Carl Jung: There are things which are simply incomprehensible to the tough brains of our race and time.

To J. B. Rhine

Dear Dr. Rhine, 20 May 1925

I was glad to be able to contribute to your researches, but being of a less optimistic outlook than you Americans I never put my experiences on show.

I have learned too much from the past in that respect.

There are things which are simply incomprehensible to the tough brains of our race and time.

One simply risks being taken for crazy or insincere, and I have received so much of either that I learned to be careful in keeping quiet.

I would ask it as a favour from every psychologist in Europe not to put that photograph on the wall, but since North Carolina is very far away from Europe, so far away, indeed, that probably very few are even aware of the existence of a Duke University, I shall not object.

I have found that there are very few people who are interested in such things from healthy motives and fewer still who are able to think about such and similar matters, and so in the course of the years I arrived at the conviction that the main difficulty doesn't consist in the question how to tell, but rather in how not to tell it.

Man's horror now is so great that in order not to lose his modest brain capacity he always prefers to treat the fellow who disturbed him as crazy.

If you are really serious in teaching people something good, you must do your best to avoid such prejudices.

Those are the reasons why I prefer not to communicate too many of my experiences.

They would confront the scientific world with too upsetting problems.

Sincerely yours,

C.G. Jung ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. I, Page 190

Carl Jung: It would all look hopelessly haphazard and pretty flimsy

Dear Dr. Rhine, September 18, 1945

Your letter has been a great joy to me.

I have often thought of you in these last years and I also often mentioned your name and your experiments to many people.

I wish I could fulfill your wish but having a scientific conscience I feel very hesitant about it since, being a doctor, my observations are all of a clinical kind, which means that they are unavoidably subjective to a certain extent and never systematic in as much as they are all isolated cases and facts which form a rather incoherent mass, which would look like a collection of anecdotes.

I despise such a way of dealing with this matter and I would much prefer to be in a position to deal with a coherent material collected along certain scientific lines.

Of course I have had quite a number of noteworthy experiences, but you know how it is: circumstances and persons involved, though indispensably important for the explanation of the facts, cannot be described in a way that would convince the outsider.

It would all look hopelessly haphazard and pretty flimsy.

As you assume, I have thought a great deal about parapsychological facts and I tried to establish certain connections, but I always refrain from talking publicly about such matters for the above mentioned reasons. (pp. 378-379) ~Carl Jung, Rhine-Jung Letters, Page 18.

Carl Jung: Synchronicity is indeed a difficult and involved problem.

Prof. J. B. Rhine July 26, 1954
Parapsychological Laboratory
College Station
Durham, N. C.

Dear Professor Rhine,

Thank you for your kind letter!

Synchronicity is indeed a difficult and involved problem.

The translation of my book into English is finished and the printing must be on the way, so that you will have a chance to read it rather soon.

I must warn you though that in spite of all sorts of alterations I have made, it is still a difficult book that appeals chiefly to the thinking function as it consists in its main substance of the description of a point of view rather unfamiliar to our epoch.

Certain main points of my book have not been understood at all, but that is what I have always seen with my books: I just have to wait for about 10 or 20 years until certain readers appear understanding what my thought is.

That sounds most arrogant, and everybody is free to think that I am writing a particularly unclear and obscure style.

The writer himself has to suspend his own judgment.

As far as I can see, my book has not had any noticeable effect yet, with the exception of Prof. Bender's experiments.

I have seen him recently, and he told me that he pursues his experiments with success.

My best wishes to you; I always remember our rather noisy lunch at the Ambassador's.

We must give up at the outset all explanations in terms of energy, which amounts to saying that events of this kind cannot be considered from the point of view of causality, for causality presupposes the existence of space and time in so far as all observations are ultimately based upon bodies in motion. (Jung, CW 9, para. 836) ~Carl Jung, Rhine-Jung Letters, Page 5