Atom, Archetype, and the Invention of Synchronicity: How Iconic Psychiatrist Carl Jung and Nobel-Winning Physicist Wolfgang Pauli Bridged Mind and Matter – Brain Pickings
▻https://www.brainpickings.org/2017/03/09/atom-and-archetype-pauli-jung
Modern microphysics turns the observer once again into a little lord of creation in his microcosm, with the ability (at least partially) of freedom of choice and fundamentally uncontrollable effects on that which is being observed. But if these phenomena are dependent on how (with what experimental system) they are observed, then is it not possible that they are also phenomena (extra corpus) that depend on who observes them (i.e., on the nature of the psyche of the observer)? And if natural science, in pursuit of the ideal of determinism since Newton, has finally arrived at the stage of the fundamental “perhaps” of the statistical character of natural laws … then should there not be enough room for all those oddities that ultimately rob the distinction between “physics” and “psyche” of all its meaning…?
If you turn Pauli’s words over in your mind for a few moments, you’d realize just how radical and enormous a proposition this is. Indeed, it was this letter that catalyzed the series of conversations in which Pauli and Jung came up with the concept of synchronicity — the ultimate dependency between the observer and the observed. By the fall of 1948, they were using the term regularly in their correspondence. In a letter from mid-1949, Jung writes to Pauli, enclosing a manuscript of his first paper on the subject:
Quite a while ago, you encouraged me to write down my thoughts on synchronicity… Nowadays, physicists are the only people who are paying serious attention to such ideas.
A few days later, Pauli echoes this faith in interdisciplinary thinking by sharing with Jung one of his great intellectual influences:
The idea of meaningful coincidence — i.e., simultaneous events not causally connected — was expressed very clearly by Schopenhauer in his essay “On the Apparent Design in the Fate of the Individual.”
[…]
This essay of Schopenhauer’s had a lasting and fascinating effect on me and seemed to be pointing the way to a new trend in natural sciences. But whereas [he] wanted at all costs to cling to the rigid determinism along the lines of the classical physics of his day, we have now acknowledged that in the nuclear world, physical events cannot be followed in causal chains through time and space. Thus, the readiness to adopt the idea on which your work is based, that of the “meaning as an ordering factor,” is probably considerably greater among physicists than it was in Schopenhauer’s day.