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Society asked me how I could explain the fact that a so highly intellectual people as
the Chinese had produced no science. I replied that this must really be an ‘optical
illusion’, because the Chinese did have a science whose ‘standard work’ was the I-
Ching, but that the principle of this science, like so much else in China, was
altogether different from our scientific principle. The science of the I-Ching is not
based on the causality principle (hitherto unnamed because it not met with among
us) which I have tentatively called the synchronistic principle. My occupation with the
psychology of unconscious processes long ago necessitated my looking about for
another principle of explanation, because the causality principle seemed to me
inadequate to explain certain remarkable phenomena of the psychology of the
unconscious. Thus I found that there are psychic parallelisms which cannot be related
to each other casually, but which must be connected through another sequence of
events. This connection seemed to me to be essentially provided in the fact of the
relative simultaneity, therefore the expression ‘synchronistic’. It seems indeed, as
though time, far from being an abstraction, is a concrete continuum which contains
qualities or basic conditions manifesting themselves simultaneously in various places
in a way not be explained by causal parallelisms, as, for example, in cases of the
coincident appearance of identical thoughts, symbols, or psychic conditions. Another

example would be the simultaneity of Chinese and European periods of style, a fact
pointed out by Wilhem».

This was the thought of the prestigious Psychiatric C.G. Jung about the matter that I
was treating. With its concepts, the apparition of the two identical phenomenons (common
idea of two persons), separated by the space, would depend of a collective Archetype (cause)
and the simultaneity (synchronicity) of the phenomenic events.

To interpret the principle of synchronicity, it is necessary to take present a key concept
of the Analytic Psychology: the one of the «collective unconscious». This concept permits to
handle in more real manner the Archetypes, that are not static beings anymore as the Ideas of
Plato but dynamic entities of powerful animic force, support and sustentation of the Myths
that influence unconsciously in the behaviour of man.

The concept of Collective Unconscious has been resumed by Jung in the same quoted
book: «…just as the human body shows a common anatomy over and above all racial
differences, so too, the psychic possesses a common substratum. I’ve called the latter
collective unconscious. As a common human heritage it transcends all differences of

culture and consciousness and does not consist merely of contents capable of
becoming conscious, but of latent dispositions towards identical reactions. Thus the
fact of the collective unconscious is simply the psychic expression of identity of brain-
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