''Synchronicity: An Acausal Connecting Principle'', by

Carl Gustav Jung Carl Gustav Jung ( ; ; 26 July 1875 – 6 June 1961) was a Swiss psychiatrist and psychoanalyst who founded analytical psychology. Jung's work has been influential in the fields of psychiatry, anthropology, archaeology, literature, philo ...

, is a book published by

Princeton University Press Princeton University Press is an independent publisher with close connections to Princeton University. Its mission is to disseminate scholarship within academia and society at large. The press was founded by Whitney Darrow, with the financial su ...

in 1960. It was extracted from '' Structure & Dynamics of the Psyche'', which is volume 8 in '' The Collected Works of C. G. Jung''. The book was also published in 1985 by

Routledge Routledge () is a British multinational publisher. It was founded in 1836 by George Routledge, and specialises in providing academic books, journals and online resources in the fields of the humanities, behavioural science, education, law, and ...

. To Jung,

synchronicity Synchronicity (german: Synchronizität) is a concept first introduced by analytical psychologist Carl G. Jung "to describe circumstances that appear meaningfully related yet lack a causal connection." In contemporary research, synchronicity ...

is a meaningful

coincidence A coincidence is a remarkable concurrence of events or circumstances that have no apparent causal connection with one another. The perception of remarkable coincidences may lead to supernatural, occult, or paranormal claims, or it may lead t ...

in time, a psychic factor which is independent of space and time. This revolutionary concept of synchronicity both challenges and complements the physicist's classical view of

causality Causality (also referred to as causation, or cause and effect) is influence by which one event, process, state, or object (''a'' ''cause'') contributes to the production of another event, process, state, or object (an ''effect'') where the cau ...

. It also forces a basic reconsideration of the meaning of chance,

probability Probability is the branch of mathematics concerning numerical descriptions of how likely an Event (probability theory), event is to occur, or how likely it is that a proposition is true. The probability of an event is a number between 0 and ...

, coincidence and the singular events in our lives. Jung was intrigued from early in his career with coincidences, especially those surprising juxtapositions that scientific rationality could not adequately explain. He discussed these ideas with

Albert Einstein Albert Einstein ( ; ; 14 March 1879 – 18 April 1955) was a German-born theoretical physicist, widely acknowledged to be one of the greatest and most influential physicists of all time. Einstein is best known for developing the theory ...

before

World War I World War I (28 July 1914 11 November 1918), often abbreviated as WWI, was one of the deadliest global conflicts in history. Belligerents included much of Europe, the Russian Empire, the United States, and the Ottoman Empire, with fightin ...

, but first used the term ''

'' in a 1930 lecture, in reference to the unusual psychological insights generated from consulting the ''

I Ching The ''I Ching'' or ''Yi Jing'' (, ), usually translated ''Book of Changes'' or ''Classic of Changes'', is an ancient Chinese divination text that is among the oldest of the Chinese classics. Originally a divination manual in the Western Zho ...

''. A long correspondence and friendship with the Nobel Prize-winning physicist

Wolfgang Pauli Wolfgang Ernst Pauli (; ; 25 April 1900 – 15 December 1958) was an Austrian theoretical physicist and one of the pioneers of quantum physics. In 1945, after having been nominated by Albert Einstein, Pauli received the Nobel Prize in Physics fo ...

inspired a final, mature statement of Jung's thinking on synchronicity, originally published in 1952 and reproduced in this book. Together with a wealth of historical and contemporary material, this essay describes an

astrological Astrology is a range of divinatory practices, recognized as pseudoscientific since the 18th century, that claim to discern information about human affairs and terrestrial events by studying the apparent positions of celestial objects. Dif ...

experiment Jung conducted to test his theory. ''Synchronicity'' reveals the full extent of Jung's research into a wide range of psychic phenomena. On the front cover of the Police album of the same name, lead singer/bassist

Sting Sting may refer to: * Stinger or sting, a structure of an animal to inject venom, or the injury produced by a stinger * Irritating hairs or prickles of a stinging plant, or the plant itself Fictional characters and entities * Sting (Middle-eart ...

can be seen reading a copy of the book.

Editions

* Jung, C. G. 1973. ''Synchronicity: An Acausal Connecting Principle''. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. . * Jung, C. G. 1985. ''Synchronicity: An Acausal Connecting Principle''. London: Routledge. .

References

1960 non-fiction books Works by Carl Jung Analytical psychology Princeton University Press books {{Psych-book-stub