One example out of the many he gives we shall render in his own words:
My example has to do with a young patient who, in spite of the efforts we both made to overcome the resistance, continued to remain psychologically inaccessible. Her difficulty lay in the fact that she always knew best about everything. Her excellent upbringing had provided her with a weapon ideally suited for this purpose, namely, a sharply polished, Cartesian rationalism with a concept of reality that was “geometrically” beyond question.
After several fruitless attempts to temper her rationalism with a somewhat more human common sense, I had to confine myself to the hope that something of an unexpected and irrational nature would happen to her, something that would succeed in breaking the intellectual retort into which she had sealed herself.
I was sitting opposite her one day, in order to listen to her flow of rhetoric, with my back to the window. She had had an impressive dream the night before in which someone had given her a golden scarab (a costly piece of jewellery). While she was still engaged in telling me this dream, I heard something behind me gently tapping on the window. I turned around and saw that it was quite a large flying insect which was beating against the window pane from the outside in the obvious effort to get into the dark room.
This seemed to me very strange. I opened the window immediately and caught the insect in the air as if flew in. It was a scarabaeid, cetonia aurata, the common rose bug whose green-gold coloring most nearly resembles that of a golden scarab.
I handed the insect to my patient with the words: “Here is your scarab,” This experience punctured the hole we had been looking for in the thick armor of her rationalism and broke the ice of her intellectual resistance. The treatment could now be continued with satisfactory results.
In summarizing his concept Jung admits that synchronicity represents a highly abstract, not readily visualizable (unanschauliche) entity. He points our that, since the meaningful or intelligent behaviour of low forms of life which have no brain and even of lifeless bodies falls within its scope, it forces us to abandon the concept of a psyche a associated with the brain.
Rather, we seem to deal with a formal or formative factor of meaningness, independent of any brain activity, which expresses itself equally through lifeless things, body and psyche. (This again is in complete agreement with the conclusion of atom physics, as expressed by Schroedinger, that form not substance is to be the fundamental concept underlying the dynamism of matter.) Thus we may come to understand the psychosomatic interplay as but one instance of synchronicity, namely, of the non-causal expression of a formative or meaningful element, rather than as a cause and effect interrelation.
Jung goes further to add that the fact of the “absolute knowledge” that characterizes the synchronicity phenomenon-a knowledge which includes future and space-distant events and which is not transmitted by any sense organ-suggests to us the existence of a per se meaning of a transcendental nature that “exists in a psychically but relative space and corresponding time, namely, in a non-visualizable space-time continuum”.
His conclusion is that, in view of the mutually closely supporting findings of atom physics and psychology, it becomes necessary to add to out basic categories of scientific thinking causelessness or synchronicity in addition to the categories of space, time and causality. Just as absolute unformed and indestructible energy relates to its perceptible manifestation in space and time, so relates the principle of non-causality, namely, the inconstant indeterminate contingency, expressible only symbolically through analogy, similarity and meaningfulness to the constant determinate relation of cause and effect.
The two approaches along causality and non-causality are not mutually exclusive but rather complementary. The nature of the phenomenon, not arbitary choice, determines which of the two applies. In the realm of macrophysics and our consciousness of the daily observable happenings, the concept of causality holds.
On the other hand, in the subatomic sphere, in the realm of the unconscious and in the very activities of the life processes, causality ceases to be applicable and has to be replaced by the principle of inconstant, non-causal connection through synchronicity or meaningfulness.
How does this principle of “meaning” actually and practically enter into the observable life and psychic processes? The spontaneous, discontinuous occurrence of “bundles” of events analogous to the quanta of microphysics represents a phenomenon, the biological and psychological expression of which G. R. Heyer compared to the effects of the “field” of physics.4.
A field is described as a kind of tension or stress which can exist in empty space in the absence of matter. It reveals itself through the fact that material objects that happen to lie in the space which the field occupies respond to its forces in a characteristic way. This response is determined on the one side by the type of the field (for instance, the different patterns of iron filings in a unipolar and a bipolar magnetic field), on the other hand by the characteristic responsiveness peculiar to the object (for instance, a magnet needle responds mechanically with deflection, a neon tube with a light phenomenon to the same electric field. A piece of wood will not respond at all). Thus, the field is a kind of a transcendental entity never directly observable which we know only through the peculiar behavior of the objects which it affects and through which it manifests itself.
Similarly, the transcendental “meaning” underlying the synchronistic occurrences manifests itself to us only through the objects which it affects and which, each in their own and characteristic way, give it expression. Thus, whenever a “field of meaning” arises in the course of living existence, or, perhaps we might say, when ones course of life passes through a “field of meaning” this field manifests itself through events on various levels (for instance, psyche, soma), all of them in their own different fashion giving expression to that same formative factor.
Borrowing a mathematical terminology, we may say that the synchronistic occurrence of X1 X2 X3, etc., namely, meaningfully associated analogous phenomena in psyche, soma, outside nature, etc., not only postulates the directly unknowable transcendental factor x but also offers us a way to at least approach it indirectly by establishing through a process of abstraction the common denominators of X1 X2 X3, etc. Obviously, also, the concept of the “field of meaning” is itself but an attempt at symbolic representation of something unvisualizable that can never be directly observed.
What Schroedinger says of the atom model equally applies to out concepts here:
The pictures are only a mental help, a tool of thought, an intermediary means… from which to deduce a reasonable expectation about the results of new experiments…. We plan them for the purpose of seeing whether they confirm the expectations- thus whether the expectations were reasonable and thus whether the pictures or models we use were adequate. Notice that we prefer to say adequate, not true. For in order that a description be capable of being true, it must be capable of being compared directly with actual facts. That is usually not the case with our models.5.
In the following, a comparatively brief example is given of how the above concepts, hypothetically applied, might enlighten us about the scope of the “field of meaning,” with a partial manifestation of which we are familiar in the symptomatology of our drug Sulphur. In attempting to abstract a “common denominator” from what we consider but partial manifestations of the “field of meaning,” that is from the mental, constitutional, physiological, chemical, etc., known qualities of the drug, in addition to whatever other material we may glean for amplification from other sources, we follow the purely descriptive enumerative method which already Hahnemanns genius anticipated and which now has been adopted also by modern physics.
The understanding of the broader formative law of the field may enable us to anticipate the nature of events to be expected-on the basis of statistical probability, however, but not specifically for the given case; similarly, we may, after recognizing a certain drug picture in a patient, anticipate a Possible scope of further symptoms that might arise, without being able to predict specifically for the given case which of these possible symptoms he is actually going to have, if any at all.
Moreover, mental and physical symptoms being synchronistically, not causally, related, they may substitute for one another and thus one may appear to be able to cancel the other. Thus we get a first glimpse of an understanding how also illness and “similar” drug energy as synchronistic entities of the same “field” sharing a functional likeness, may perhaps substitute for one another and thus functionally cancel each other.
