synchronicity/seriality

[Douglas G. Wilson]

At 10:10 AM 2/18/2002 +0800, you wrote:
>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.

My perhaps naive interpretation of 'synchronicity' would cover Larry's
experience and -- as I understand it -- match the narrow definition fairly
well too. "Coincidence in time" need not be absolute, perhaps. What Larry
might find remarkable is the fact that in his 29+ years of life he has
encountered this "Tricycle" only twice, both times in the same day or so --
synchronic enough for me. If I saw this "Tricycle" exactly three times at
approximately 5-year intervals, say, I would not think of serialism or
synchronicity or any other 'special' connection ... just something which I
don't encounter too often, maybe ... if I saw it in three independent
contexts within an hour, though, and never before nor for years after, I
might wonder whether the group of encounters ("encounter group"?) had some
(mystical or other) significance .... Maybe such thinking is why
"seriality" didn't catch on as an alternative?

-- Doug Wilson