On Divination and Synchronicity

The psychogenesis of the spirits of the dead seems to me to be more or less as follows. When a person dies, the feelings and emotions that bound his relatives to him lose their application to reality and sink into the unconscious, where they activate a collective content that has a deleterious effect on consciousness.

Chance, we say, must obviously be susceptible of some causal explanation and is only called “chance” or “coincidence” because its causality has not yet been discovered.

Therefore it cannot be a question of cause and effect, but of a falling together in time, a kind of simultaneity. Because of this quality of simultaneity, I have picked on the term “synchronicity” to designate a hypothetical factor equal in rank to causality as a principle of explanation. In my essay “On the Nature of the Psyche,”35 I considered sy