Synchronicity Cambray

chapter 2
Interconnectedness: Visions
and Science of Field Theory
Jung’s monograph on synchronicity was the product of years of
thinking; and he only published it in the last decade of his life. Various
authors 1 have detailed how this idea fits into the corpus of Jung’s
other writings, how it is an integral part of analytical psychology
(Jung’s term for his general psychological approach). For present
purposes, I would like to emphasize and develop a perspective that
informs much of Jung’s thinking: holism. I will try to build a context
for locating Jung’s idea of synchronicity based on the scientific milieu
he was exposed to from late adolescence through his later years, in
particular the influence of scientific holism. Jung himself only rarely
refers directly to this milieu, and then mostly through specific figures
that have captured his imagination, such as Goethe.
The term holism goes back to the ancient Greeks’ OloV/holos
meaning whole, entire, complete; this was applied to one of the main
horrors of the twentieth century, holo-caust: burnt whole. In his Metaphysics
Aristotle states: “In the case of all things which have several
parts and in which the totality is not, as it were, a mere heap, but the
whole is something beside the parts, there is a cause;” 2 or in the shorthand
of gestalt psychology: “the whole is greater than the sum of the
parts.” Throughout Western history there has been a tension, at times
a complementarity, between holistic and reductionistic approaches
to understanding the world. Reductionism is the method of breaking
down something complex into its component parts and explaining its
operations and functions through these components. Western science
with its analytic paradigm has primarily focused on the explanatory