Everyone must have thought: “Look what a coincidence!” I am referring to an encounter, a phrase read in a book, an unexpected discovery, or news that took us by surprise. Synchronicity is when something happens to you that seems “by chance” but blends so perfectly with the events of your life that it makes your heart flutter and think, “It seems like destiny!”
Synchronicity is what makes you feel aligned with the universe, as part of a great design. The person who spoke for the first time in an organic and profound way about it was the great Swiss psychoanalyst Carl Gustav Jung in the middle of the last century. In this Psychology-Online article, we will talk about Carl Gustav Jung’s theory of synchronicity.
What is synchronicity according to Jung?
The word synchronicity derives from the Greek roots syn (“with”, which marks the idea of meeting) and khronos (“hour”): meeting in time, simultaneity. Synchronicity as a concept was introduced by the psychoanalyst in 1950, and he defined it as a principle of acausal connections.
Carl Jung’s theory of synchronicity states that no event is a fact accidental,but our life is full of a set of coincidences; or rather, those that we are used to considering coincidences but that in reality are not coincidences at all.
The definition of the term Jungian synchronicity crowned the uninterrupted effort of the psychoanalyst to understand how humans create connections:
- How our unconscious world connects with the conscious world.
- How our past, personal and collective, is related to the present moment of consciousness at the service of a process that tends towards greater integration.
- How our inner life, subjectivity, comes to the surface, finds other lives and creates bonds with them, first with parents, then with family and then with increasingly wider circles of friends, acquaintances, even the society in which we live. his set.
Synchronicity Categories
How does synchronicity work? According to Jung, it does not reside outside of us, in a supernatural destiny: it is within us and is a principle of psychological connection. According to Jung’s analysis, there are three types of significant causalities that are part of the discourse of synchronicity:
- Coincidence between psychic content and a specific event: a thought, dream or desire that coincides in time and space. The classic example is thinking about someone and getting to know them after a while.
- Coincidence between psychic content and a general event: a thought, dream or desire that does not materially affect your life, but is relevant to what your conscious or unconscious mind is generating (coincidence at a distance in time and space). This is the case of premonitions of catastrophic events, which not by chance affect thousands of people in the world. Shortly before September 11, 2001, there was an increase in dream activities globally that contained the sinking of the twin towers in a symbolic or realistic way.
- Coincidence “out of phase” in time between a psychic content and a distant event: a thought, dream or desire and an event that, however, occurs at a distance, perhaps years later. For example, you can dream about details about your cousin’s wedding to a stranger that will later come true.
How synchronicity works according to Jung
According to Jung, we can speak of synchronicity when a significant coincidence between a psychic event and a physical-objective event without any causal relationship between the two events. In this case, a psychic event can be understood as a premonition, a dream, a vision, an oracle or an archetypal image that will find tangible feedback in the person’s life, thus revealing itself to be true.
Jungian synchronicity has three distinct characteristics:
- The events are connected acausallyand not thanks to a chain of causes and effects in which an individual can recognize the result of an intentional decision.
- The occurrence of the event is always accompanied by a deep emotional experience which normally manifests at the same time as the event.
- The content of the synchronous experience, what the event is, has a invariably symbolic character.
Examples of synchronicity according to Jung
Now that we have seen how it works, we will see different examples of synchronicity according to Jung:
Golden Beetle Chance
To Jung’s intuition that the life of each of us is peppered with events that have a deep connection with our unconscious, an “illuminating” episode followed: a patient was telling him about a dream, in which a golden beetle was present. Just during the session, Jung heard something crashing against the window glass attracting his attention. And what a surprise when, going to check it, he saw that it was none other than a ketonia, a beetle-like insect of a beautiful golden green!
Chance of Jungian synchronicity
Another example of synchronicity according to Jung can be seen if a person who is working on an article on Carl Gustav Jung’s theory of synchronicity comes into contact with people who are working on the same topic. Therefore, a pleasant friendship or acquaintance is established. Is a nice coincidencebut not very significant in itself.
If that same person who writes an article about synchronicity and coincidences will think that no one around him knows this topic and that, therefore, it is difficult to find a person who works on the theory of synchronicity. So this becomes a coincidence that has meaning.
This article is merely informative, at Psychology-Online we do not have the power to make a diagnosis or recommend a treatment. We invite you to go to a psychologist to treat your particular case.
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Bibliography
- Corona, S. (2020). Jung’s Synchronicity. That’s what Coincidenze Significant. Retrieved from: https://www.samuelecorona.com/sincronicita-coincidenze-significant-jung/
- Perria, P. (2018). Synchronicity: Jung and the studio on coincidence. Retrieved from: https://www.ohga.it/sincronicita-jung-e-lo-studio-sulle-coincidenze/