As an archetype, number becomes not only a psychic factor, but more generally, a world-structuring factor.
Number, as it were, lies behind the psychic realm as a dynamic ordering principle, the primal element of which Jung called spirit.
As an archetype, number becomes not only a psychic factor, but more generally, a world-structuring factor.
In other words, numbers point to a background reality in which psyche and matter are no longer distinguishable.
Was particularly impressed, for example, by the fact that the Fibonacci number series corresponded to laws for the growth of plants, as well as by what Eugene Wigner called “the unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics in the natural sciences.”
This seemed to him emphatically to suggest that one and the same ordering principle underlies both living matter and the human psyche—“ergo a property of matter (or of ‘energy’ . . .) in general and consequently also of moving bodies in general, the psychic ‘movement’ included.”
Nonetheless this principle does not seem to turn up with any regularity; rather, synchronicity points to an indeterminable “clearly arbitrary ordering principle.”
In relation to the primary coincidence of psychic and physical events, these irregular synchronicity phenomena are something secondary.
That being the case, the numbers appear to constitute the actual bridge between regular acausal orderedness and irregular synchronicity phenomena. ~ Marie-Louise von Franz, Psyche and Matter, Page 216
