Synchronicity
By Joe Cambray, PhD, CGJUNGNE, USA
Synchronicity is a hypothesis that C. G. Jung formulated in collaboration with the Nobel laureate physicist Wolfgang Pauli to describe an acausal connecting principle, in which the connectivity is established through meaningful coincidence. Jung further identified this type of coincidence as primarily, though not always, between an inner, subjective psychological state and an outer, objective event. This signifies an interdependence or porosity between subjective and objective aspects of reality, a view which was not accepted as valid by the positivist science of his day. In addition, he saw these events as closely associated with heightened emotional intensity, often occurring during times of “crisis, transition, illness, or profound personal development,” thus having an archetypal basis. The hypothesis emerged from a host of personal and clinical experiences that could not be explained through any known scientific mechanisms yet had important psychological meaning.
Jung’s paradigmatic case was of a young woman who was struggling against acknowledging the power of unconscious dynamics in her analysis with him. The events he described occurred in the mid-1920s, well before he had coined the term “synchronicity.” As he reported it, she had had a dream of being given a piece of golden jewelry in the shape of a scarab beetle. In the process of listening to the dream, Jung was distracted by a sound of tapping at his window. Following up on this he opened the window and caught a roughly equivalent species of beetle flying into his office. He presented the woman with the beetle and this successfully opened the analysis to significant, excluded, irrational elements in her life. It was several years after this event that Jung first formulated his hypothesis, and then only tentatively in a private seminar. In 1930 he mentioned it publicly for the first in the memorial service for his friend Richard Wilhelm, the translator of the I Ching and the Secret of the Golden Flower. However, the full hypothesis was not presented for another 20 years. It was only through a collaborative correspondence with Wolfgang Pauli that he decided to bring out his more detailed thinking on the idea.
With the release of the Red Book in 2009 and the Black Books in 2020, we now have a fuller picture of how the synchronicity hypothesis emerged from Jung’s own inner work. His 1927 “Liverpool” dream — with its vision of a luminous magnolia tree bearing golden blossoms on an island at the city’s center — felt to him like the culmination of his search for the self. Yet he didn’t step away from the Red Book for a few years more. The exit first appeared, he tells us, in 1928 with his receipt of a manuscript, a translation of the ancient Taoist alchemical text The Secret of the Golden Flower, from Wilhelm asking for a commentary from Jung. The timing of arrival was meaningful, just as Jung himself was painting a castle mandala strikingly similar to the manuscript’s frontispiece. This coincidence offered a passage out the Red Book with a turn towards alchemy as a validating, historical precursor to his own confrontation with the unconscious.
This same meaningful coincidence spurred Jung, in 1928, toward his first formulation of synchronicity in a private seminar. In retrospect, we can see this as the moment his notion of individuation expanded beyond an almost exclusive focus on the intrapsychic realm— the realization of the self was no longer just an inner achievement but something linked to the external world through meaningful coincidence. It also resolved an old dilemma: his 1913 visions of Europe drowning in blood, which he’d feared were either prophetic of catastrophe (WWI) or a sign of his own incipient madness. Synchronicity offered a third possibility — a general principle transcending both horns of that dilemma, and with it, a new cosmological vision in which the potential for meaningful coincidence entered the world prior to the laws of physics themselves, echoing the “big bang” singularity from which those laws would emerge.
Around this same idea, Jung built the core of a new, non-dualist spirituality — one in which mind and matter arise from a shared primal field. Working with Pauli, he extended his notion of the archetype to bridge inner and outer realities, to the “psychoid archetype,” first named in his 1948 essay “On the Nature of the Psyche.” The psychoid drew on older intuitions that matter could carry quasi-psychic qualities, and spirit quasi-material ones. To make sense of both poles — and to account for meaningful coincidence — Jung proposed that the archetypes themselves act as an ordering principle undergirding all these realms, extending beyond the usual framework of psychology.
In the first generation of analysts following Jung, Marie Louise von Franz notably developed his ideas on synchronicity in numerous publications combining clinical work with understanding from modern physics (general relativity and quantum theory), philosophy and alchemy. She also expanded on his work with the I Ching as a mantic tool based on synchronicity to look at divination practices from this perspective. Her works helped keep this futuristic concept alive in the analytical psychology community.
More recently with the advent of complexity theory, beginning in the 1980s, a new approach to understanding synchronicity has arisen. The study of complex adaptive systems with their capacity for spontaneous self-organization to engender new holistic features discussed as emergent properties, has allowed a thorough reconsideration and deeper validation of the synchronicity hypothesis. This approach has placed the idea on a more solid footing as a form of holistic phenomena, thus deserving careful (re)consideration. A complex systems perspective has also highlighted the ethical neutrality of synchronicities when seen as forms of emergence, confirming Jung’s intuition that the conscious personality must wrestle with the meaning of such events rather than read them solely as (spiritual) endorsement for thought and behavior.
As we move more deeply into the 21st century, synchronistic phenomena have become increasingly resonant with scientific understanding and cultural developments. This has advanced clinical understandings and uses of synchronistic events, including a variety of what might be considered subtle, lower affect-intensity experiences, such as reveries that arise during the course of therapeutic encounters. In the past these phenomena tended to be dismissed as distractions and overlooked. Further, important links to current theories of consciousness have also begun to cohere around ideas of emergence, especially in terms of “dual-aspect monism.” This is the notion that mind and matter arise from a psychophysically neutral background, in a powerful reframing of the Jung-Pauli synchronicity hypothesis as discussed by Harald Atmanspacher and colleagues.
The proposed porosity of subjective and objective realms can then enfold a synchronistically active psyche into an ecological vision. Such a view of the psyche includes non-local, distributed aspects, embedding it wholly within the environment where it operates. This model extends Jung’s intuition about the rhizomatic quality to the psyche, recognizing its profound interconnectedness to the universe in which it finds itself. The synchronistic psyche is perhaps then best described as a type of field, bearing resemblances to the fields of modern physics (electromagnetic, gravitational and quantum). This is an area for much future exploration and development as our knowledge base evolves.
On the cultural-spiritual level, synchronistic phenomena may be discovered in several places. For example, in the historical record, in the way meaningful coincidences have had influence on the development, and at times destruction of cultures. Consider one of the original colonialist encounters, between the Spanish conquistador Hernán Cortéz and the Aztec emperor Moctezuma II. A series of divinatory predictions about the return of the Aztec deity Quetzalcoatl matched Cortez’s appearance as well as the timing and landing site of his arrival, at today’s city of Vera Cruz, Mexico. The synchronistic core of these events contributed to the decisions that ultimately led to the conquest of Mexico and the colonization of the Americas. Here we can see the terrible consequence of taking an exploitative stance towards synchronistic events, rather than ethically considering the meaningfulness of the coincidences. A study of history focused on key synchronicities might provide a valuable perspective, derived from the unconscious, on our views of the past and its meaning.
Finally, we might also consider how the synchronicity principle might add to the pursuit of re-enchantment. With the rise of modern science in the late 16th century continuing into the present, our world has become increasingly disenchanted, being emptied of spiritual beings and soulful experiences. Naïve return to an early enchanted vision of the world is not genuinely palatable for most modern people. However, the spiritual vacuum of modernity has provoked a counterreaction in the exploration of re-enchantment. This challenges us to retain what we have learned and gained over the past four centuries but also to find ways to recover a fuller sense of awe and wonder about the world, perhaps even reinstating some of its mystical dimensions. This would be closely aligned with Jung’s own desire to “re-spiritualize” the world. Complexity theory seems to hold a possible key to entering a re-enchanted world but this is only in its initial stages and will require on going research to refine and fully appreciate the potential resident in the synchronicity hypothesis.