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Jung's paper 'Synchronicity - an acausal connecting principle', defining the phenomenon as a 'meaningful' coincidence depending on archetypal activation, was published in 1952, together with a conceptually related piece by physicist and Nobel Laureate Wolfgang Pauli entitled, 'The influence of archetypal ideas on the scientific theories of Kepler'. Slavoj Žižek, in The Indivisible Remainder: On Schelling and Related Matters, suggests that, in contrast to any notion of a 'pre-modern Jungian harmony', the main lesson of quantum physics was that not only was the psychoanalytic, empty subject of the signifier constitutively out-of-joint with respect to the world, but that the Real in itself was already incomplete, out-of-joint, 'not-all'. Yet while Žižek frequently tries to separate Jung from his own ontology, this paper shows that his ontology is not as different as he suggests. Consistent with our earlier publications on Jung and Zizek, a closer investigation reveals an underlying congruence of both of their approaches. In this paper we show that this affinity lies in the rejection by both Jung and Žižek of the ideology of reductive materialism, a rejection that demonstrably draws on quantum physics in similar ways. While Jung posits an inherently meaningful universe, Žižek attempts to salvage the freedom of human subjectivity by opposing his Lacanian 'dialectical materialism' to reductive materialism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article the author comments on a paper by Morgan Stebbins which presented a concise overview of Lacanian theory. He states that the paper by Stebbins presents an excellent idea which will help in promoting any Jungian/Lacanian intellectual exchange. According to him Stebbin's approach to 'conjoining' aspects of Jungian and Lacanian theory conforms the strands of post-Jungian theory.

Innovative attempts at collating Jungian analytical psychology with a range of 'post-modern' theories have yielded significant results. This paper adopts an alternative strategy: a Lacanian vantage point on Jungian theory that eschews an attempt at reconciling Jung with post-structuralism. A focused Lacanian gaze on Jung will establish an irreducible tension between Jung's view of archetypes as factors immanent to the psyche and a Lacanian critique that lays bare the contingent structures and mechanisms of their constitution, unveiling the supposed archetypes' a posteriori production through the efficacy of a discursive field. Theories of ideology developed in the wake of Lacan provide a powerful methodological tool allowing to bring this distinction into focus. An assembly of Lacan's fragmentary accounts of Jung will be supplemented with an approach to Jungian theory via Žižek's Lacan-oriented theory of the signifying mechanism underpinning 'ideology'. Accordingly, the Jungian archetype of the self, which is considered in some depth, can begin to be seen in a new light, namely as a 'master signifier', not only of Jung's academic edifice, but also -and initially-of the discursive strategies that establish his own subjectivity. A discussion of Jung's approach to mythology reveals how the 'quilting point' of his discourse comes to be coupled with a correlate in the Real, a non-discursive 'sublime object' conferring upon archetypes their fascinating aura. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]