Author(s): Tito Livio Ferreira Vieira
Our object of study in this article, succinctly, shows the evolution of the concept of telepathy in the psychoanalytic field, as well as the concept of synchronicity in the Jungian field; For this we will verify concepts that are close to the latter, such as projective identification, transitional object, within the Kleinian and Winnicottian universe. Bion’s considerations on “Finite space and infinite space, such as Jung’s use of the concept of “participation mystique”. To accomplish this goal we intend to make a survey of the historical evolution of the concept of synchronicity. We will begin with the primary sources, and in a second moment we will make a bibliographic survey of the developments that occurred after the death of Jung until the present day, on these proposed themes, and the possible enrichment through interdisciplinarity with other sciences. We will try to identify at the end of our reflection, some epistemological consequences that may benefit the evolution of Freudian and Jungian metapsychology and its consequences for the epistemology of analytical practice. We intend to illuminate some objective and intersubjective aspects of therapeutics. What types of communication are possible? What kind of looks? What types of listening? What kinds of relationships can we establish between the forms we compare the forms of communication in transference, compared to telepathy and synchronicity?
Our claim in this article, despite the infinite complexity of the topic, is modest. It is first time that we are researching the subject on an academic level; Our main source of knowledge is the long clinical practice where, from time to time, we deal with the phenomenon of synchronicity. Our relationship with physics is even less because in our training in the history of science we produced a master’s degree on “The Project for a Scientific Psychology of Sigmund Freud” (PUC/SP, 2005) and “The Higher Mental Issues in Jean-Baptiste Lamarck” (PUC/SP, 2013), where in both the emphasis was the historiography of the life sciences. Part I and II of this article, which is predominantly psychological, is far from original. We have simply tried to summarize the main notions already established by Freud and Jung about ‘Telepathy’ and ‘Synchronicity’ and, the kind of explanation they brought and their publications; in Freud’s case, some published posthumously in 1950 in the first critical edition of his Complete Works in Britain. The vast majority of publications in both Psychoanalysis and Analytical Psychology have prioritized themes related to analytical practice, which is understandable in view of the great demand of psychological suffering worldwide. However, Sigmund Freud’s publications on the application of psychoanalysis to the study of society, religions and art are already well known. Although with less emphasis, the theme of ‘occult phenomena’ did not go unnoticed by Freud. Freud produced some texts on the relationship of psychoanalysis with telepathy, which we intend to comment on in this article.
Carl Gustav Jung, on the other hand, has in the study of ‘comparative mythologies’, as well as of ‘comparative religions’ and ‘occult phenomena’ one of his main interests. An example of this is his doctoral thesis in 1902 “On the Psychology and Psychopathology of So-called Occult Phenomena” at the age of 27. Freud and Jung were great scientific collaborators and developed a great friendship over a period of seven years. “On the first of January 1907, Freud in a letter describes him as ‘The most able helper who has joined me so far.’ On March 3, Jung visited Freud in Vienna and quickly developed a close professional friendship. It soon becomes evident that Freud sees Jung as his ‘heir’ [1].
Jung wrote in Freud’s obituary of S. Freud’s ‘The Interpretation of Dreams’ on the first of October 1939:”This book ‘revolutionized its time’ and that ‘it was the most audacious attempt ever undertaken to master the riddles of the unconscious psyche on the seemingly solid ground of empiricism... For us, who at the time were young psychiatrists, this book was a source of enlightenment, while for our older colleagues it was the object of derision” [2].
As far as the content of the repression was concerned, I did not agree with Freud. As a cause of the repression he pointed out the sexual content and I found it unsatisfactory. Through practical work, he had known numerous cases in which sexuality had played a secondary role, while other factors occupied the mainplace: for example, the problem of social adaptation, oppression by the tragic circumstances of life, the demands of prestige, etc. Later I presented Freud with cases of this kind, but he did not want to admit as a cause any other factor than sexuality ... Freud was the first truly great personality I related to. No one among the people I related to could compare to him. In his attitude there was nothing trivial. I found him extraordinarily intelligent, penetrating, remarkable from every point of view [2]. Freud was a persona non grata in the university world at that time..., but there was a concordance of my associative experiences with Freud’s theories... I openly sided with Freud and fought on his behalf [2].
We must understand that in the period of relationship between them, Freud already had the Psychoanalytic Theory, which enabled a scientific understanding of the suffering caused by mental illness, which did not exist in psychiatry at the time; that’s what Jung and the Zurich school he was a part of won. Jung, in turn, can offer Freud the experimental basis that psychoanalysis lacked, because between 1902 and 1909, using the Word Association Test in the experimental .
psychopathology laboratory of the Burgholzli Hospital, he developed the Theory of Complexes. Jung wrote in his memoirs that precisely his personal interest in the occult:”My dear Jung, promise me never to abandon sexual theory. That’s what matters essentially! Look, we must make it a dogma, an unshakable bulwark.” Somewhat astonished, I asked him, “A bulwark against what? He replied, “Against the tide of black slime of the occult!” Jung explained that “This shock hurt the core of our friendship. I knew I could never agree with that position. Freud seemed to understand by ‘occultism’ all that philosophy and religion - as well as nascent parapsychology - said of the soul. But to me sexual theory was as ‘hidden’ - undemonstrated, still mere hypothesis as so many other speculative conceptions. I regarded a scientific truth as a hypothesis, but not an eternally valid article of faith [3].
Regardless of the different attitudes they both had on these issues, we would like to point out that both researchers had in mind to remain on an empirical level, that is, strictly psychological, with the possibility of finding corroborating evidence of some kind.
Paul Kugler wrote: “Freud had defined psychic images as mental copies of instincts, while Jung formulated a radically new view of images as the very source of our sense of psychic reality. Reality is no longer situated in God, eternal ideas, or matter, for Jung now places the experience of reality within the human condition as a function of the psychic imagination”: ‘the psyche creates psychic reality every day. The only expression I can use for this activity is fantasy. Fantasy, therefore, seems to me the clearest expression of the specific activity of the psyche. She’s mostly... [a] creative activity’ [1] .with this ontological shift, the mental image ceases to be seen as a copy, or as a copy of a copy, and now assumes according to Kant, the role of origin and ultimate creator of meaning and of our sense of existence and reality [1]. Jungian psychology, when it was applied in domains beyond the clinic, was given the name of complex psychology.
According to the testimony of the historian of psychoanalysis Ilse Grubrich-Simitis “the manuscript of “Psychoanalysis and Telepathy”, of twenty pages... it didn’t even have that title; it was added posthumously by the editors. His name was Preliminary Report. Freud intended, as it were, in the officiality of the intimate committee, to test some preliminary ideas about telepathic phenomena and their possible psychoanalytic explanation. It is always good to remember that interest in the occult, even though it was frowned upon in the academic world, somehow hung in the air in the early twenties. The question he asked himself was whether there could be a connection between the prophecy of a seer on the one hand and the unconscious inner world of the one requesting the prediction on the other. And if this occurred so that the prophecy -as always through the transmission of a thought - was mainly the explicit, ugly revelation by the seer of an intense unconscious desire of his client, provoking through this reaction, the disconcerting quality of coincidence of this phenomenon. In this example of the seer, Freud again discusses his assumption, based on many observations, that each person has, in his own unconscious, an instrument through which he can interpret the manifestations of the unconscious of the other, that is, an archaic means of communication phylogenetically very old and prior to the evolution of speech, whose functioning, however, it is still very mysterious [4].
Simitis continued his narrative: “.Some elements of the manuscript, in a more abridged form, were used in later publications on related topics, such as ‘Dream and Telepathy’ and then in the passage on the meaning of the dream in ‘Some Addendums to the Set of Dream Interpretation’, as well as finally in the thirtieth conference of the New Conferences...called ‘Dream and Occultism’. An extract from this lecture was printed in 1934 in the Almanac of Psychoanalysis under the title ‘The Problem of Telepathy’, which led Walter Benjamin, on reading the article, to underline the modernity of Freudian thoughts [4].
The English editor of the first critical edition of Freud’s works, James Strachey explained: “It is worth noting that ... in the last of his writings on the subject he no longer felt the doubts about the propriety of discussing it, so evident in the present article; In fact, near the end of the conference, it specifically dispels the fears, expressed here, that the scientific perspectives of psychoanalysis could be put in jeopardy if the truth of the transmission of thought were to be established [5].
Freud wrote:”. Cooperation between analysts and occultists offers little prospect of profit. The analyst has his province of work, which he must not abandon: the unconscious element of mental life. If, in the course of his work, he had to be attentive to occult phenomena, he would run the risk of not being aware of everything that most closely concerned him. He would be abandoning the impartiality, the absence of prejudices and preventions that constituted an essential part of his armor and analytical apparatus [5].
In the 1922 text, Freud analyzed some dreams that could imply the phenomenon of telepathy; let’s try to synthesize as much as we can in the space of this article and put the accent on Freud’s scientific conclusions. In one of the dreams a gentleman sees his wife giving birth to twins.
However, after the analysis it is realized that in reality it was the daughter who had twins. He came to the conclusion that this gentleman had an unconscious desire to marry his daughter as a second wife.” the coincidence in the almost exact time between the dream and the birth of the daughter’s twins [5].Readers will also be primarily interested in whether the dream can really be regarded as a telepathic notification of the unexpected birth of the twins.I may say that it would be a great satisfaction to me, if I could convince myself, as well as others, of the unassailable evidence of telepathic processes, but I also consider that the information
provided about this dream is entirely inadequate to justify such a pronouncement. I refuse to make any pronouncement about the dream in question is a telepathic event, a particularly subtle realization on the part of the unconscious of what it dreamed, or if it should simply be taken as a remarkable coincidence [5].
Telepathic messages if we are justified in acknowledging their existence - do not thus alter the process of forming a dream; Telepathy has nothing to do with the nature of dreams.
I think it would be interesting for scientific accuracy to keep ‘dream’ and ‘sleep state’ more distinctly separate... Supposing that we are brought face to face with a pure telepathic ‘dream’, we call it, preferably, rather than ‘dream’, a telepathic experience in a state of sleep. ... The very conception of a purely ‘telepathic’ dream lies in its being a perception of something external before which the mind remains passive and receptive.
I am now almost at the end of what I wish to say. I could, however, add the observation that the examples of telepathic messages or productions studied here are clearly linked to emotions pertinent to the sphere of the Oedipus complex. This may sound astonishing, however, I do not intend to present it as a great discovery. I would prefer to refer to the result we arrived at by investigating the dream that I considered in the first place. Telepathy has no relation to the essential nature of dreams and cannot at all deepen what we already understand of them through analysis. On the other hand, psychoanalysis can accomplish something to advance the study of telepathy, inasmuch as, with the aid of its interpretations, many of the enigmatic features of telepathic phenomena can become more intelligible to us; or else other phenomena, still doubtful, may, for the first time and definitively, be confirmed as telepathic in nature.
There is the indisputable fact that sleep creates incontestable conditions for telepathy, although it is not indispensable to the occurrence of telepathic processes, they originate from messages or unconscious activity... Then nothing new presents itself. It can be assumed that the laws of unconscious mental life apply to telepathy [5].
Peter Gay, one of Freud’s biographers, made a very interesting critical comment:”As a scientist, Freud was unwilling to defend superstition and the abandonment of reason. But also as a scientist he was ready to investigate phenomena that seemed mysterious and elusive to earthly solutions. Virtually all of these phenomena, he argued, are open to naturalistic explanations. The startling prophecies, the haunting coincidences usually turn out to be projections of intense desires. But some occult experiences, particularly in the realm of thought transfer, could prove authentic. In 1921 Freud declared himself willing to leave the question open - but at the same time preferred to keep the subject restricted to his innermost circle, so that the frank discussion of telepathy would not divert attention from psychoanalysis [6].
Depois De Freud muitas pesquisas sobre telepatia foram feitas, em varios paises, mas com enfase nos Estados Unidos e Uniao Sovietica, atual Russia. Traremos, de forma muito sucinta alguns elementos de Ornstein e Krippner. Ornstein escreveu que existem dois modos de lidar com a pesquisa do fenomeno “paranormal”: In the linear mode, we receive and process imput primarily in sequence, one event following the other like the hours of the clock. If a second mode exists, in which the concepts of future and past are irrelevant, then many phenomena within that that second mode will see to ‘transcend’ the ordinary notion of time - but only for those who aattempt to account for all within the linear mode. Nessas pesquisas ocidentais foram criadas condicoes especiais para o aparecimento do segundo modo com a utilizacao do biofeedback. Com isso pode-se atingir um estado de ‘escuridao’ semelhantes ao estado conseguido no oriente atraves das praticas de meditacao, que amplia a nossa sensibilidade. Entretanto e possivel estudar o fenomeno cientificamente, utilizandose recursos de tecnologia. to begin any scientific analysis of ‘paranormal communication, certain relevant questions must be asked.’ In what mode of conciousness do these communications occur?’ ‘What is the nature of the informstion transmitted?’ The paranormal communications reported in esoteric tradition are often of great importance and of great emocional significance. It might be said that ‘emotion is the fuel of this communcation’. Por outro lado, “ At the dream laboratory of Maimonides Hospital in New York, Stanley Krippner and Montague Ullman have begun to investigate paranormal communication in this manner. Their study concerns ‘transmission’ during the sleep, using information of varying degrees of emotional significance. In these experiments the ‘receiver’ go to sleep, in a close room and is monitored by EEG. When the EEG of the ‘receiver’ shows that h is dreaming, the ‘sender’ in another room, physically isolated from his partner, opensone of envelopes containing a painting. The reproduction might be Salvador Dali ‘s The Last Supper, or a quiet scene at the beach. The ‘sender’ concentrates on transmitting the the scene to the ‘receiver’. A the end of a dram period , rapid eye movements stop. Using the EEG as ana indicator in the control room near the ‘receiver’ awakens the sleeper at the the end of his REM period and tape-rcords the remembered contents of the dream. Of course, this experimenter does not know what was in the envelop. The sender awaits the onset of the next REM period and resumes ‘transmission’; the receiver is again awakened after the dream. This process continues throughout the night. Later, the transcripts of the records are sent to a panel of judges, who not know which painting was ‘sent’ during which dream. The judges attempt to match the transcripts of dreams and the set of twelve paintings. Each painting has, then a chance probabilility of being judged the stimulus that was ‘sent’. An increase in that probability beyond chance would presumably de due to similarity of dream and the painting. The matches for the paintings containing highly emotional situations were found to be much higher than chance. These experiments are but one series which seem to indicate that emocionality has an effect on this mode of communication , but need confirm by other investigators [7].
One of Jung’s editors wrote in the preface: Synchronicity a principle of “acausal” connections because it deals with facts determined by instincts or archetypes and that cannot be understood through the principle of causality. On the contrary, they are significant coincidences that bring a new dimension to scientific understanding. The fact that Jung hesitated to publish this writing that was going to revolutionize science seems very understandable. He only came to publish it together with an essay by the famous physicist and Nobel Prize holder, Prof. W. Pauli, of the Federal Technical School of Zurich in Explanation of Nature and Psyche. The theory of synchronicity shows us the existence of connections between the knowledge of modern Physics and Analytical Psychology, in a frontier field still very little explored and difficult to access reality.
To facilitate the presentation to the reader of such a complex and somewhat obscure subject we will bring the concept of synchronicity: “By the synchronistic phenomenon, Jung understood the coincidence in time of two or more psychic and physical events that are connected, not causally, but by theiridentical meaning”, quoted by Von Franz [8]
Jung posed the question that otherwise there is a general domain where acausal events are not only possible, but also real. He wrote that “we generally admit that chance is susceptible to some causal explanation, and can only be called ‘chance’ or ‘coincidence,’ because its causality has not yet been discovered. As we have an ingrained conviction about the absolute validity of the law of causality, we think that this explanation of chance is sufficient; but if the principle of causality is valid only relatively, it follows that the vast majority of chance can be explained in a causal sense; However, there must remain a small number of cases that have no causal link. We are thus faced with the task of selecting the casual events and separating the acausal from those that can be explained causally. It is to be supposed, of course, that the number of events that can be explained causally far outweighs the events suspected of acausality, and for this reason a superficial or prejudiced observer can easily ignore the relatively rare acausal phenomena. As soon as we began to deal with the problem of chance, we were faced with the need for a quantitative evaluation of the phenomena in question” [2].
Jung explained that it is not possible to select empirical material without differentiating criteria. “How can we recognize the acausal combinations of events, since it is evidently, of course, impossible to examine all events with respect to their causality? The answer to this question is that acausal events should be expected, especially where, after lengthy reflection, a causal connection seems to us unthinkable.
Jung cited the example known to physicians as ‘duplication of cases’ or even more, cited the work done by Kammerer, who established the ‘law of the series’ (1919). However, the explanation found by Kammerer is that “although the series or successions of chance are not subject to the action of a common cause, that is, although they are acausal, they are an expression of inertia, of the general capacity for persistence.
He explains the simultaneity of ‘series of similar things side by side’ as being ‘imitation’..., but for some obscure reason, what he seeks behind these events is much more than the simple guarantee of probabilities - he seeks a law of seriality which he would like to introduce as a principle, alongside causality and finality” [2].
Jung wrote in footnote n.9 that “the numinosity of a series of flukes grows in direct proportion to the number and its terms. By virtue of this, unconscious (probably archetypal) contents are constellated, giving us the impression that the series was ‘caused’. Since we cannot imagine how this is possible without really magical categories, we are usually satisfied with simple printing” [2].
We have here to mention, that in more current times, who defined the term ‘numinous’ was the theologian Rudolf Otto in his book “The Sacred”; Jung used the term not for exclusive references to religions, but, as a self-declared empirical researcher, to the most varied manifestations of the collective unconscious, through its structures, that is, the archetypes.
In one of the definitions he made, in his work on the concept of archetype we have that, “From a causal and scientific-natural point of view, we can consider the primordial image as mnemic sediment, an engram (SEMON) that arose from the condensation of numerous processes similar to each other. In this sense it is a sediment and, with it, a fundamental typical form of a certain psychic experience that always returns. As a mythological motif it is an expression that is always active and always returning, evoking the psychic experience and question or formulating it appropriately. Under this aspect, it is a psychic expression of a physiologically and anatomically determined disposition. Assuming one takes the view that a given anatomical structure is the product of environmental conditions acting on living matter, then the primordial image, in its constant and universal occurrence, corresponds to an equally universal and constant external influence which, therefore, must have the character of a natural law [9].
Jung, continuing his reasoning for the progressive construction of his theory of synchronicity, makes a critique of some philosophical elements of Schopenhauer:”All the events of a person’s life would consequently be in two fundamentally different kinds of connection: first, in an objective causal connection of the natural process; secondly, in a subjective relation which exists only with respect to the individual who experiences it, and which is therefore as subjective as his own dreams... The fact that these connections exist simultaneously and the same fact, though being a link between two entirely different chains, fits perfectly between the two, so that the fate of one individual fits the fate of others, and each is his own hero and at the same time the extra of an alien drama is something that really surpasses our capacity for understanding and can only be conceived by virtue of the most marvelous harmonia praestabilita (pre-established harmony). In his opinion, the ‘subject of the great dream of life... it is one’, that is, the will, the prima causa from which all the causal chains radiate... and they are in a relationship of significant simultaneity. Jung explained that from a scientific point of view “there is nothing that asides these two conceptions. The first cause is a mythologeme, and it only deserves credit when it happens in the form of the old paradox, ‘all things are one’, that is, at the same time as unity and multiplicity” [2].
On the other hand, within the scientific domain “The amount of facts gathered by Gurney, Myers and Podmore, stimulated Dariex, Richet and C. Flammarion to deal with the problem on the basis of the calculation of probabilities. Dariex found a probability of 1:4,114,545 for “telepathic” precognition of death, meaning that the explanation of such a premonitory fact as the work of chance is therefore over a million times more unlikely than ‘telepathic’ coincidence or significant acausal coincidence [2].
Jung wrote that “it is only in a more recent epoch that the decisive proof of the existence of combinations of acausal events has been presented in an adequate scientific manner, especially through the experiments of Rhine and his collaborators, although these authors have not recognized the far-reaching conclusions that should be drawn from their findings [2]. Jung explained that distance, in principle, has no influence on the result, it is proof that the object studied here can not be a phenomenon of force or energy, because, otherwise, the overcoming of distance and diffusion in space should cause a decrease in the effect and, as it is not very difficult to see, The number of hits should be inversely proportional to the square of the distance. As this evidently did not happen, there is no alternative but to admit that the distance is physically variable and, in certain circumstances, can be reduced to zero by some psychic disposition... Even more remarkable is the fact that time, in principle, is not a negative factor, that is, the early reading of a series of cards to be drawn in the future produces a hit that goes beyond the limits of probability... This points to a psychic relativity of time, since it is about perceptions of eventsthat have not yet occurred. In such circumstances it seems that the time factor was eliminated by a psychic function, or rather, by a psychic disposition that is capable of eliminating also the space factor [2].
On the part of physicists, ESP experiments were appreciated in a positive sense by Robert A. McConnell, in an article entitled “ESP- Facto or Fancy” (reading suggested by W. Pauli to Jung). Here is a second definition of synchronicity made by the author himself: “It seems more appropriate to say that the explanation must begin on one side, with a critique of our concept of time and place, and on the other side, with the unconscious. As I have already said, it is impossible, with current resources, to explain extra-sensory perception, that is, significant coincidence, as being an energy phenomenon. This eliminates the causal explanation, because the ‘effects’ can only be understood as a phenomenon of energy. That is why one cannot speak of cause and effect, but of a significant coincidence in time, a kind of contemporaneity. Because of the character of this simultaneity, I chose the term synchronicity to designate a hypothetical factor of explanation equivalent to causality [2].
Jung was a man of truly encyclopedic knowledge, with numerous experiences on the construction of his thought, however I would personally consider Goethe and Kant as his main epistemological bases.
Jung explained that, “In itself, space and time consist of nothing. They are hypostatic concepts, born of the discriminating activity of consciousness and form the indispensable coordinates for the description of the behavior of bodies in motion. They are of essentially psychic origin, and this was probably the reason that led Kant to consider them as a priori categories. BUT, if space and time are apparent properties of bodies in motion, created by the intellectual needs of the observer, then their relativization by a psychic condition, in any case is no longer something miraculous, but lies within the limits of possibility. But this possibility occurs when the psyche observes, not the outer body, but itself. This is what happens in Rhine’s experiments: The response of the subject of experimentation is not the product of the observation of material cards, but of pure imagination, of the associations of ideas that reveal the structure of the unconscious that produces them. Here I just want to remind you that it is the decisive factors of the unconscious psyche, the archetypes, the ones that constitute the structure of the collective unconscious... The part that can’t be observed directly I called it psychoid [2].
Another noteworthy topic in his work on synchronicity is his discussion of the problem of the empirical basis of synchronicity: “The main difficulty here is to obtain empirical material from which we can draw quite safe conclusions, and unfortunately it is not easy to solve this difficulty. We do not have the experiences in question directly. Therefore, it is necessary to venture into the most hidden angles and have the courage to shake off the prejudices of our time, if we want to broaden the bases of knowledge of nature. When Galileo discovered the moons of Jupiter, with the help of his telescope, he immediately clashed also with the prejudices of his learned contemporaries”[2].
It was modern psychology and parapsychology that proved that causality does not explain a certain class of phenomena, and that, in this case, it is necessary to take into account one factor, that is, synchronicity, as a principle of explanation [2].
We will also begin an epistemological summary of the Freudian heritage as well as the Jungian heritage, which had a phase in connection with the first, but then entered into dissent in relation to psychoanalysis to constitute itself into an independent and original discipline. Since approximately 1915, when Freud formulated metapsychology, until the present day, psychoanalysis has been questioned by other models that although officially are also officially called psychoanalysis, such as Melanie Klein, Lacan, Winnicot, Mahler, Kohut, Kernberg etc. However, in our opinion as a psychologist and historian of science, we think that the distance that separates Jung from Freud is not much greater than that which separates each of the authors just mentioned, from Jung’s psychology.
The epistemological cut of these authors is significant to the point that they can almost be considered sciences distinct from Freud’s metapsychology. Klein, for example, devised a new theory of personality with a description of the workings of the mind, different from Freud’s; If, on the one hand, it has preserved as human emotions, love and hatred perhaps inspired by the Freudian drive for life and death, on the other hand it breaks with biological notions and replaces them with the notion of bond. The theory of object relations is today more accepted by most psychoanalysts than the notion of drives. It promoted a transformation in the conception of the psychic apparatus and in the unconscious; the enormous importance she attaches to fantasies in the constitution of the internal world and even in the way these objects affect reality is almost an inversion of Freud’s understanding, and brings her closer to Jung in this respect. For her, reality is always a consequence of the interaction between the internal and external world. Lacan, in bringing psychoanalysis closer to Saussure’s linguistics and Levi-Strauss’s structural anthropology, also moved away from Freud’s energetic and biological conceptions, but broadened the hermeneutic aspect of psychoanalysis. In our Master’s Thesis (2005) in History of Science, PUC/Sao Paulo, (already mentioned), we highlight the enormous importance of the Project for an epistemological understanding of Freud’s work.
We disagree with those who think that the Project is a text of prehistory of psychoanalysis, linked only to energetic aspects implying the neurophysiology and physics of the time, and later directed to an exclusively hermeneutic path; in our opinion the Project of 1895 is the “rosette stone” for the understanding of psychoanalysis, so much so that in 1939, in the last year of his life, after publishing (SB, Freud, vol. 23) his text “Moses and Monotheism” included the text “The Psychic Apparatus” where he demonstrated his appreciation of the energetic aspects. His ideal was always to unite the energetic conception, evidenced with more emphasis in the Project with the hermeneutic conception which reaches its greatest expression in the Interpretation of dreams. Much of the misunderstanding of Freud’s work comes from his not having made these premises explicit, but continuing to use them his entire life in an implied way. We are 128 years away from the Project, and it seems that humanity is far from reconciling these seemingly irreconcilable topics, even with current neuroscience, and current physics with the hermeneutical data obtained by the practice of psychoanalysis (in the plural); this does not prevent the Project at some future time from being achievable. Thus, we see Freud’s epistemological stance identified with naturalistic Monism. According to Assoun:”. It is true that there is at the heart of Freudism an energetic problem and a theory of meaning. Freud, though. He never overcame the fate of his energetic problem andhis theory of meaning. Freud is not someone who wanders from one to the other, trying to keep them together and achieving greater or lesser success: he never dissociated one from the other! [it] does not move from naturalism to hermeneutics, with one place to the other: in it, naturalism and hermeneutics are linked as one and the same language [10]. A relevant aspect of Jung’s epistemological stance can be seen in a lecture he gave in Augsburg entitled “Spirit and Life” where he stated: “I do not pretend to contest either the relative validity of the realist point of view, that of the esse in re (of the real being), or of the idealistic point of view, that of the esse in intellectu solo (of being only in the intellect); I would just like to unite these extreme opposites through the in anima (of being in the soul) which is precisely the psychological point of view” [11].
If Freud relied on evolutionists such as Darwin and Lamarck as well as on Helmholtz, Muller, Ludwig and DuBois-Reymond, Jung welcomed the antinomies, relying on a conception of a unified nature, an inheritance that he owed to the Romantics; he was also close to Baruch Spinoza (1632-1677) whose conception could be understood as a Monism of attributes. According to Spinoza, “the thinking substance and the extensive substance are one and the same substance understood from the outset under one attribute, as under another” Spinoza, B (1973). “Jung often mentioned Kant as his forerunner. In addition to Kant’s interest in ‘parapsychology’, which sparked Jung’s own interest. Jung attributed much of his own archetypal theory. This is because Kant, as a Platonic, thought that our perception of the world conformed to ideal Platonic forms. He held that reality exists only through our perceptions, which structure things according to basic forms. The path to any objective knowledge therefore occurs through the Kantian categories... Jung can be seen as a Neo-Kantian, since he broadens Kantian thought by adding it to a sense of the reality of history and culture.
Jung’s movement of thought was encyclopedic, but we cannot fail to quote Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832) with whom he had a special affinity and saw him as a predecessor (and even as a possible ancestor)... like Jung, he was concerned with the possibility of the metamorphosis of the Self and the relation of the Self (masculine) to the feminine... and with evil and its effort to maintain the tension of opposites within itself.”
Our synthetic narrative about the main arguments presented by Freud in relation to the theme of Telepathy and by Jung in relation to the Theory of Synchronicity, imply in some way the philosophical and scientific discussions about the body/psyche relationship and the matter/spirit relationship. In this part of our work we will bring the positioning of eminent thinkers of physics, psychology, philosophy of science, epistemology that can illuminate the understanding of these subjects that are situated at the frontiers of the sciences and that imply both physics and metaphysics.
My dear Professor Dr. Jose Luiz Goldfarb, at the time President of the Brazilian Society of History of Science, physicist by training and biographer of Mario Schenberg wrote:”Completing the thought of Mario Schenberg affirming that the ideal of building a philosophy of nature in a comprehensive method that allows to know reality in its multiple manifestations, persists in the Professor himself. If twentieth-century physics carried out part of this project by unifying physics and chemistry (through quantum theory), we will see that Mario Schenberg presents his personal vision of the next step: ‘I personally believe that ordinary biology is not the closest part of physics. I think it’s in psychology that there’s a more direct link. This kind of relationship must involve perhaps parapsychological-type phenomena, it’s something between physics and psychology. Perhaps the assimilation of parapsychological phenomena to physics could be a natural point to allow the union of physics with biology. There, then, physics could acquire its aspect of a global science of nature”.
And, Professor Goldfarb continues; “We conclude, with one of Newton’s greatest intuitions, according to Professor Goldfarb. I think this psychology thing is key. Newton should assume that, too. I don’t know if at that time there was a clear idea of psychology. But this idea of space as the sensory of God suggests a relationship between the things of psychology and those of physics, for the theory of sensation is psychological in nature. So if space was God’s sensory, there was already something of psychology” [12].
Note to the reader the profound similarity of these assertions of Schenberg, considered by Albert Einstein one of the 8 greatest physicists of his time, and the thought of Jung in communication with Stephen I Abrams [8].“I think you are correct in assuming that synchronicity, though in practice a relatively rare phenomenon, is an all-pervading factor or principle in the universe, i.e., in the unus mundus, where there is no incommensurability between so-called matter and so-called psyche. Here one gets into deep waters, at least I must confess that I am far from having sounded these abysmal depths. In this connection I always come upon the enigma of the natural number. I have a distinct feeling that number is a key to the mystery, since it is just as much discovery as it is invented. It is quantity as well as meaning. For the latter I refer to the arithmetical qualities of the fundamental archetype of the of the so-called Self (monad, microcosm.) and its historically and empirically well-documented variants of the 4 - 1 3,10
Dr. Jung explained that “the concept we have of synchronicity in the narrowest sense is only a special case of general organization, that of the equivalence of physical and psychic processes where the observer is in a privileged position of being able to recognize the tertium comparationis [13]. But as soon as one perceives the archetypal background, he is tempted to attribute the assimilation of independent psychic and physical processes a (causal) effect of the archetype, and thus to ignore the fact that they are merely contingent. We avoid this danger if we consider synchronicity as a special case of general acausal organization. In this way one also avoids unnecessarily multiplying the principles of explanation: the archetype is the introspectively recognizable form of aprioristic psychic organization. If you add to this an external synchronistic process, it will obey the same fundamental scheme or, in other words, is organized in the same way. This form of organization is distinguished from the properties of integers or from the discontinuities of physics by the fact that the latter have existed from eternity and are regularly repeated, whereas the former are acts of creation in time. Let us say in passing that this is precisely why I insisted on the time factor as characteristic of these phenomena and called them synchronistic.
Nobel Prize-winning physicist Wolfgang Pauli explained:“In searching for an application of the of the archetypes apart from its in modern psychology of the of unconscious, I first came across the historical fact that Kepler expanded and regularly made use of the terms archetypes and archetypal is, and actually in the same sense as Jung, namely, as ‘prototype’, ‘primal image’. At all events, Kepler’s use of this concept is a special one; he applies it to mathematical ideas exclusively.From my teacher, A. Sommerfeld, I well knew that Pythagorean elements whichappeared in Kepler are still effective today. If therefore the general concept of ‘archetype’ is made use of today. It should be understood in such a way as to include the ideas, among others, of the continuous series of whole numbers in arithmetic, and that of the continuum in geometry. Without doubt it is a question of constantly and regularly recurring concepts. I think it would be of interest to work out more precisely the specific qualities of the archetypal ideas which form the basis of mathematics in comparison with more general archetypal concepts. In my opinion the concept of the archetypes requires no enlargement for us to understand these basic mathematical intuitions.” (1961, p.122) Jung escribes:“There is two poles partake of one and the same unknown living reality and registered only as two different factors in consciousness. If we are affected by the physical or so-called ‘material’ events of the outer world, we call it matter; if we are moved by fantasies, Ideas, or feelings from within, we call it the objective psyche or the collective unconscious. Jung then concentrated his attention on investigating the latter phenomenon, and subsequently discovered to his amazement that he had developed thought models and concepts which exhibited an xtraordinary correspondence with models of microphysics. For example, there is the concept of mplementarity (in physics between particle and wave and in psychology between conscious and unconscious contents); the necessity for taking the conscious hypotheses of the ‘observer’ into account when describing events; the limitation of only being able to describe the ‘workings” of nonperceptual structures without grasping their substance “in itself’; and the fact that we can only do justice to phenomena by an interpretation on the level of energetics [13].
A doutora Von Franz, explicit “this parallelism does not imply that their subject matters are directly related. And yet all indications are that an actual connection does exist between the psychic unconscious and the subject matter of physics. This connection in the first place appears to be statistical-causal, insofar as interactions between them are demonstrable. Bodily physical conditions influence the psyche, and conversely purely mental conceptions can alter the physis. Such reciprocal influences ca be statistically formulated; psychosomatic medicine has already begun to do research in this fiel [13].
As Jung points out, the lowest level of our psyche is simply pure nature, ‘Nature, which includes everything, thus also the unknow, inclusive of matter’, In the preconscious aspect of the object is to be found, as it were, on the ‘animal’ or instinctual level of the psyche. It is only with the activation of this that synchronistic events appear to be constellated [13].
We note here a similarity between Freud and Jung, since both attribute, with respect to Telepathy for Freud and synchronicity for Jung, to the manifestation of a more archaic level of the psyche. In the English school, it is admitted that the unconscious some types of innate knowledge, from very early (archaic) and draws attention to the almost ‘magical’ relationship (telepathic?) between mother and baby through projective and introjective identification.
In turn, Winnicott’s concept of the transitional object and, according to him, occupies the place of illusion and has a role of intermediation between the internal world and the external world, resembles in some points the way Jung sees the psyche and the imaginal field, because for Jung the image is the bridge between subject and object.
We now come to consider authors who made the history and philosophy of the life sciences (Canguilhem) and physics (Bachelard in his Doctoral Thesis studied Einstein). We consider that physics in its radical sense (originating in the physis of the Greeks), implied the study of nature as a whole, even if only in the philosophical mode, which does not prevent physics in its scientific mode from broadening its gaze; There are distinct planes of nature that have been studied by independent sciences: the general properties of “matter” by physicists, the properties of “life” by biologists, and the properties of the “psyche” by psychologists. However, our article implies considering these planes as having very intimate relations with each other, without one level being reduced to the other.
Georges Canguilhem in the preface Gaston Bachelard reported that this “arises, now double and complete. His life as a philosopher will take place in a work united by two distinct temporalities: the accelerated time of epistemological impatience, afflicted with the idea of being outdated by the dialectical renewal of knowledge, and the lazy time of the dream, ‘not tormented by reproaches’. It was necessary to invent in philosophy dualism without mutual excommunication between real and imaginary. Gaston Bachelard is the author of this invention, by the bold application of a new principle of complementarity.
The Introduction of Bachelard’s thought at this point in our article is due not only to his great qualifications as a philosopher of science, but also to the profound studies he developed in the area of poetics and imagination; in this topic we find a strong connection with the essence of Carl Gustav Jung’s thought. The latter wrote that imagination is the reproductive or creative activity of the spirit in general, without being a special faculty, since it is reflected in all the basic forms of psychic life: thinking, feeling, sensualizing and intuiting. Fantasy as an imaginative activity is merely a direct expression of psychic activity, of psychic energy that is only given to consciousness in the form of images or content.A psychic content is nothing more than a system of force manifested to consciousness. From this point of view, it can be said, then, that fantasy as a ghost is nothing more than a certain amount of libido (psychic energy) that cannot manifest itself to consciousness except in the form of an image; The ghost is an idea-force. Fantasizing as an imaginative activity is identical to the flow of the psychic process of energy [9].”Mario Schenberg also commented:”.It is through imagination that we can attain reality. We don’t actually have another way to attain reality except through imagination. You attain reality through creative imagination, and the view of reality changes according to a change of concepts that you have, because the concepts already give another different picture of reality. Now, these concepts are the product of the creative imagination; So our view of reality is a perception that is essentially based on our capacity for imagination. The more the power of imagination grows, the more other aspects of the universe are perceived.The creative imagination is the epistemological limit of the human being: there is no pure knowledge, regardless of its performance [12].
Jean E. Charon, a nuclear physicist, believed, as did Andre Malraux, that our third millennium will be that of the spirit. Charon thought that: “To open to Metaphysics the doors of Physics, is the first claim of physicists who are able to reflect philosophically; it is to leave more free course within research, imagination and creation, and it is to know that the problems truly ‘important’ to man, you must also ask everyone to enumerate them [14].”
Von Franz mentioned que “The French physicist Olivier Costa de Beauregard suggests an interesting enlargement of the Minkowski-Einstein ‘universe’ by postulating that a coexistent cosmic infrapsychism should be coordinated with the four - dimensional continuum of the relativists. This infrapsychism contains the pictorial representations of the outer world which we produce in our psyche. These images constitute the basic elements to produce all higher orders (negentropy and information).” Consequently, explicit Von Franz, there seem to be two tendencies at play in the modern scientific viewpoint on the ultimate order of existence, one consisting of images, and other of geometric or numerical structures. In this connection Jung expressed himself more guardedly by saying that the unus mundus contains all the preconditions which determine the form of empirical phenomena. These preconditions must be considered completely nonperceptual and to some extent both pre-image-creating and premathematical. Only when they reach the threshold of psychic perception do they take on the form of images or geometric or numerical structures. By ‘preconditions’ Jung refers to the archetypes in their aspect as nonperceptual dispositions latent in the unconscious which are manifest on the threshold of consciousness in regularly appearing images, thoughts, and typical emotional mods of behavior [13].
Newton Freire-Maia, a geneticist at the University of Parana, with an international reputation, pondered Beauregard and the themes he addressed:” time and the progress of the material system to its most probable state, prediction and retrodition, entropy and negentropy, Carnot’s theorem, Bayes’ principle, the arrow of temodynamics, the chance of ignorance, occult determinism, probability and subjectivity, entropy and information, Maxwell’s demon, cybernetics, anti-Carnot syntropic sense, antiphysical action, living beings and the temporal dimension of the universe, the biological arrow and the psychological arrow of time, etc. Well, what conclusion does this scientist who penetrates so deep into the verisimilitude of the universe draw from his work? After addressing topics of physics and metaphysics (with a hyphen!), he concludes that what physics studies of the universe ‘is not the whole of the universe’ (my emphasis). For him, there is another universe of a psychic nature. This psychic reality pervades matter and spills over into living beings, which move in a direction contrary to that of changes with increased entropy [15].
“Jung explained that” It may well be the most primitive element of order in the human mind… thus we define number psychologically as an archetype of order which has become conscious” In this instance ‘mind’ should be understood as a dynamism operating in the unconscious, whose aspect of order, when it becomes conscious, appears to the inner vision as idea of number. In this paper on synchronicity Jung designated number not as the primal manifestation of the mind or spirit, but also as an unalterable quality of matter. When all its other properties or characteristics such as mass, color, consistency, ad so on have been subtracted, he says, the numerical aspect of matter remains the most primitive basic element” [13].
Thomas Herbert reported that ideological mutation always has the status of a delusional discourse for the dominant ‘ideology’ at the point considered (this seems valid also for scientific mutations, as well as aesthetic or political.) One must then pose the question of how the effect of (scientific) knowledge and the homologous aesthetic or political effect can be distinguished from delusion: it is clear that this implies a transformation of the norms of admissibility, that is, of the system of guarantees that ensure ideology, its inviolability. This demonstrates that every form of non-ideological knowledge develops in and against an ideological element [13].
Here is not the place to make the study of the interfaces between the scientific aspects with the political and economic aspects but only to mention the fact that the impressive epistemological cut (Bachelard) occasioned by the passage from classical physics to electromagnetism and then to the physics of relativity and quantum physics, left physicists perplexed; they had to reconsider the epistemological premises they possessed and seek new means, philosophical, epistemological, scientific.
Similarly, the psychology of the unconscious, which emerged first as philosophies of the unconscious, attributed to Carl Gustav Carus and Edouard Von Hartmann, then by the concept of the subconscious that was established by French medicine in the nineteenth century and finally by Freud’s psychoanalysis with its conception of the personal unconscious and analytical psychology with its conception of the collective unconscious, generated an epistemological cut similar to that which occurred in physics.
Gaston Bachelard explained that “.The new physicist reversed the perspective of the hypothesis patiently elaborated by Vaihinger. Now it is the objects that are represented by metaphors, and it is their organization that represents reality, that is, what is now hypothetical is our phenomenon; because our immediate apprehension of the real only functions as a confusing, provisional, conventional datum, and this phenomenological apprehension needs to be listed and classified. The reflection is that to give meaning to the initial phenomenon, suggesting an organic sequence of research, a rational perspective of experiences. We cannot rely a priori on the information that the data can provide us... Scientific knowledge is always the reformation of an illusion .Microphysics ceases to be a hypothesis between two experiments to be an experiment between two theorems. It starts with an idea and ends with a problem... and, by an inversion of positive belief, it is believed that the phenomenon demonstrates nothing, or that it demonstrates evil, as long as it has not been mathematically sensitized, as long as the mathematical reactives have not revealed to it all the aspects. A thousand subtleties of mathematical origin, although awaiting an experimental justification, are imposed on physicists, not by the seduction of an unstructured novelty, but by their numenical coordination. Mathematical physics thus brings together the spirit of refinement and the geometric spirit, or rather: it gives refinement geometric rigor and certainty.... In the infinitely small, the numenic properties are more numerous than the phenomenal properties... Given the success of rational research, how can we justify placing under the phenomenon a number in which our spirit recognizes and animates itself?... We could say that mathematical physics corresponds to a numenology quite different from the phenomenography in which scientific empiricism intends to isolate itself. This numenology clarifies a phenomenological technique by which new phenomena are not only found, but invented, fully constructed [16].
Jean Charon reflected on the need to have a new attitude towards knowledge that can: “be a new window by considering the Universe of Spirit (psyche for Jung) and that of Matter, and try to describe them in scientific language without ceasing to consider, both of them.”
Descartes declared within his Meditations: “Then all Philosophy is like a tree whose roots are Metaphysics, the trunk is Physics and the branches that come out of this trunk are all the other sciences” (our translation).
As we have mentioned before, this does not imply confusing the different planes, but rather relating them by imagination and reflection; for Jung the latter only reaches its fullness when the imagination is actively involved [14].
Newton throughout his life regarded Spirit as possessing a nature directly accessible to experience, and therefore belonging to the realm of the investigations of physics.... whether Marx, Laplace, Voltaire, Comte, Valery has a serious attitude is to assume a dogmatic position, which consists in refusing to the Spirit the possibility of being the object of research [14]. To open to Metaphysics the doors of physics, it is first to demand of physicists that they be able to reflect philosophically, and to be able to give free course within research to imagination and creation [14].
Charon explained that he was proposing to explain with his research, in an extension of Einstein’s work on general relativity, which allowed him to answer interesting questions, not only to Physics, but also to Metaphysics, in the sense that it will be described in the language of Physics, the structure of matter ‘containing’ a space of Spirit [14]. Around the years 1975-1976 “I was able to show that certain elementary particles, of which are stable (i.e. practically infinite lifespan) as envelope within a shell of matter a new spacetime different from the spacetime we are accustomed to consider” ... Charon created a metaphor to explain to those who are not experts in physics by saying that “ these particles are comparable to soap bubbles that float within our ordinary space time; but within these tiny bubbles of soap, there would be a space of time of a special nature” [14].
If I say that if in the space of this bubble an event is recorded at time t, the same event will return within the space of the bubble at a slightly later time of t + T raised to one. This new time is all similar to that which seems to prevail within the phenomena where memory intervenes. Indeed, when we forget for an instant a past event, it is that this event, recorded somewhere within what we call our memory, comes to appear again in the present of our spirit in that instant. The particular time of our ‘soap bubbles’ I shall name Temps de L’ Espirit. (as opposed to our ordinary time, which I will name as the time of Matter) which then continually brings past events into the present instant, putting them at our disposal by making an act of memory of the past [14].
And that’s not all. The space of our soap bubbles’, and not only its time, also presents a great analogy with what is expected of a proper space for spiritual phenomena.( psyche for Jung; esprit in French is synonymous with the psychic) In fact, each one knows that the events that unfold within our common space, the space of Matter, obeys the famous principle called the ‘second principle of thermodynamics’ according to which physical phenomena cannot unfold in such a way as to decrease their entropy [14].
our universe of Matter is doomed, sooner or later, to certain death. Well, in the ‘soap bubbles, they enclose a space where things go in the opposite way: within that space, the amount of information stored can only grow. Since, on the other hand, there is an equivalence between information (emphasis added) and negative entropy (or neguentropy), we can affirm that within the spaces of our ‘soap bubbles’ they entropy does nothing but decrease (i.e., negentropy only increases), contrary to what happens with the common space, that of Matter. But then, isn’t this space the specific space of the Spirit? Because it is what we notice, from this, that we can diagnose the presence of the Spirit within a phenomenon of Nature, in living or thinking structures, most remarkably.... In short, since it is the operator of what we “call Spirit”, the structure “is instructed by experience”, and this in an irreversible way giving the irreversibility of memory. This phenomenon of instruction frequent, or in all cases, never decreasing [14]. Charon titled his work complex relativity.
Michel Cazenave in the warning of the edition of the colloquium of Cordoue: “Can we advance the hypothesis of a potential psychophysical unity of the whole universe what the philosophers called Unus Mundus? Should we raise the hypothesis of a fundamental consciousness-energy whose physical, physiological, psychic and unconscious phenomena would be different modes of manifestation, and the imaginal the door? Should we invoke the coexistence of an ontologically different matter and consciousness, but one and the other in constant interaction? Should we consider the universe only from the angle of chance and necessity, or can we think that phenomena of meaning are manifested there, just as deep psychology or certain physical theories have discovered them?
When reflecting on the phenomenon of synchronicity and telepathy, it is perceived that Freud and Jung realize the unequivocal existence of these phenomena, through observation and description. Freud with his more realistic bias tried to find the causes of the telepathic phenomenon, and for this, resorted to his traditional explanatory basis for almost all psychic phenomena, dreams, flawed acts, development, transference, etc.; He concluded by explaining the unconscious, mainly sexual desires and the Oedipal situation of the characters involved.
Jung observes the phenomenon without intending to explain it; His approach is descriptive and phenomenological. Synchronistic and parapsychological phenomena may be waiting for new epistemological approaches in order to unravel their true nature. Jung studied divinatory games in order to understand synchronicity as a way of producing knowledge and was fascinated by the ability of the Chinese to generate knowledge many centuries ago with the I Ching. It is known that something acts, but how to answer the traditional questions: How? What is the origin? Why? What for? Well, that’s our tradition. The Epistemological Project of Modernity, based on a nomothetic and quantifier model, with measurement, experimentation, mathematization, purified epistemological object, was very successful about 400 years ago and still has fields where its application is valid; it however has its limitations that have already been made explicit by many philosophers, historians and sociologists of science, with Popper, Polanyi, Feyerabend, Bachelard, Latour, kuhn, Morin, Chalmers, just to name a few examples.
A process that had already begun much longer, by German Romanticism and by Kant, as we know (apud Morin), “subtracted time and space from the outside world to make them ‘a priori forms of sensibility’ that allow the spirit to organize experience. He also subtracted causality and finality to transform them into categories of understanding. Thus, our knowledge can only know what obeys its organizing power (the world of phenomena); the Reality itself (num) remains inaccessible to him.” and by Dilthey, who distinguished natural sciences and spirit sciences valuing hermeneutics as a method of producing valid knowledge [17].
In psychology, the distinction made by Kant has an equivalence in Jung in the distinction between archetype “in itself” (numenic and energetic aspect) and “archetypal image” (level of phenomenon) and can be experienced as psychological experience For Morin , atpresent, “the crisis of the foundations of scientific knowledge meets the crisis of the philosophical foundations, both converging to the ontological crisis of the Real confronting us with the ‘problem of problems , that of the crisis of the foundations of thought’ (Pierre Cornaire). The fundamental Uncertain hides behind all local certainties. Nothing certain. Nothing really founding. The idea of foundation must sink with the idea of ultimate analysis, ultimate cause, of first explanation [17].
To account for this crisis, Morin adopted a “metapoint of view”, perhaps which makes us better reflect on the issues raised in our article, examining the examinations that are made in the distinct planes of the universe and that are carried out by different specialists, “but that is still in the process of constitution”; He reasoned that “ Complex epistemology will have a broader competence than classical epistemology, but without having a foundation, a privileged place, or unilateral power of control. It will be open to a number of essential cognitive problems raised by the Bachelardian (complexity) and Piagetian epistemologies (the biology of knowledge, the articulation between logic and psychology, the epistemic subject) If complex epistemology were to take shape, it would not constitute a Hubblean revolution. Hubble showed that the universe has no center. Complex psychology has no foundation. The notion of baseless epistemology has already been suggested by Rescher. Instead of starting from the “basic or ‘protocolary’ statements that, in the view of logical positivism, provided knowledge with an undoubted foundation, Rescher imagines a networked system whose structure is not hierarchical, without any level being more fundamental than the others. We fully accepted this conception and added to it the dynamic idea of rotating recursion called it the knowledge of knowledge [18].
