th century. He speculates about the ability of artificially intelligent computer software to be able to generate random quasi-periodic patterns. Lastly, the author recounts a synchronistic experience that occurred during the month of his 72nd birthday, in which his work with numbers is seemingly reciprocated by nature.     

Towards the feeling of emergence

Emergence is a multi-dimensional notion; the meanings it has acquired span the mythopoetic to the scientific, especially as found in complex systems. Examples of emergence in Navaho and Egyptian imagery underscore its diverse cultural origins and applications as well as suggesting an underlying archetypal quality to the core concept. A brief overview of the use of this term in science starting in the 17th century helps to locate the roots of modern emergent views in the philosophy of Leibniz. Jung's own use of early systems approaches was a part of his formulations of a 'third' position associated with the transcendent function. As this paper was delivered at the 50th anniversary conference of the Journal of Analytical Psychology, aspects of the emergence of the Journal within the contents of the first issue are explored. Attention is drawn to several articles, especially a case of brief child therapy done by Robert Moody. His approach to working his case is strikingly modern and vividly demonstrates principles of emergence within the clinical setting. Following this there is a discussion of some neuroscientific research on neural body maps, pointing to the experience of feelings as an emergent process. It is suggested that feelings derive from phase transitions in the brain's body mapping states. A reconsideration of a seeming impasse in the case described by Moody leads instead to a view of the initial phase of treatment as a pre-critical period. Research findings on mirror neurons are presented in terms of the feeling of empathy. Subjective feelings are then shown to be associated with moments of emergence, especially surprise and curiosity, exemplified by a case from the author's practice.     

Beyond synchronicity: the worldview of Carl Gustav Jung and Wolfgang Pauli

While exploring the phenomena of synchronicity, Carl Gustav Jung became acquainted with the quantum physicist Wolfgang Pauli and eventually began a collaboration with him. During that collaboration Jung's study of synchronistic phenomena underwent a considerable change; prior to the collaboration, Jung had stressed mainly the phenomenological and empirical features of synchronistic phenomena, while in association with Pauli, he focused his attention upon their ontological, archetypal character. Pauli, on the other hand, became increasingly sensitive to the philosophical aspects concerning the unconscious. Jung and Pauli's common reflections went far beyond psychology and physics, entering into the realm where the two areas meet in the philosophy of nature. In fact, as a consequence of their collaboration, synchronicity was transformed from an empirical concept into a fundamental explanatory-interpretative principle, which together with causality could possibly lead to a more complete worldview. Exploring the problematic character of the synchronicity concept has a heuristic value because it leads to the reconsideration of the philosophical issues that drove Jung and Pauli to clear up the conceptual background of their thoughts. Within the philosophical worldview arising from Jung and Pauli's discussions about synchronicity, there are many symbolic aspects that go against mainstream science and that represent a sort of criticism to some of the commonly held views of present day science.     

Alchemy as a Psychological Model

In Part I, this article traces the history of how Jung came to his realization that alchemy was a precursor for his concept of individuation. This includes his key dream of 1926, which he only slowly understood; a Short History of Alchemy; and how Jung was finally able to Bring Order out of Chaos. Part II examines the key elements of Jung's great late work, Mysterium Coniunctionis. This includes the Conjunction of Opposites; Personification of Opposites; Nature of the Conjunction; the Alchemical Creation Myth; and an amplification of each of The Three Unions: (1) the unio mentalis, or mental union; (2) the union of the mind with the body; and (3) the union of the mind and body with the unus mundus, or unitary reality.     

Psyche, Matter and Synchronicity

In 1948, and with Pauli s enthusiastic support, Jung began to write down his thoughts on synchronicity. A two-year correspondence ensued, with a focus on psyche and matter, and the importance of acausality within the frameworks of physics and psychology.
This paper traces the improbable interaction between the physicist and the psychologist, as these great scientists enrich and merge their formative views on acausality. Bolstered by his dreams, Pauli draws a correspondence between psychology and atomic physics, centring on the 'psychophysical problem', including synchronicity. Seminal thoughts are discussed, such as the need to broaden the concept of the archetype, and to recognize that the future of analytical psychology is not to be found primarily in therapy but in a 'unified holistic conception of nature and the status of man within it'. Two world pictures were constructed, identifying a non-causal (non-rational) side to reality, as experienced both in physics and the psyche. Pauli discusses his concept of a 'neutral language', the aim being to bridge the gap between psyche and matter, both of which are seen to rest on a common foundation, known to the alchemists as the unus mundus. The collaboration was highlighted with the publication of their book, The Interpretation of Nature and the Psyche (1952), which emphasizes the archetypal influence of archetype on consciousness.     

A brief history of negation

The history of scholarship on negation tracks and illuminates the major developments in the history of metaphysics, philosophy of language, and philosophy of mind, from Parmenides, Plato and Aristotle through Frege, Russell, and Wittgenstein to contemporary formal theorists. Our perspective focuses on the catalytic role played by the 20th century philosopher of language Paul Grice, whose views on negation serve as a fulcrum for his attempt to bridge the (neo-)Traditionalist and Formalist traditions in logical thought. Grice's remarks on negation and speaker meaning and the elaboration of his ideas by subsequent neo-Griceans are summarized and situated within a broader picture of the role of contradictory and contrary negation in the frameworks of Aristotelians, Medievals, early modern schoolmaster-logicians, 19th and early 20th century neo-Idealists and Formalists, Oxford ordinary-language analytics, practitioners of classical and non-classical logics, and a range of other philosophers and linguists. Particular attention is paid to the relations between negation and the other operators of propositional and predicate calculus. Implications for accounts of the semantics and pragmatics of natural language are also pursued and extensive references to related work are provided.