Pauli and Jung’s Synchronicity
Illustration from Carl Jung’s ‘Liber Novus’ or ‘The Red Book’. 1917.
Molly Hankins November 21, 2024
In 1945, the Viennese physicist Wolfgang Pauli won the Nobel Prize for his work on quantum numbers and the structure of matter that predicted the existence of the neutrino 20 years before it was confirmed. This was 18 years after he started seeing Carl Jung for psychotherapy and dream analysis following his mother’s suicide, and 7 years before he and Jung would publish The Interpretation of Nature and the Psyche exploring in great detail the concept of ‘synchronicity.’ It is a word intrinsically ties to Jung, who started using it in lectures a few years after meeting Pauli and published a book of the same name a year before his death, but the idea was brought to life in their collaboration.
In The Interpretation of Nature and the Psyche, synchronicity describes an acausal relationship between events that occur sequentially in linear time and appear meaningfully related but with no identifiable, underlying relationship. At the time, using physics as a lens to study metaphysics wasn’t controversial; Pauli’s friends and contemporaries like physicists Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg were working together to explore theories that would bridge understanding between esoteric philosophy, practice and science.
The same year his treatise with Jung was published, Pauli spent the summer in Copenhagen with Bohr and Heisenberg having these very conversations. Heisenberg said that physicists needed to make every effort to grasp the meaning of old religions because, “… it quite obviously refers to a crucial aspect of reality.” This was before the chokehold of post-World War II and the Cold War thought made physics-funding the exclusive business of the war machine and condemned exploration of metaphysics to the realm of taboo. Fellow Austrian physicist and Tao of Physics author Fritjof Capra famously never received institutional funding again for his research after the book was published in 1975.
“Synchronicity mirrors quantum entanglement, which occurs when two particles link together and influence each other's state no matter how far apart they are, because at the quantum level, the laws governing the interactions of space and time stop behaving according to the principle of causality.”
Like so many revolutionary minds, Pauli was troubled and controversial, known for his alcoholism and quarrelsome nature. His mother’s suicide, which followed his father’s infidelity, devastated him, but ultimately pushed him to seek out Jung while they were both living in Zurich. Their relationship continued by letter, most famously documented in their published book of letters from 1932 to 1958, Atom and Archetype, named after a Pauli quote included in the collection. “As I regard physics and psychology as complementary types of examination,”, he wrote, “I am certain that the investigation of the psyche can throw light on the structure of the atom, just as the study of the atom can illuminate the structure of the psyche.” The core tenet of this thought is that both the human psyche and atom contain a central core, “a nucleus of self” surrounded by orbiting subatomic particles or “unconscious electrons” such as archetypes or complexes that influence conscious awareness. Atomic stability depends on the arrangement of the electrons, so their analogy espoused that stability of the psyche depended on the balance between aspects of the conscious and unconscious mind.
Synchronicity was present in their daily lives too, as Pauli was known for disrupting experiments simply by being nearby. This became known to physicists as the ‘Pauli effect’ and describes the inexplicable disruption of technical equipment in the presence of certain people. When an experiment failed at University of Göttingen after a measuring device stopped working, the lab’s director James Franck wrote to Pauli joking that he could not have been the cause because he wasn’t physically present. In response Pauli revealed that he actually had been at the Göttingen rail station at the time of the failure. After a china vase fell and shattered for no discernible reason at a symposium in 1948 as he entered the meeting hall at Jung’s Institute, Pauli attempted to explain the phenomenon and its relationship to psychology in a new paper called ‘Background-Physics.’
While Pauli and Jung were never able to completely pin down the mechanism of synchronicity explored in their 30 year collaboration on the subject, they did conclude that the experience must somehow correlate to quantum entanglement. Synchronicity mirrors quantum entanglement, which occurs when two particles link together and influence each other's state no matter how far apart they are, because at the quantum level, the laws governing the interactions of space and time stop behaving according to the principle of causality.
And it makes sense that the phenomenon of synchronicity was explored and articulated by a psychologist and a physicist: the experience of it feels like a feedback loop between what’s going on in our minds and the physical world. As Jung himself said, “Synchronicity is the coming together of inner and outer events in a way that cannot be explained by cause and effect and that is meaningful to the observer.” Quantum physics tells us that to observe reality is to essentially render it, and synchronicity leaves us with the feeling our perspective is undeniably influencing the experience being rendered.
The study of the occult lies at the intersection of observation and creation of what’s rendering in the physical and how we can work with it. Synchronicity, as Terrence McKenna said, is the universe nodding at us as confirmation that we’re on the right track.
Molly Hankins is a Neophyte + Reality Hacker serving the Ministry of Quantum Existentialism and Builders of the Adytum
