Superimposed
1914-1916, by an anonymous German photographer
The writer Wilhelm von Scholz has collected a number of stories showing the strange ways in which lost or stolen objects come back to their owners. Among other things, he tells the story of a mother who took a photograph of her small son in the Black Forest [in 1914]. She left the film to be developed in Strassburg. But, owing to the outbreak of war, she was unable to fetch it and gave it up for lost.
In 1916 she bought a film in Frankfurt in order to take a photograph of her daughter, who had been born in the meantime. When the film was developed it was found to be doubly exposed: the picture underneath was the photograph she had taken of her son in 1914! The old film had not been developed and had somehow got into circulation again among the new films.
--Carl Jung
SOURCE: Synchronicity by Carl Jung (2011 ed.) p.15. Jung got it from Wilhelm von Scholz's Der Zufall: Ein Vorform des Schicksalls (my dictionary translates this as "Chance: a Fore-Form of Fate").
Editor's Notes
To call this "coincidence" here you must declare six unlikely events all to be chance:
Of course, ordinary gravity was originally criticized as unscientific: "Spooky action at a distance." Luna tugged at Earth with what, invisible ropes? Superstition!
Yet mass pulls mass. And photographer pulls photo.
A better analogy is entangled particles. Such entanglements aren't exotic isotopes decaying in mere seconds, minutes, hours. This link pulled patiently through two years of war! That disproves the "fragile flower" model of ESP--the idea that worldly distractions (or skeptics in the room, for that matter) disrupt some delicate medium or fragile sense. Whatever synchronicity is, it's robust.
A Personal Note
ESP (or, if you're certain it's all nonsense, then, clearing my mind and blindly guessing--only it's not blind!) gets me hits way above chance, accruing real, practical benefits. It's just not too acute as senses go, perhaps vestigial--rather like my sense of smell. Theory may say my experience is impossible; but experience trumps theory. I live with it. But this sixth sense I live with is nothing like an acausal link between a photographer and her film.
My point: the sixth sense that I (and millions) know may not be Jung's synchronicity. Two (or more) peculiar phenomena may have been treated as one, by skeptics and believers alike, muddying study of the whole field.
World Dream Bank homepage - Art gallery - New stuff - Introductory sampler, best dreams, best art - On dreamwork - Books
Indexes: Subject - Author - Date - Names - Places - Art media/styles
Titles: A - B - C - D - E - F - G - H - IJ - KL - M - NO - PQ - R - Sa-Sk - Sl-Sz - T - UV - WXYZ
Email: wdreamb@yahoo.com - Catalog of art, books, CDs - Behind the Curtain: FAQs, bio, site map - Kindred sites