Post by donq on Dec 7, 2016 4:53:56 GMT
I used to post about Jung's Synchronicity (An Acausal Connecting Principle) some time ago (and even posted a scene between Jung and Fraud from the movie about this). But just in case someone might not read it yet, here it is:
Jung wrote:
My example concerns a young woman patient who, in spite of efforts made on both sides, proved to be psychologically inaccessible. The difficulty lay in the fact that she always knew better about everything. Her excellent education had provided her with a weapon ideally suited to this purpose, namely a highly polished Cartesian rationalism with an impeccably "geometrical" idea of reality. After several fruitless attempts to sweeten her rationalism with a somewhat more human understanding, I had to confine myself to the hope that something unexpected and irrational would turn up, something that would burst the intellectual retort into which she had sealed herself. Well, I was sitting opposite her one day, with my back to the window, listening to her flow of rhetoric. She had an impressive dream the night before, in which someone had given her a golden scarab — a costly piece of jewellery. While she was still telling me this dream, I heard something behind me gently tapping on the window. I turned round and saw that it was a fairly large flying insect that was knocking against the window-pane from outside in the obvious effort to get into the dark room. This seemed to me very strange. I opened the window immediately and caught the insect in the air as it flew in. It was a scarabaeid beetle, or common rose-chafer (Cetonia aurata), whose gold-green colour most nearly resembles that of a golden scarab. I handed the beetle to my patient with the words, "Here is your scarab." This experience punctured the desired hole in her rationalism and broke the ice of her intellectual resistance. The treatment could now be continued with satisfactory results.
An Austrian biologist dr. Paul Kammerer (1880-1926) was the first scientist to study the law of series (law of seriality, in some translations). His book Das Gesetz der Serie (1919) contains many examples from his and his nears' lives. Here is a sample:
(22) On July 28, 1915, I experienced the following progressive series: (a) my wife was reading about "Mrs Rohan", a character in the novel Michael by Hermann Bang; in the tramway she saw a man who looked like her friend, Prince Josef Rohan; in the evening Prince Rohan dropped in on us. (b) In the tram she overheard somebody asking the pseudo-Rohan whether he knew the village of Weissenbach at Lake Attersee, and whether it would be a pleasant place for a holiday. When she got out of the tram, she went to the delicatessen shop on the Naschmarkt, where the attendant asked her whether she happened to know Weissenbach on Lake Attersee - he had to make a delivery by mail and did not know the correct postal address.
Anyway, here's another interesting story:
In July 1891 Charles Wells went to Monte Carlo with 4,000 pounds that he had defrauded from investors in a bogus invention, a "musical jump rope". In an eleven-hour session Wells "broke the bank" twelve times, winning a million francs. At one stage he won 23 times out of 30 successive spins of the wheel. Wells returned to Monte Carlo in November of that year and won again. During this session he made another million francs in three days, including successful bets on the number five for five consecutive turns. Despite hiring private detectives the Casino never discovered Wells's system; Wells later admitted it was just a lucky streak. His system was the high-risk martingale, doubling the stake to make up losses
Jung's meaningful coincidence and Kammerer's law of seriality are so fascinating, aren't they?
Hmm...but I don't know why I'm sooo...interested about Charles Wells's story, too.
