The great descent of the modern self had reached an apparently intractable impasse. Extending into and permeating every aspect of human experience, this metaphysical and epistemological predicament in one form or another engaged virtually every major thinker of the twentieth century. Many courageous responses to this encompassing dilemma emerged in the course of that century, some resigned to its inevitability, others anticipating its transformation. Among the latter, from within the field of depth psychology itself, the study of one provocative category of phenomena in particular has suggested with special directness that the chasmic division between interior self and objective world might not be absolute.
Synchronicity and Its Implications
Most of us in the course of life have observed coincidences in which two or more independent events having no apparent causal connection nevertheless seem to form a meaningful pattern. On occasion, this patterning can strike one as so extraordinary that it is difficult to believe the coincidence has been produced by chance alone. The events give the distinct impression of having been precisely arranged, invisibly orchestrated.
Jung first described the remarkable phenomenon he named synchronicity in a seminar as early as 1928. He continued his investigations for more than twenty years before at last attempting a full formulation in the early 1950s. He presented his influential, still-evolving analysis of synchronicity in the final paper he gave at the Eranos conferences, and immediately followed this with a long monograph. Developed in part through discussions with physicists, particularly Einstein and Wolfgang Pauli, the principle of synchronicity bore parallels to certain discoveries in relativity theory and quantum mechanics. Yet because of its psychological dimension, Jung’s concept possessed a special relevance for the schism in the modern world view between the meaning-seeking human subject and the meaning-voided objective world. From the beginning, it has held a unique position in contemporary discussions, having been simultaneously described by physicists as posing a major challenge to the philosophical foundations of modern science and by religious scholars as holding deep implications for the modern psychology of religion. With each decade, increasing numbers of books and heightened attention, both scholarly and popular, have been devoted to the concept and the phenomenon.1
Jung took particular interest in meaningful coincidences, in the beginning no doubt because their frequent occurrence had exerted a considerable influence on his own life experience. He also observed that in the therapeutic process of his patients such events repeatedly played a role, sometimes a powerful one, especially in periods of crisis and transformation. The dramatic coincidence of meaning between an inner state and a simultaneous external event seemed to bring forth in the individual a healing movement toward psychological wholeness, mediated by the unexpected integration of inner and outer realities. Such events often engendered a new sense of personal orientation in a world now seen as capable of embodying purposes and meanings beyond the mere projections of human subjectivity. The random chaos of life suddenly appeared to veil a deeper order. A subtle sign, as it were, had been given, an unexpected color in the pale void of meaning—an intimation, in William James’s phrase, of “something more.”
Accompanying the more profound occurrences of synchronicity was a dawning intuition, sometimes described as having the character of a spiritual awakening, that the individual was herself or himself not only embedded in a larger ground of meaning and purpose but also in some sense a focus of it. This discovery, often emerging after a sustained period of personal darkness or spiritual crisis, tended to bring with it an opening to new existential potentialities and responsibilities. Both because of this felt personal import and because of its startling metaphysical implications, such a synchronicity carried a certain numinosity, a dynamic spiritual charge with transformative consequences for the person experiencing it. In this respect, the phenomenon seemed to function, in religious terms, as something like an intervention of grace. Jung noted that such synchronicities were often kept secret or carefully guarded, to avoid the possibility of ridicule concerning an event possessing such significant personal meaning.
The classic example of a pivotal synchronistic experience is Jung’s well-known description of the “golden scarab” case:
My example concerns a young woman patient who, in spite of efforts made on both sides, proved to be psychologically inaccessible. The difficulty lay in the fact that she always knew better about everything. Her excellent education had provided her with a weapon ideally suited to this purpose, namely a highly polished Cartesian rationalism with an impeccably “geometrical” idea of reality [as in Descartes’s characteristic mode of logical demonstration]. After several fruitless attempts to sweeten her rationalism with a somewhat more human understanding, I had to confine myself to the hope that something unexpected and irrational would turn up, something that would burst the intellectual retort into which she had sealed herself. Well, I was sitting opposite her one day, with my back to the window, listening to her flow of rhetoric. She had had an impressive dream the night before, in which someone had given her a golden scarab—a costly piece of jewelry. While she was still telling me this dream, I heard something behind me gently tapping on the window. I turned round and saw that it was a fairly large flying insect that was knocking against the window-pane from outside in the obvious effort to get into the dark room. This seemed to me very strange. I opened the window immediately and caught the insect in the air as it flew in. It was a scarabaeid beetle, or common rose-chafer (Cetonia aurata), whose gold-green colour most nearly resembles that of a golden scarab. I handed the beetle to my patient with the words, “Here is your scarab.” This experience punctured the desired hole in her rationalism and broke the ice of her intellectual resistance. The treatment could now be continued with satisfactory results.
The acute coincidence between the symbolically resonant image that the woman had experienced in her dream the night before and was just then recounting and the spontaneous appearance at the window of an insect that was “the nearest analogy to a golden scarab that one finds in our latitudes” effectively broke through the intellectual armoring that had been blocking her psychological development. Now “her natural being could burst through…and the process of transformation could at last begin to move.”
In another such instance, recounted in Esther Harding’s notebooks, a patient whose dreams were filled with sexual imagery kept attempting to interpret the dreams in nonsexual symbolic terms, despite Jung’s efforts to persuade her of their more plausible straightforward meaning. On the day of her next appointment, two sparrows fluttered to the ground at the woman’s feet and “performed the act.”
On rare occasions a synchronicity proves to have an extraordinary power through its impact on an historically significant individual, so that it ultimately plays a pivotal role in the collective life of the larger culture. The famous coincidence that formed a turning point in the life of Petrarch took place at the climax of his ascent of Mont Ventoux in April 1336, an event that has long been regarded by scholars as representing the symbolic beginning of the Renaissance. For many years Petrarch had sensed a growing impulse to ascend the mountain, to see the vast panorama from its peak, though doing such a thing was virtually unheard of in his time. Finally choosing the day, with his brother for a companion, he made the long ascent, marked by intense physical exertion and inward reflection. When he at last attained the summit, with clouds below his feet and winds in his face, Petrarch found himself overwhelmed by the great sweep of the world that now opened out to him—snowcapped mountains and the sea in the distance, rivers and valleys below, the wide expanse of skies in every direction. James Hillman recounts the event:
At the top of the mountain, with the exhilarating view of French Provence, the Alps, and the Mediterranean spread before him, he had opened his tiny pocket copy of Augustine’s Confessions. Turning at random to book X, 8, he read: “And men go abroad to admire the heights of mountains, the mighty billows of the s
ea, the broad tide of rivers, the compass of the ocean, and the circuits of the stars, and pass themselves by….”
Petrarch was stunned at the coincidence between Augustine’s words and the time and place they were read. His emotion both announced the revelation of his personal vocation and heralded the new attitude of the Renaissance…. Petrarch draws this crucial conclusion from the Mont Ventoux event: “Nothing is admirable but the soul” (nihil praeter animum esse mirabile).2
Petrarch was so moved by the coincidental force of Augustine’s words that he remained silent for the entire descent down the mountain. He at once recognized the coincidence as part of a larger pattern of such transformative moments that had happened to others in the history of spiritual conversions: “I could not believe that it was by a mere accident that I happened upon them. What I had there read I believed to be addressed to me and to no other, remembering that Saint Augustine had once suspected the same thing in his own case.” For indeed Augustine had undergone a nearly identical experience at his own momentous spiritual turning point: In the garden of Milan in 386, in a frenzy of spiritual crisis, he heard a child’s voice from a nearby house mysteriously repeating the words “Tolle, lege” (“Pick up and read”). Uncertain of their significance, he finally opened at random a copy of Saint Paul’s epistles and there read words that spoke with uncanny precision to the nature of his lifelong conflict and its resolution, immediately after reading which “the light of certainty flooded my heart and all dark shadows of doubt fled away” (Confessions, VIII, 29).
Here too Augustine’s emotion in the garden of Milan both announced the revelation of his personal vocation and heralded the new attitude of the Christian epoch being born. A thousand years later, Augustine’s own words randomly encountered provided a strikingly similar catalyzing force for Petrarch on Mont Ventoux. This time the synchronistic epiphany unfolded in a new direction and with different consequences—one revelation in the garden, pointing to Christianity and the Middle Ages, the other on the mountain, pointing to the Renaissance and modernity.3
Jung believed that synchronicities generally seemed to serve the same role as dreams, psychological symptoms, and other manifestations of the unconscious, namely, to compensate the conscious attitude and move the psyche from a problematic one-sidedness toward greater wholeness and individuation. Not only did the unexpectedly externalized pattern of meaning seem to represent more than mere chance coincidence; it also appeared to serve a definite purpose, impelling the psyche toward a more complete psychological and spiritual realization of the individual personality. This self-realization was achieved through a deeper integration of conscious and unconscious, which ultimately required of the individual a discerning surrender of the usual conscious attitude of knowing superiority. In this view, the perceptive interpretation of synchronistic phenomena, as with all expressions of the unconscious, rather than inflating the egocentric importance of the individual in a narcissistic manner, could correct precisely these tendencies and open the psyche to a larger vision.
An instructive example of this self-critical, compensatory approach toward synchronicity in Jung’s own life was recounted by Henry Fierz when he described a meeting with Jung in the 1950s. Fierz had come to discuss whether Jung thought a manuscript by a scientist who had recently died should be published. At the appointed hour of five o’clock, Fierz arrived for the meeting and the discussion began:
Jung had read the book and he thought that it should not be published, but I disagreed and was for publication. Our discussion finally got rather sharp, and Jung looked at his wristwatch, obviously thinking that he had spent enough time on the matter and that he could send me home. Looking at his watch he said: “When did you come?” I: “At five, as agreed.” Jung: “But that’s queer. My watch came back from the watch-maker this morning after a complete revision, and now I have 5:05. But you must have been here much longer. What time do you have?” I: “It’s 5:35.” Whereon Jung said: “So you have the right time, and I the wrong one. Let us discuss the thing again.” This time I could convince Jung that the book should be published.
Here the synchronistic event is of interest not because of its intrinsic coincidental force but because of the meaning Jung drew from it, essentially using it as a basis for challenging and redirecting his own conscious attitude. The unexpected stopping and resulting error of the watch was immediately recognized by Jung as paralleling—and as thereby bringing to his attention—what he then suspected might be a comparable stoppage and error in his own thinking about the matter at hand. He was alert to the fact that the two events, one inner and the other outer, would have taken place at virtually the same moment. Rather than automatically assuming that there could be no significant connection between the state of his watch and the state of his thinking, which would certainly be the usual assumption, his immediate intuition was of a larger field of meaning underlying and patterning all that happened in the room at the time. In that field, events having no apparent causal connection in the conventional sense could be recognized as participating in a more subtly ordered whole, a larger pattern of meaning that was discernible to the prepared mind—even if that meaning challenged his conscious attitude.
For Jung, the symbolic connection between the two events was as transparently intelligible as if he were reading a newspaper, and he acted accordingly. What made the correlation between the inner and outer events intelligible was the presence of two factors: first, a developed capacity for thinking and perceiving symbolically, a cultivated sensitivity to metaphoric and analogical patterns that connect and thereby illuminate diverse phenomena; and second, an epistemological openness to the possibility that such meaning can be carried by the outer world as well as the inner, by all of nature and one’s surrounding environment, not just by the human psyche.
Yet the recognition of synchronicities requires subtle judgments made in circumstances usually pervaded by ambiguity and open to multiple interpretations. The suggestive patterning and often delicate precision of detail in such coincidences notoriously escape the net of objectivistic assessments and experimental tests. Synchronicities seem to constitute a lived reality the experience of which depends deeply on the sensitive perception of context and nuance. For synchronicities have a shadow side, as in the exaggeration of the trivial to discover a self-inflating meaning. Another form this shadow can take is the paranoid’s morbidly narrow interpretation of coincidences in terms of other people’s malign plots cunningly directed at the self, or psychotic delusions of self-reference. Such interpretations are, as Jung once suggested, pre-Copernican, egocentric. They center the world of meaning naïvely on the old narrow self, inflating the separate ego or persecuting it, and thereby evade the more complex and often painful emergence of the individuated self that is in dialogue with the whole.
Such an emergence requires attending to the claims and communications of the larger cosmos of the unconscious. A painstaking cultivation of self-knowledge must be undertaken to avoid succumbing to mere projection. Discriminating such events requires a self-critical awareness of unconscious tendencies towards narcissistic distortion by which random or peripheral events are continually transformed into signs of an egocentric universe. No less crucial is the development and balanced interplay of multiple faculties of cognition—empirical, rational, emotional, relational, intuitive, symbolic. A capacity for acute yet balanced discernment has to be forged, founded not only on an alertness to meaningful pattern but also on a disciplined mindfulness of the larger whole within which the individual self seeks orientation.
Today, a half century after Jung’s original formulation of the principle of synchronicity, with both the concept and the phenomenon now so widely recognized, one can discern a typical sequence and progression in the nature of synchronistic events and responses. The first stage is usually marked by the experience of various ambiguously suggestive coincidences and patternings that may seem somewhat remarkable, curious, or even vaguely uncanny, but can still be regarded as
perhaps merely fortuitous or subjective, and are therefore usually ignored and forgotten. Eventually, there may occur one or more especially powerful synchronicities, unambiguous in their coincidental force and precision of patterning, that have a revelatory effect on the individual and mark a decisive threshold in his or her psychological and spiritual development. Not infrequently, synchronicities of this category occur in association with births, deaths, crises, and other major turning points in life. On occasion, there may take place a sudden convergence of many such synchronicities, intricately interconnected, occurring in close proximity or in rapid succession, and having the effect of an overpowering epiphany of new meaning and purpose in the life of the individual.
Over time, however, after this threshold has been crossed, a new attitude toward synchronicities often emerges as their frequency and character come to seem part of life’s pervasive intelligence and artistry—less a paradigm-shifting revelation of a new order of reality and more a continuing source of meaning and orientation with which to participate in life with greater sensitivity and intelligence. A disciplined alertness to significant pattern in the outer world as well as inner begins to develop as an essential aspect of living a more conscious life. The occurrence of synchronicities is seen as permitting a continuing dialogue with the unconscious and the larger whole of life while also calling forth an aesthetic and spiritual appreciation of life’s powers of symbolically resonant complex patterning.
Although Jung himself did not explicitly describe this later stage in his principal monograph on synchronicity, it is evident from many scattered passages in his writings and from the recollections and memoirs of others that he both lived his life and conducted his clinical practice in a manner that entailed a constant attention to potentially meaningful synchronistic events that would then shape his understanding and actions. Jung saw nature and one’s surrounding environment as a living matrix of potential synchronistic meaning that could illuminate the human sphere. He attended to sudden or unusual movements or appearances of animals, flocks of birds, the wind, storms, the suddenly louder lapping of the lake outside the window of his consulting room, and similar phenomena as possessing possible symbolic relevance for the parallel unfolding of interior psychological realities. For the woman who had the dream of the golden scarab, the next day’s synchronistic visitation through the window was dramatically transformative, whereas the same event for Jung represented a striking but not uncharacteristic example of the meaningful patterning of inner and outer events to which he had long before learned to be attentive.
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