Synchronicity Cambray

phylogenetic evolution it has been replaced by the better method
of giving information with the help of signals which are picked up
by the sense organs. But the older method might have persisted
in the background and still be able to put itself into effect under
certain conditions—for instance, in passionately excited mobs. 6
Freud goes on in the next paragraph to extend this mechanism to
children:
If there is such a thing as telepathy as a real process, we may suspect
that, in spite of its being so hard to demonstrate, it is quite a
common phenomenon. It would tally with our expectations if we
were able to point to it particularly in the mental life of children.
Here we are reminded of the frequent anxiety felt by children
over the idea that their parents know all their thoughts. 7
Similarly, Jung was drawn to insect examples for synchronicity (the
famous Scarabaeid beetle story) and for explicating his archetype theory
(the leaf-cutting ant and yucca moth examples he borrowed from
Conway Lloyd Morgan’s Habit and Instinct, see Hogenson, “The Baldwin
Effect,” for details). Perhaps this interest of the founders in insects
and mental life resides in an intuition that there have been two major
approaches in evolution to the development of intention and purpose:
collective behaviors requiring rapid communication between
organisms, while relying on self-organizing properties of collective
systems and alternatively an internalization of separate units to reside
in a single individual who would also retain, à la Freud, vestiges of
this other communication system—the human brain with its roughly
hundred billion neurons being a relevant example.
Jung’s notion of the Self also can be read as an emergent property
of the psyche, and as I’ve previously shown synchronicity is consistent
with an emergentist paradigm. In recent years growing numbers of
analytical psychologists have begun to apply systems and complexity
theories to the Jungian approach. In addition to the Hogenson paper
already mentioned, a few other authors whose writings have appeared
in the Journal of Analytical Psychology over the last several years with
( 48 ) Chapter 3