From Nowhere: Artists, Writers, and the Precognitive Imagination

Whatever their impact on mainstream psychology, Carl Jung's ideas have exerted an incalculable influence on the culture at large.Jungian concepts such as extraversion/ introversion, the shadow, archetypes, and the collective unconscious have long been part of the common lexicon.Yet perhaps no Jungian concept has gained as much cultural currency as his strangest: synchronicity.As Eric Wargo notes in From Nowhere: Artists, Writers, and the Precognitive Imagination:Synchronicity today is more popular, and arguably, more culturally relevant, than ever before.It is the subject of countless books and blogs, not at all confined to Jungian psychology and metaphysics.The past decade has seen a flood of selfhelp books with titles like Connecting with Coincidence and Super-Synchronicity and The Synchronicity Key."Synchromystics" actively draw connections, however improbable, among historical events, popular culture, archeology, and occult writings as a means of accessing the collective unconscious or divining the archetypal logic of history.UFO experiencers sometimes consider synchronicities to be messages or interventions from the nonhuman intelligence(s) behind the phenomenon.Synchronicity is now, arguably, a worldview, one that goes well beyond Jung and depth psychology (Wargo, 2024, p. 190).As the notion of synchronicity has spread, it has grown diffuse, applying to a widening array of phenomena, sometimes with little regard for its original (at times baffling) formulation.In some cases, such as with the UFO experiencers and synchromystics Wargo mentions, synchronicity has come to signify its very opposite-not an "acausal connecting principle" so much as a higher form of causation.For Jung, synchronicity did not, strictly speaking, serve an explanatory function-if it did, it would not be "acausal.""[S]ynchronistic phenomena," he wrote, "cannot in principle be associated with any conceptions of causality" (Jung, 1969, p. 30; my emphasis).What he sought were qualitative grounds for distinguishing meaningful coincidences from meaningless ones (Jung, 1969).The need for this arose from the role such coincidences play in people's lives, a role of such importance that astounding examples can be drawn from the life of just about anyone.When I was an aspiring filmmaker in my youth, a relative arranged for me to meet a local artist named Olivier Asselin, then chair of the visual arts department at the University of Ottawa.I was nervous about this meeting, and as I walked toward the entrance of the visual arts building on the appointed day, I was seized by an urge to turn back.Just as I did, a delivery truck passed in front of me, momentarily blocking my path.