I’ll definitely take a look at the “Sham” book. Sounds interesting.

You have a point about the concept of synchronicity. Jung’s idea has some subtleties and his original idea for synchonicity may have been misinterpreted over the years. As it happens, the New York Center for Jungian Studies is holding a conference here in my town (oh my gosh – synchronicity?) and I spoke with the director of the center briefly about this issue. He agreed to be interviewed and to talk to me about Jung. So stay tuned – I’ll definitely follow up on this in a future episode.

NOTE: for now what I’ll do is delete the reference to the word “synchronicity” from the episode and the show notes and replace it with the essence of the troublesome idea: the belief that “everything happens for a reason” (number 3 in the list above).

Thanks for the helpful comment!

Michael

First of, I think that interviewing Steve Salerno, the author of “Sham: How the Self-help Movement Made America Helpless”, would be a terrific follow-up to this episode (if you can manage to contact him of course).

Second, you misrepresented the concept of synchronicity. Well, you explained it as it is sometimes presented in the New Age mouvement, but it’s nonetheless incorrect (don’t believe what new agers are writting, ever LOL). Jung doesn’t claim that randomness doesn’t exist. He claims that sometimes, in some occasion, non causal phenomena can happen (he’s thinking of paranormal phenomena, astrology and numerology). You should read is article “Synchronicity: An Acausal Connecting Principle”.

I’m also very critical of this concept, especially because it’s deeply rooted in Jung personal conviction in the existence of paranormal phenomena. He uses Rhine’s expermiments to try to give an empirical ground to his hypothesis, even if today parapsychologists don’t seem to agree with his interpretation (In “An introduction to parapsychology” Harvey J. Irwin and Caroline A Watt say that Psi implies a alleged anomalous transfert of information while Jung’s synchronicity does not)…

Well, I don’t advice you to go into the parapsychological debate anyway, but the way you presented the concept of synchronicity was inacurate.

Keep up the good work,