Ghosts in the house

By 1919, World War I had ended and Jung's crisis had passed, yet he continued to practice what he called "active imagination," a kind of daydreaming, the results of which he recorded in the "Red Book." However, there was no shortage of more traditional ghosts. Jung was invited to London to deliver a lecture entitled "The Psychological Basis of the Belief in Ghosts," organized by the Society for Psychical Research. Jung told the Society that ghosts and materializations were "subconscious projections." "I have repeatedly observed the telepathic effects of subconscious complexes, as well as many psychic phenomena, but I see no evidence of the existence of real ghosts, and until such evidence appears, I am forced to consider this entire territory as belonging to psychology," Jung said.

This was undoubtedly scientific enough, but a year later, back in England, Jung encountered a somewhat more real ghost. He spent several weeks in a house in Aylesbury belonging to Maurice Nicoll (later a student of Gurdjieff and Ouspensky), and while he was surrounded by strange sounds, an unpleasant odor filled the room. Locals said the place was haunted, and one night, while lying in bed, Jung found the head of an old woman, half her face missing, on the pillow next to him. Jung jumped out of bed and waited until morning, sitting in an armchair. The house was later demolished. One might have thought that, after encountering the dead returning from Jerusalem, Jung would not be so shaken by the sight of a traditional English ghost, but the experience shocked him; his account of the event did not appear until 30 years later, in 1949, in an insignificant anthology of ghost stories. When his lecture to the Society for Psychical Research was published in 1947 in the Collected Works, Jung added a footnote explaining that he had never again felt as certain as he had in 1919 that ghost appearances could be explained psychologically, and he doubted "whether a particularly psychological approach is capable of assessing this phenomenon." In a later postscript, he admitted that his earlier explanation was inadequate, but he could not accept the reality of ghosts because he had no experience with them—easily forgetting the Aylesbury haunting. However, in a 1946 letter to psychotherapist Fritz Kunkel, Jung admitted: "Metapsychic phenomena can be better explained by the ghost hypothesis than by the qualities and properties of the subconscious."

A similar uncertainty surrounds his experience with the I Ching, the ancient Chinese oracle with which he began experimenting in the early 1920s and which, like horoscopes, became part of his therapeutic practice. Although he mentioned the I Ching here and there in his writings, it was not until 1949—almost 30 years later—in his introduction to Wilhelm-Baynes's classic translation that he frankly admitted to using it. And although he tried to explain the I Ching's effectiveness in terms of synchronicity, which became his paranormal deus ex machina , Jung admitted that the source of the oracle's insights were "spiritual agencies" that constituted "the living soul of the book"—a remark that seems odd compared to his quasi-scientific explanation. Ironically, his major work on "significant coincidence," Synchronicity as the Principle of Acausal Coincidence (1952), co-authored with the physicist Wolfgang Pauli, cites only one unambiguous example of the phenomenon, and readers who, like me, accept the reality of synchronicity are somewhat baffled by Jung's attempt to describe it using archetypes, quantum physics, statistical analysis, mathematics, Rhyne's ESP experiments, astrology, telepathy, precognition, and other paranormal abilities, all of which look like a rehash of Jung's "I am a scientist" reflection