Synchronicity is a beautiful word for a beautiful thing. Originally coined by Carl Jung in 1930 it gives us a word for something mysterious that has the power — if true — to turn our cultural model of the world on its head. It’s a shame then that it is one of the most misunderstood and misused terms in popular culture. And not just by the sceptics but even more so by its devout sign-drunk believers. The goal of this piece then is to present a clear account of Synchronicity that is true to Jung’s original thinking, that is coherent and which is rigorous enough to satisfy (if not totally convince) sceptics.
After coining the term in 1930 Jung spent the next two decades developing the concept with his collaborator Wolfgang Pauli — one of the giants of quantum physics who won the Nobel Prize in 1945 and was described by Einstein as his “spiritual heir”.
Together Jung and Pauli published their work in 1952’s The Interpretation of Nature and the Psyche. In his half of the book, Jung gives us the most neat and concise definition you could ask for; he defines a Synchronicity as a “meaningful coincidence”. But it’s not the only definition he gives us. He also describes it as “acausal parallelism”; or as in the title of his contribution to the 1952 book as “an acausal connecting principle“. Or in a more comprehensive definition, he describes it as:
“the simultaneous occurrence of a certain psychic state with one or more external events which appear as meaningful parallels to the momentary subjective state”
So as you can see, like all good terms it’s got depth and depth as we know always requires a little nuance. And this is where things are going to get really interesting and a little bit unexpected for those of you who are already familiar with synchronicity. So here’s the plan; we’ll unpack:
the three components at play in every true synchronicity
the difference between (concrete) synchronicity with a small S and (abstract) Synchronicity with a capital S. Then
tidy up some of the sloppier use of the term after Jung.
But first, let’s start with the basics. So, according to Jung, for something to be a Synchronicity, it has to have three separate elements. First off we have at least two events — one internal and one external; secondly, the connection between these events is acausal which means their connection doesn’t come from one causing the other but something more mysterious; and thirdly these events happen at the same time. We’re going to look at all these using examples but this third one is the controversial; it’s the one that everyone after Jung seems to have forgotten or ignored which makes it the perfect place to start.
1. Temporally Aligned
Another good reason to start with this piece of the pie is because it’s intimately connected with the term itself. Synchronicity comes from the marriage of two Greek words. First off, the prefix “syn-” meaning “together” as in synthesis or synonym and “chronos” meaning “time” as in chronological or chronicle. So synchronicity means together in time or as Jung, rather more poetically puts it, a “falling together in time”.
It’s a key element and one often overlooked in popular usage of the term. A Synchronicity isn’t simply a meaningful coincidence Jung tells us but a meaningful coincidence with this alignment in time. You can see this in any of the examples that Jung gives of Synchronicity but here’s a fun one from a letter that he wrote in 1945:
“For instance, I walk with a woman patient in a wood. She tells me about the first dream in her life that had made an everlasting impression upon her. She had seen a spectral fox coming down the stairs in her parental home. At this moment a real fox comes out of the trees not 40 yards away and walks quietly on the path ahead of us for several minutes. The animal behaves as if it were a partner in the human situation. (One fact is no fact, but when you have seen many, you begin to sit up.)”
In this example, the fox comes along at the same time as they were talking about this impactful dream of a spectral fox. If the fox had come the next day or the later in the walk then it would have been less significant. But what makes this a Synchronicity is that just when they are talking about this dream of the spectral fox, this real one appears.
This element of synchronising in time as we’ll see is overlooked not just by New Age writers who pick up on Jung’s work from the 1960s onwards but also by future Jungians. But Jung is explicit about this:
“Here I would like to call attention to a possible misunderstanding which may be occasioned by the term “synchronicity.” I chose this term because the simultaneous occurrence of two meaningfully but not causally connected events seemed to me an essential criterion. I am therefore using the general concept of synchronicity in the special sense of a coincidence in time of two or more causally unrelated events”
2. Internal/External Component
The second key component of every Synchronicity according to Jung is that as well as the external coincidence — in the above example the real fox — there is also an internal element — this could be a lot of things like a thought, a feeling, a vision or a dream. This is another very important difference between the Jungian and popular usage of Synchronicity that both its sceptics and its diehards get wrong.
Let’s use another example to illustrate this. The following is the story of French poet Emilé Deschamps at the start of the 20th century. Here’s Jung’s version of the story:
“A certain M. Deschamps, when a boy in Orleans, was once given a piece of plum-pudding by a M. de Fortgibu. Ten years later he discovered another plum-pudding in a Paris restaurant, and asked if he could have a piece. It turned out, however, that the plum-pudding was already ordered—by M. de Fortgibu. Many years afterwards M. Deschamps was invited to partake of a plum-pudding as a special rarity. While he was eating it he remarked that the only thing lacking was M. de Fortgibu. At that moment the door opened and an old, old man in the last stages of disorientation walked in: M. de Fortgibu, who had got hold of the wrong address and burst in on the party by mistake.”
That’s a beautiful example of Synchronicity. We have three events, one in childhood in Orleans, one in a Parisian restaurant a decade later and one many years later. In the latter event we see the internal subjective side of the Synchronicity in Deschamps’s thinking about M. de Fortgibu and commenting on his absence and then the external objective side of the equation with the unexpected arrival of the lost old man. It’s a wonderful illustration of what we’re talking about.
But this story also provides us a helpful counterexample. Given the way Synchronicity is thrown around these days, you’d be forgiven for mistaking the second incident — the one in the Parisian restaurant — for a Synchronicity. But it is not — at least not as far as Jung is concerned. It is a hell of a coincidence — in a different city and a city with hundreds if not thousands of restaurants and here we have the same dish, plum pudding, ordered by the same man.
But notice: there is no internal mental event. There is no feeling or thought which foreshadows the external event. Such an event is easily dismissed by sceptics who would point out that given enough people and time such events are bound to happen. They make great stories but to see anything more than that in them is to make a great leap. Jung is explicit about this. In the book he writes:
“Synchronicity … means the simultaneous occurrence of a certain psychic state with one or more external events which appear as meaningful parallels to the momentary subjective state”
The third instance does meet this criteria; it is a true Jungian Synchronicity and thus much harder to dismiss. And while it might not convince a sceptic Jung points out that there is something rather more compelling about it. It has the hallmarks of a good Synchronicity with its temporal alignment and its internal and external component.
3. Acausal
That brings us to the third element of a Synchronicity and the truly quirky part of Jung’s formulation of it. That is the acausal element of Synchronicity.
This is a central part of Jung’s thinking. It’s contained in the title of his 1952 work on the subject: Synchronicity: An Acausal Connecting Principle.
In the book he describes acausal events as:
“successions of chance events [that] are not subject to the operation of a common cause”
So to say that a Synchronicity is acausal is to say that neither the internal nor the external events that make up the Synchronicity could in any plausible way have caused the other by any normal means. And so, if there is no causal explanation, we have what Jung calls an “acausal connection”.
Let’s illustrate this with another example. The following is a famous story from the life of Swedish polymath Emanuel Swedenborg. Here’s the Wikipedia summary of the event:
“On Thursday, 19 July 1759 a great and well-documented fire broke out in Stockholm, Sweden. In the high and increasing wind it spread very fast, consuming about 300 houses and making 2000 people homeless.
When the fire broke out Swedenborg was at a dinner with friends in Gothenburg, about 400 km from Stockholm. He became agitated and told the party at six o'clock that there was a fire in Stockholm, that it had consumed his neighbour's home and was threatening his own. Two hours later, he exclaimed with relief that the fire had stopped three doors from his home. In the excitement following his report, word even reached the ears of the provincial governor, who summoned Swedenborg that same evening and asked for a detailed recounting.
At that time, it took two to three days for news from Stockholm to reach Gothenburg by courier, so that is the shortest duration in which the news of the fire could reach Gothenburg. The first messenger from Stockholm with news of the fire was from the Board of Trade, who arrived Monday evening. The second messenger was a royal courier, who arrived on Tuesday. Both of these reports confirmed every statement to the precise hour that Swedenborg first expressed the information.”
Jungian analyst Jean Shinoda Bolen gives similar examples in her book The Tao of Psychology where she talks about her grandfather living in New York’s uncanny knowledge of someone’s death in Japan.
“The person would appear to him in a dream or in a waking vision, carrying a suitcase. In this way, he would know that they were leaving and moving on. My mother remembers his remarking on several occasions that so-and-so died—my grandfather had "seen" him on his way with a suitcase. Then, often weeks later, news would come verifying what Grandfather already knew clairvoyantly.”
In these examples we can see a sort of knowledge from a distance. We can’t speak of Swedenborg or Bolen’s grandfather’s visions as causing the fire in Stockholm or the deaths of people in far off Japan. We might also find it strange to speak of the fire or the distant deaths causing the visions. It is not a common quality of fire to communicate visions to people far off.
That might lead us to ask what the connection is? This is another common misunderstanding of Jung. Thinkers will often speak of an event being acausal and then they’ll seek to account for it using exactly what Jung was arguing against. They’ll invoke some sort of — what Jung calls “magical causality”. You see this a lot in writers who talk about Intention Manifestation. They might use spiritual language or they might talk about the power of the subconscious mind but the result is the same: they are invoking some as yet unknown to science magical causation that we can harness to make our dreams a reality.
(concrete) synchronicity vs. (abstract) Synchronicity
Jung doesn’t think this way. He doesn’t think of Synchronicity in this causal way that we can harness and manipulate. Instead he thinks something else is going on.
This is where we get his distinction between the concrete and abstract Synchronicities comes in. So far we’ve been talking about the components of a Synchronicity — that is to say we’ve been talking about the necessary elements in a synchronistic experience. Think of this as synchronicity with a small s. It’s a concrete example.
But there’s another layer to Jung’s treatment. He’s also talking about the underlying principle. He’s talking about this new mysterious natural law or principle that these examples are pointing to. Think of gravity. Every time something falls we can think of that as a concrete example of gravity. But these concrete examples all point to an underlying natural law that we have to wait for Newton and Einstein to get a full grasp on.
Jung, working with the quantum physicist Wolfgang Pauli is trying to build a theory of this Newtonian/Einsteinian level of Synchronicity — Synchronicity with a capital S. This is what he is referring to in the title of his section of their book Synchronicity: An Acausal Connection Phenomenon. Notice he doesn’t call it Synchronicity: Meaningful Coincidence. Because he’s being very ambitious and is trying to get to the underlying principle.
Where he gets to in his investigation is that Synchronicity with a capital S is a separate law to causation. There is something mysterious going on that we don’t fully understand but somehow there is a connection between psyche and the material world that foregoes restrictions of space and time. You can see the footprint of his quantum physics collaborator here. They formulate a view of the world in which the archetypal level of the psyche has roots which sink into the mysterious depths of material reality. Jung and Pauli are attempting nothing less than the transformation of our entire materialist worldview. They believe that Synchronicity points to a new understanding of the world that transcends Descartes’s mind-body duality.
Ultimately, I think Jung’s project fails. He bases his book on too many dodgy studies and premises and his ambitious endeavour collapses with them. That’s something I might look at in more depth in a future instalment but for now I just want to highlight that Jung doesn’t see Synchronicity as something we can manipulate. It’s not a “magical causality” that we can harness but something without cause.
This mysterious acausal something is the third element in every one of Jung’s meaningful coincidences. Setting aside all this high philosophical theory, what this acausal piece means is quite simply that there is no sense of a cause between the internal events and the external ones. Jung and the dreamer talking about the spectral fox in her dream didn’t cause the real fox to appear in the forest. Nor vice versa. The same goes for the plum pudding. Emilé Deschamps’s comment on the absence of M. de Fortgibu didn’t magically cause the old man to appear. There is something deeper and more mysterious at work — Jung’s “acausal parallelism”.
Are “Winks from the Universe” Synchronicities?
So to recount then a Synchronicity for Jung is composed of three things: a “coming together in time” of an internal and external event in which neither caused the other but both, by some mysterious acausal mechanism, co-occurred.
We could leave it there but there’s one more implication of what we’ve looked that I want to draw out. With that in mind let’s play a game I like to call Synchronicity or No Synchronicity. Consider the following example. Listen to the following passage from Jung’s book and see if it sounds like a Synchronicity to you:
“I noted the following on April 1, 1949: Today is Friday We have fish for lunch Somebody happens to mention the custom of making an "April fish" of someone That same morning I made a note of an inscription which read: "Est homo totus medius piscis ab imo." In the afternoon a former patient of mine whom I had not seen for months showed me some extremely impressive pictures of fish which she had painted in the meantime. In the evening I was shown a piece of embroidery with fish-like sea-monsters in it. On the morning of April 2 another patient, whom I had not seen for many years told me a dream in which she stood on the shore of a lake and saw a large fish that swam straight towards her and landed at her feet I was at this time engaged on a study of the fish symbol in history. Only one of the persons mentioned here knew anything about it”
Synchronicity or no? There’s definitely a sense of there being some meaningful coincidences here; as Jung notes:
“The suspicion that this must be a case of meaningful coincidence, i.e., an acausal connection, is very natural. I must own that this run of events made a considerable impression on me. It seemed to me to have a certain numinous quality.”
It’s the kind of thing that the sign-drunk diehards would call a “wink from the universe”. It bears a close family resemblance to the phenomenon of “Angel Numbers” that normally passes for Synchronicity in New Age circles. That is to say, the idea that numbers like 11:11 or other significant numbers are following you around or that the traffic lights turning green has some kind of meaning or something of this sort. Or for a strong example we might think of Deschamps in the Parisian restaurant.
Part of the trouble is that the phrase “meaningful coincidence” leaves a lot of wiggle room for interpretation. Some writers say that it’s in the eye of the beholder whether the coincidence is meaningful or not. Another part of the trouble is that Jung kind of monopolises the whole territory of “meaningful coincidence” with the term Synchronicity. Perhaps we just need another term for these weaker coincidences that don’t measure up to the bar Jung sets.
At any rate, Jung ultimately dismisses the idea that such coincidences — even when there is a notable series of them as in his fish example — meet the requirements for Synchronicity. Continuing from the fish example above and the numinous impression it can make on us he writes that:
“The strength of an impression, however, proves nothing against the fortuitous coincidence of all these fishes. It is, admittedly, exceedingly odd that the fish theme recurs no less than six times within twenty-four hours. But one must remember that fish on Friday is the usual thing, and on April 1 one might very easily think of the April fish. I had at that time been working on the fish symbol for several months. Fishes frequently occur as symbols of unconscious contents. So there is no possible justification for seeing in this anything but a chance grouping. Runs or series which are composed of quite ordinary occurrences must for the present be regarded as fortuitous. However wide their range may be, they must be ruled out as acausal connections. It is, therefore, generally assumed that all coincidences are lucky hits and do not require an acausal interpretation. This assumption can, and indeed must, be regarded as true so long as proof is lacking that their incidence exceeds the limits of probability.”
So we can see here that Jung is hesitant about dismissing these occurrences. They make an impression on him but if he is to build a theory of Synchronicity he wants to use solid building materials and so we have his strong conditions for Synchronicity that we’ve looked at in this instalment. He distinguishes between two types of chance event. There’s your ordinary workings of random chance and then there’s Synchronicity.
Where does that leave Angel Numbers and other “winks from the universe”? The answer from Jung is clear: they are not Synchronicities. Maybe they point to another weaker category of meaningful category but as far as Jung is concerned they are not the real thing.
And if that means that 90% of so-called Synchronicities are illegitimate? His successors may disagree but as far as Jung is concerned, so be it.
📚Further Reading:
Atmanspacher, H. “The Pauli-Jung Conjecture and Its Impact Today”
Cambray, J., “Synchronicity as emergence” in “Analytical Psychology: Contemporary Perspectives in Jungian Analysis”
Cavalli, C. “Synchronicity and the emergence of meaning”
Jung, C.G. and Pauli, W., “The Interpretation of Nature and the Psyche”
Jung, C.G. and Jaffé, E., “Memories, dreams, reflections”
Jung, C.G. “Letters of C. G. Jung vol.1”
Shinoda Bolen, J., “The Tao of Psychology”
Main, R., “Synchronicity and analysis: Jung and after” http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13642530701725924
Main, R., “Revelations of chance: synchronicity as spiritual experience”
von Franz, M. L., “On divination and synchronicity: the psychology of meaningful chance”
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