Experiencing the Baader-Meinhof Phenomenon

Sometimes the scattered data accumulated through adventitious cultural activity appear to align in such a way as to make you briefly give credence to Jung’s dubious concept of synchronicity. For example, about a week ago, I watched Uli Edel’s The Baader-Meinhof Complex. It’s an entertaining enough film, although any ambition to explore either the philosophy of the post-war radical left in Germany or the latent tensions muffled by the Federal Republic’s affluent democracy is jettisoned in favour of a scrupulously staged costume drama, featuring chic killers and enough shooting to please a Bruce Willis fan.

Trying to fill in the gaps left by the film, Moira checked Wikipedia. As well as getting some background about the group—more “correctly” known as the Red Army Faction (Rote Armee Fraktion)—she also discovered the term “Baader-Meinhof phenomenon,” which was new to both of us. From the Wikipedia entry:

The Baader-Meinhof phenomenon occurs when a person, after having learned some (usually obscure) fact, word, phrase, or other item for the first time, encounters that item again, perhaps several times, shortly after having learned it. This is a specialised version of the effect of serendipity.

The “Baader-Meinhof phenomenon” was coined by a reader of the St. Paul Pioneer Press, Terry Mullen. The Minnesota newspaper runs a daily column called “Bulletin Board,” for which readers, using pseudonyms (in this case it was ‘Gigetto on Lincoln’), submit humorous or interesting anecdotes. The term was coined when Mullen submitted a story around 1986, about how he first heard about the terrorist group known as the Baader-Meinhof Gang and then heard about it again a short while later from a different source.

Readers suddenly piled on with their own versions of the phenomenon, which quickly came to be known as the Baader-Meinhof phenomenon. Today, all similar stories are published in the St. Paul Pioneer Press Bulletin Board under the heading “Baader Meinhof Phenomenon.”

The day after reading the above explanation, I came across the following passage on page 59 in the Harper Perennial paperback of Rivka Galchen’s novel Atmospheric Disturbances:

I know the ordinary often masquerades as the extraordinary, that if you put thirty people in a room, the likelihood that two have the same birthday is over ninety percent, that when you learn a new word and it then seems suddenly ever present it is only because you have just begun to notice what was there all along. (This once happened to me with the word cathect. Also Rosicrucian.) Maybe that’s all that this find of mine was. For all I know, maybe Tzvi Gal-Chen and Buenos Aires were both already pervasive terms and I’d simply stumbled across two examples of Baader-Meinhof phenomenon.

So, in the immediate wake of learning that “Baader-Meinhof phenomenon” describes the déjà vu-like feeling that arises when re-encountering an unusual word or term soon after running into it for the first time*, I recursively experienced that phenomenon by again coming across the phrase “Baader-Meinhof phenomenon” in an unrelated source. Was this mildly jarring serendipity evidence of Jung’s collective unconscious, which implies an invisible grid of meaningful connections between apparently isolated events? Or simply dumb coincidence?

(I’d guess Ulrike and Andreas, as good dialectic materialists, would truculently nod their heads for the latter option.)

*I wonder if there is a phrase that describes a variant of the Baader-Meinhof phenomenon as it applies to people. Viz. when you have just been thinking about somebody you haven’t seen in ages and the person in question turns up, as if summoned by your recollections.