Posted by Paul the Pharmacist on March 27, 2001 at 10:10:32:
You have to understand that Jung was very much a subjective thinker. Without knowing it (perhaps) you have hit the nail right on the head except for one sentence. You say that meaning is subjective and it is. One person will say they have never seen a miracle while another sees a miracle in the smile of a young baby. meaning is VERY subjective. I apologize somewhat for the oak analogy as it was a gross exaggeration to make a point just like if you study Sheltons constitutional psychology you may well use superman as an example of a mesomorph and santa claus as the example of an endomorph because they are extreme examples. Tru life "morphs" are mixtures and rarely pure types although there are exceptions (ir Arnold schwartznegger seems to be a pretty pure mesomorph but even here we have a problem as he got this way through developing himself he wasnt born this way)
Pardon my intutive thinking as Im starting to wander. Lets get back to meaning and synchronicity. You stated meaning is what YOU assign to the situation. It may seem like a play on words but here is where we disagree. The idea that a situation is meaningful siezes you you are not the pilot in control. Its like saying I enjoy the taste of pasta because i have decided that it will taste good. Whether or not it tastes good is rarely up to your individual will although you can develop a taste for something (like fine wines)
The real question is the statistical significance. Do these happenings occur greater than can be predictied by chance. According to Rhine they do and the key seems to be emotional involvement in the situation. The problem is that the synchronistic phenomenon are not static but fluid. When Rhine did his card experiments some of the subjects had intuitive guesses as long as they were interested. When they lost interest the statistical significance dropped dramaticaly. In fact in some cases you not a negative statistical significance in that the subjects produced guesses much less than could be expected by chance. Thereis a 25% chance of guessing the right card symbol. Some people did so poorly when the emotion had gone out of the situation that the chances of their doing so poorly was very very much against chance. So the statistical significance ran bothways.
Jungs real interest was not in cards or oak trees but in Phenemenon like dreaming about the death of someone close and the person subsequently dying. When this happens people like to say to themselves its nothing its just a dream. As much as we would like to comfort ourselves this may not be true. Jung describes a dream of his own. Write before he was about to have his grunbreaking book Psychological types published he dreamed he was talking to his father. In the dream he wanted to discuss his new book (note this was in 1923 , Jungs father died in 1896)but his father wanted to talk about marriage counseling. Jung couldnt understand the dream per se but his mother died in 1923 and he seriously wondered if his dead father was preparing (Jungs parents had a stormy marriage to some degree) for his wifes coming "presence."
My wifes former husband died of a massive heart attack
at age 44. My wife had seen the whole scene ( the man died at night in bed after bowling) 3 weeks before in a vivid dream. She tried to tell herself it eas a dream but it was obviously a precognitive one. One day I we were eating dinner and I was eating too fast and started to sort of choke for a bit. My wife later told me she had a dream that I was in the computer room and I was cholking on something. My wife is an ESFJ 2w1 and not an ituitive type obviously. The point is she SOMETIMES has dreams that are indeed precognitive