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Wolfgang Giegerich's challenging and strongly argued response to the two papers recently published in the JAP by myself and Angeliki Yiassemides takes us (and other non-German-speaking Jungians) to task for a ‘serious misunderstanding’ of the kind of ‘meaning’ Jung intended by the (translated) phrase ‘meaningful coincidence’. This critique has two aspects. The first is concerned with the ‘meaning of meaning’. Giegerich notes:
Meaning in this context has absolutely nothing to do with Meaning with a capital M', with human experiences of meaning, what is meaningful for us and makes existence meaningful, let alone with transcendent meaning. In [Jung's] entire synchronicity essay the big question of meaning … in the phrase ‘quest for meaning’ has no place.
Now although I certainly did speak about transcendent meaning in my paper, this was only in terms of a possible outcome of synchronistic experiences. The kind of meaning-making I was mainly concerned with has to do with a process of ‘making sense’ of experience in such a way as to render it significant rather than ‘meaningless’. In using the term ‘congruent correspondence’ to describe this, it turns out that I was rather closer to sinngemäß, the German word that Jung used, than I had realized. The term ‘sinvoll’ meaning ‘full of meaning’ would be more appropriate to the impact of synchronicity which, as Giegerich rightly points out, I was conflating with the synchronistic events themselves. This is the second aspect of the ‘serious misunderstanding’ to which he refers and is much more germane to my particular way of thinking about synchronicity than the first aspect.
One of the main reasons for this emphasis on the experiential impact of synchronicity on my part has always been the effort to distinguish genuine cases of synchronicity from those trivial coincidences that have no particular significance but which naïve Jungians claim as ‘synchronicity’ and to which they attribute what often seems to me to be unwarranted mag