synchronicity/seriality

[Laurence Horn]

I was just reflecting on yet another instance of this phenomenon--the
minister at our Unitarian society cited "Tricyle", the Buddhist
review (with which I'd been unfamiliar), a couple of times in her
sermon yesterday and when I got home and opened the Sunday Times, the
first letter to the editor in the Week in Review was from the
editor-in-chief of "Tricycle", the Buddhist review, (arguing that the
Times was wrong in claiming that the apostles of non-violence are
having a rough time in the wake of 9/11).  Synchronicity, I thought.
But then this morning I happened to notice a paperback copy of
Koestler's _The Roots of Coincidence_ (1972) on our bookshelves, so I
looked up the relevant chapter ("Seriality and synchronicity"), and I
realized there's been some sort of reanalysis.  Several people on
this list and off indicated that they're familiar with the use of
"synchronicity" to describe cases of this sort, but Koestler
distinguishes (true) synchronicity, a term and concept that Jung
invented to describe acausal relations between events transpiring
simultaneously, from seriality, a notion Paul Kammerer developed in
_Das Gesetz der Serie_ (1919) for the significant but acausal
recurrence or clustering of similar events *across* time.  Kammerer
was "the last Lamarckian", according to Koestler, who has described
Kammerer's failed studies in that direction, terminating in his
attempt to demonstrate acquired characteristics in the "midwife toad"
that led to his suicide when it was discovered that the results had
been faked.  (Koestler argues in _The Case of the Midwife Toad_
(1971) that the faked results were forged by someone other than
Kammerer himself.)  As perhaps an attenuated instance of seriality,
Koestler himself committed suicide a few years ago.

So anyway, midwife toads and suicides aside, it appears that what we
and everyone else have been calling synchronicity was originally
seriality.  The OED has the historically accurate

SYNCHRONICITY
The name given by the Swiss psychologist, C. G. Jung (1875-1961), to
the phenomenon of events which *coincide in time* and appear
meaningfully related but have no discoverable causal connection.
[emphasis added]

while AHD4 reflects the broadening that seems to have applied with this item:

SYNCHRONICITY
2. Coincidence of events that seem to be meaningfully related,
conceived in Jungian theory as an explanatory principle on the same
order as causality.

--no explicit mention of "coinciding in time".  One problem may be
that "coincidence" itself has become unmoored from "temporally
coinciding"; the other is obviously that despite Kammerer's and
Koestler's best efforts,"seriality" never caught on; there's nothing
relevant in either OED or AHD4 for this term.

larry