Synchronicity is defined as a coincidence between an inner psychological state or event and an external or objective event. There is no causal connection between the two events and no causal explanation can be given, but it seems, at least for the experiencing individual, to be meaningful. Examples of synchronicity include precognitive dreams, which are dreams that later becomes true, and the experience that the death of a close relative is somehow “felt” despite great physical distance.
The term “synchronicity” was coined by the Swiss psychiatrist and psychoanalyst Carl Gustav Jung as a product of his exchange with the quantum physicist and Nobel laureate Wolfgang Pauli, also known as the Pauli-Jung-dialogue (Gieser 2005). Jung published his second work on synchronicity in 1952 (“Synchronicity as a principle of noncausal connections”) together with a work by Pauli on Kepler in a joint volume after his first publication on the topic in 1951(“On Synchronicity”). Both Jung and Pauli...
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Roesler, C. (2017). Synchronicity. In: Zeigler-Hill, V., Shackelford, T. (eds) Encyclopedia of Personality and Individual Differences. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-28099-8_636-1
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