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:

1. Her exposed film got mistakenly treated as fresh film.
2. The film escaped that photo lab and traveled to another city...
3. To the right city--out of all the cities of the world! If it were a lost cat, we'd be impressed with the loyalty and cleverness of that cat. It's film. Loyal and clever film.
4. It didn't go on sale until the mother needed film--unlikely indeed! Unexposed film isn't stable; like food, it goes stale. Yet the film waited, avoiding sale. A patient cat!
5. Out of all the film in the shop, she was handed the right one. She didn't choose it; it chose her.
6. Out of all the shots, she superimposed her infant daughter atop her infant son, not dog atop son, daughter atop Black Forest, roses atop mother-in-law. She chose what she shot--this, and this alone, of the six steps, looks like traditional notions of intuition or ESP. All the rest are... what?

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.

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