by Eric Wargo
It would take three decades and the help of his friend and patient, the quantum physicist Wolfgang Pauli, for Jung to formulate his own theory of paranormal and coincidental phenomena, the “acausal connecting principle” he named synchronicity. This principle, he confidently claimed, could account for purported resonances between an individual’s mental life and ancient mythic motifs, such as (in Maggy’s case) the resonance between a therapeutic breakthrough and a scarab beetle, an ancient Egyptian symbol of metamorphosis and rebirth. The scarab story was the centerpiece of the 1951 Eranos lecture in which Jung publicly debuted his new theory, “On Synchronicity.” 22 He also gave an abbreviated version of the story but expanded on aspects of its meaning in a longer 1952 monograph, Synchronicity: An Acausal Connecting Principle . There, he elaborates on the “archetypal” significance of the event:
The scarab is a classic example of a rebirth symbol. The ancient Egyptian Book of What Is in the Netherworld describes how the dead sun-god changes himself at the tenth station into Khepri, the scarab, and then, at the twelfth station, mounts the barge which carries the rejuvenated sun-god into the morning sky. The only difficulty here is that with educated people cryptomnesia often cannot be ruled out with certainty (although my patient did not happen to know this symbol). But this does not alter the fact that the psychologist is continually coming up against cases where the emergence of symbolic parallels cannot be explained without the hypothesis of the collective unconscious. 23
Psychologists love to debunk synchronicities, of course, just as much as they love to debunk prophetic dreams. They point out that humans are supremely bad with statistics, underestimating the frequency with which “impossible” coincidences might occur. 24 We’re also bad at being objective: The meaningfulness of an event may simply be a function of taking a particular, egocentric point of view on it. Psychologist Ruma Falk found that an egocentric bias causes us to disproportionally notice chance events that bear on our own interests and priorities. Participants in Falk’s experiments at Hebrew University in Jerusalem were more surprised by coincidences that happened to them in their own lives (either in the course of an experiment or in the past) than by identical coincidences reported to have happened to another individual. A coincidence centered on another person, Falk says, seems unremarkable, just “one of many events that could have happened.” 25 (It is a problem that, not accidentally, besets attributions of meaningfulness to dreams as well. Since they concern very private associations and thoughts, dreams interpreted in public are seldom as persuasive or compelling to others as they seem to the dreamer.)
Whether or not a coincidence like a scarab beetle showing up just at the moment someone is telling you their dream about such an insect is random from the point of view of an indifferent, meaningless universe, these things are meaningful in terms of the associative links in the individual witness’s head, and those links bias how we perceive and interpret the world. If we take Carl Jung’s concept of synchronicity simply as a description of the brain’s appetite for meaningful and self-centric associations, his definition, “an acausal connecting principle,” would raise few psychological or even neuroscientific eyebrows. The brain is an “acausal connecting organ,” an insatiable meaning maker, with a highly self-centric bias.
But Jung meant much more by his concept. He saw synchronicity as potentially being able to account for how events in the external world actually link up and unfold. It was a new explanatory principle to complement physical causality. In his monograph, he wrote:
[I]t is impossible, with our present resources, to explain ESP, or the fact of meaningful coincidence, as a phenomenon of energy. This makes an end of the causal explanation as well, for “effect” cannot be understood as anything except a phenomenon of energy. Therefore it cannot be a question of cause and effect, but of a falling together in time, a kind of simultaneity. Because of this quality of simultaneity, I have picked on the term “synchronicity” to designate a hypothetical factor equal in rank to causality as a principle of explanation. 26
Jung generalized from the scarab case, as well as other clinical parallels he had observed between ancient myths and his patients’ dreams and fantasies, to assert that all meaningful (i.e., non-random) coincidences have an archetypal basis in the collective unconscious. While in some of his writings the latter constructs may not imply anything more than a domain of shared, primitive instincts that express themselves in similar ways across cultures, his writings on synchronicity imply something like a field of shared meanings that extend beyond the individual and can directly interact with the material world. In a 1957 letter, he asked “How does it come that even inanimate objects are capable of behaving as if they were acquainted with my thoughts?” 27 Synchronicity was his answer.
Part of the concept’s continued popularity may reflect the brilliant energetic suggestiveness of Jung’s neologism. Despite his explicit claim that it operates outside the domain of classical energetic causes and effects, the word synchronicity unmistakably connotes energy, resembling as it does the word electricity ; it implies a dynamism and a current moving and flowing among material configurations and mental forms, ideas, and symbols. It is easy to imagine synchronicity as a kind of inner vitality in individual and collective history, something in motion that, when touched, can shock, and can create short-circuits—for instance, between a moment of therapeutic epiphany and an ancient rebirth symbol. The “exteriorizations” Jung experienced in Freud’s study also carry this sense of an energetic, if not transfer, then mutual arising. Had Jung written his monograph a few decades later, he might naturally have seized on the idiom of “entanglement” and “nonlocality” to describe such occurrences.
Just as it promised to mediate the psychical and the physical worlds, Jung’s synchronicity theory also deftly bridged the two sides of his own self: the scientist and the mystic. The scarab incident he used to illustrate his new scientific theory became a kind of public certification of his guru role. At the moment he opens his office window and catches the beetle and hands it to the astonished young woman who has just been telling him her dream about a scarab, Jung the psychiatrist becomes Jung the magician-shaman—a wizard who, even if he has not actually conjured the animal with his powers, nevertheless has had the presence of mind, the wit, to capitalize on its fortuitous appearance in that instant and use it to effect a therapeutic epiphany. According to Jung scholar Roderick Main, in the same way his gesture “punctured the desired hole” in his patient’s rationalistic resistances, he intended his new concept to puncture a hole in the rationalism of the West. 28
Unfortunately, Jung’s bold new concept has not really led to any greater understanding of meaningful coincidences. Some of Jung’s readers, even those appreciative of his many other contributions to psychology, have argued that this concept actually has had the opposite effect, obscuring these phenomena and even discouraging serious study of them. 29 For one thing, calling events “acausal” effectively forecloses scientific consideration, since science deals in causes. As psychologist Charles Tart puts it, it enables one to lazily say, “Well, it’s synchronistic, it’s forever beyond my understanding.” 30 And by implying the simultaneity or synchrony of such events, it encourages us to ignore important, potentially significant aspects of their unfolding in time.
The scarab incident is a perfect example of the obscuring effect of Jung’s synchronistic framing. By focusing (egotistically, we might say) on the literal co-incidence Jung himself was in a position to witness in his office—the beetle appearing simultaneously with Maggy telling him her dream—Jung effaced the more astonishing and interesting relationship between what transpired in his office and Maggy’s dream the previous night. The result, again, is that few readers even notice the precognitive dimension of the scarab vignette, or if they do, they are distracted by Jung’s implication that the whole nexus of occurrences (the patient’s dream, the arrival of the beetle while she was describing it, and his “intervention” by letting it into his o
ffice) was somehow the effect or result of timeless archetypal patterns imprinting themselves on human events, stage-managing such occurrences to edify and enlighten the people involved.
This kind of reasoning easily veers into extreme implausibility, as in Jung’s suggestion that the beetle was “obviously” trying to get into his dark consulting room—he added, in a 1960 letter, “as if it had understood that it must play its mythological role as a symbol of rebirth.” 31 Is Jung just waxing poetic here? Readers may not take it that way, and in his letter he goes on to add: “Even inanimate objects behave occasionally in the same way—meteorological phenomena, for instance.” Plain common sense, and a moment’s thought, should dispel any such notion of the insect’s motives, however. The room was darker than the yard outside, and thus the insect would have seen the sky reflected in the window; its trying to “get into the room,” as Jung put it, was really its confused attempt to either evade, fight, or mate with its own reflection. It happens to insects all the time. (Jung can be forgiven for not knowing that beetles with iridescent shells, like the rose chafer, have optical systems designed to respond to such surfaces in other beetles; this causes them to also be particularly drawn to the polarized light reflected off glass windowpanes.)
This may seem a pedantic quibble, but the “archetypal” significance of the beetle also dwindles considerably when we consider the cultural context of Jung and his work. In two critical studies, The Jung Cult and The Aryan Christ , psychiatry historian Richard Noll argued that much of what Jung cited as “smoking gun” evidence for the collective unconscious and archetypes could be accounted for by cryptomnesia—patients reproducing in dreams and fantasies ideas encountered in their prior reading. 32 Although we need to be cautious of cryptomnesia invoked to debunk psychic claims, for reasons discussed earlier, what makes Noll’s argument compelling in Jung’s case is that his world was suffused with reading material that would supply his patients with precisely the mythological symbols that so interested him. Not only were they widely available in scholarly works, since ancient symbolism and pagan religions were all the rage at that point, but they were also available in publications of the Theosophical Society. For years, the Theosophical Publishing House had been flooding Europe and America with inexpensive, Theosophically inflected translations of ancient wisdom literature and Eastern philosophy. Spiritual and intellectual seekers of the sort who flooded to Jung’s clinic were avid readers of these books, as was Jung himself.
Noll argues that Jung’s strong personality and ego contributed to turning his clinic into an echo chamber that amplified the archetypal signal. He specifically sought mythological material in his patients’ dreams and fantasies; patients were rewarded when they supplied it (and ignored when they didn’t); and a powerful selection or file-drawer effect made ancient myths and symbols seem like some objective organizing principle in our lives when they were more likely just the doctor’s own interests (and his patients’ reading) writ large. To this day, it is mainly patients in Jungian analysis who report archetypal or alchemical dreams (just as it is mainly patients in Freudian analysis who produce Oedipal ones 33 ). Noll thus concluded that the collective unconscious is not some transpersonal Platonic wellspring of shared symbolic motifs but, much more humbly, simply the books on Jung’s own impressive bookshelf and those of his well-read patients.
Some later writers on coincidence have departed from archetypes and focused more on the role of “intention” in creating synchronistic events. In his book Connecting with Coincidence , psychiatrist Bernard D. Beitman argues that it was Jung’s “intense desire” for something irrational to open the mind of his patient that drew the insect to the window. 34 As mentioned earlier, there is an extensive and interesting literature on mind-over-matter effects (psychokinesis or PK) 35 ; and some researchers like Dean Radin have even tried to harmonize the findings on psi phenomena with the idiom of “magic.” 36 Yet cases like the scarab incident, where an outcome appears complexly symbolic, make intention particularly hard to swallow as an explanation. How exactly could Jung’s intense desire act as a magnet for that precise species of insect? What Beitman is suggesting presupposes either “superpowers” that go well beyond even the unconscious mental feats Freud and his predecessors had posited or, alternatively, some omniscient higher knower capable of aligning our intentions with the infinitely complex webs of material causation governing objectively unfolding events. Once again, the fact that we live in a world of information—including cultural information like books and symbols—does not mean the universe speaks our mental language. At best, both the archetypal and intentional explanations lack parsimony.
Fortunately, a causal (with a big asterisk beside the word) explanation for meaningful coincidences is no longer nearly as unthinkable as it was in Jung’s day, thanks to advances in several fields that, as we saw earlier, seem to be converging on a plausible (and indeed even materialistic) answer to how experiences from our future may reflux into our past and inform our dreams, thoughts, and actions. It remains to test these hypotheses, deepen our understanding of physical laws and the brain with new methods and technologies, and persist in our inquiries into psychology and nature with the healthy presumption that we don’t yet know everything about the physical world or how the mind/brain works. We cannot simply reject anomalous phenomena that don’t fit into the current materialist paradigm, but it is also too soon to appeal to explanatory factors beyond physical causation, as the latter is turning out to be far more rich, varied, and interesting than once believed. Causation really seems to go both directions in time.
With the scarab incident, the simplest explanation is, I argue, the most powerful: Maggy’s dream simply oriented her toward a highly meaningful moment, a reward, in her near future. That moment was partly brought about by her own actions, informed by that dream. The effect was its own cause.
The rewards of that moment—to both of the humans in that room, if not to the hapless beetle—would have been immense. Jung’s parenthetical note that his patient “did not happen to know this symbol” 37 enables us to infer a crucial detail: that he went ahead and explained the symbolism of scarab beetles to her during the session. Moments in therapy when the doctor finds one’s case particularly interesting and resonant with his particular interests, even if (or especially if) it entails a sacrifice of our prior, more limiting beliefs, feel gratifying and inspiring. Jung’s ability to translate patients’ mundane individual experiences into timeless mythic themes was precisely what many patients sought in his clinic. He called the process of expanding beyond our previous one-sided views “individuation,” but it could also be called the jouissance of reframing . Destruction of our previous self-conception, replaced by a broader self-understanding, is a kind of sublimely rewarding “survival,” which again is ultimately the focus of most precognitive and premonitory experiences. 38
The rewards for Jung would have been similarly palpable. Dream symbols with ancient mythic resonance were exactly what he sought from his patients, as they seemed to validate the very construct on which he had been staking his career and reputation for a decade. And scarabs were particularly exciting to him, as he himself had had a powerful vision of a scarab in December 1913, six years before Maggy entered treatment with him. It was the very first of his visions in his “confrontation with the unconscious”—a creative, near-psychotic period of depression and soul-searching that ensued after his traumatic break from Freud. In the vision, he dropped into a cave where he saw the following scene:
At first I could make out nothing, but then I saw that there was running water. In it a corpse floated by, a youth with blond hair and a wound in the head. He was followed by a gigantic black scarab and then by a red, newborn sun, rising up out of the depths of the water. … I was stunned by this vision. I realized, of course, that it was a hero and solar myth, a drama of death and renewal, the rebirth symbolized by the Egyptian scarab. 39
Jung described and painted this and other visions during the
years 1913-1917 in his private journal of transformation, his “Red Book.” In that book, he also described sitting in a desert, watching a black scarab beetle blindly pushing its dung-ball, “living [its] beautiful myth.” 40
As a rule, Jung was quite ready to divulge intimately personal material to his patients, and on other occasions admitted doing so with Maggy. For instance, he told her his dream about her as the Virgin Mary, and what it meant. 41 He was also known to bring out his “Red Book” and show it to his most trusted patients. 42 We have no proof, but it is reasonable to suppose that after he handed Maggy the wriggling gold-green beetle, he would not only have explained its meaning but also told her of his own scarab visions and perhaps may have even shown her his private journal. If Maggy did not already by this point feel as though she was being initiated into the ancient mysteries, this session would have been a real turning point for her—truly “golden.”
The promise of intellectual as well as spiritual excitement is what drew many people like Maggy to Zurich and to Jung’s clinic in the 1920s and later, and what kept them in his circle of devoted patients and students. Especially for his women followers, who at that time in history were often compelled to fill less intellectually satisfying social and domestic roles, “treatment” with Jung was really a master class in history, philosophy, and world religions, along with permission to think and express themselves in a much larger way than they had been accustomed to doing. 43 Jung’s world of mythology and mysticism seems to have been precisely what Maggy longed for, so different from the supremely boring and traditional role that her life in Holland had prepared her to play.