Synchronicity: Jung’s Theory of Meaningful Coincidence

What is synchronicity?

Jung first used the word in public in 1930, in a memorial address for his friend Richard Wilhelm, the translator of the I Ching. He set out the idea in full in “Synchronicity: An Acausal Connecting Principle” (1952), published in a volume shared with the physicist Wolfgang Pauli’s study of Johannes Kepler, translated into English as The Interpretation of Nature and the Psyche (1955).

The essential element is meaning. Two events that merely happen together are a coincidence. A synchronicity, in Jung’s sense, occurs when the coincidence is experienced as meaningful by the person involved, often with strong emotion, and when no cause connects the two events.

Inner and outer at the same moment

A psychic state coincides with a simultaneous outer event that corresponds to it.

Inner and distant

A dream or vision corresponds to an event happening far away, verified only later.

Inner and future

A psychic state corresponds to an event that has not yet happened.

These are the three types Jung distinguished in the 1952 essay.

The scarab beetle case

Jung’s most famous example comes from his own practice. A young woman patient, highly educated and very rational, was stuck in her analysis because she accepted nothing that could not be explained logically. One day she was telling him a dream in which she had been given a golden scarab, a costly piece of jewelry.

While she spoke, Jung heard a tapping at the window behind him. He opened it and caught a flying insect: a rose chafer, the nearest European relative of the Egyptian scarab. He handed it to her. According to Jung the experience broke through her rationalism, and the therapy began to move. In ancient Egypt the scarab was a symbol of rebirth, which, for Jung, was exactly what her psyche needed.

Jung and Wolfgang Pauli

Wolfgang Pauli, one of the founders of quantum physics and winner of the 1945 Nobel Prize in Physics, turned to Jung in a personal crisis in the early 1930s. He was first treated by a young colleague of Jung’s and later met Jung himself. Jung used hundreds of Pauli’s dreams anonymously in Psychology and Alchemy (1944).

Their exchange became a long intellectual friendship. In letters spanning a quarter of a century, published as Atom and Archetype, they explored whether psyche and matter might be two aspects of one underlying reality, an idea Jung linked to the old notion of the unus mundus, the one world. Pauli’s involvement gave the idea of synchronicity a seriousness it would otherwise not have had, though Pauli himself remained cautious about it.

The I Ching and the astrology experiment

Jung was fascinated by the I Ching, the ancient Chinese book of changes, and wrote a foreword to the English edition of Wilhelm’s translation (1950). He saw its method of consulting chance as based on a synchronistic rather than causal view of the world.

In the 1952 essay he also reported an experiment with the horoscopes of married couples, looking for traditional astrological marriage signs. The results seemed striking at first but did not hold up as statistical proof, as Jung himself admitted. He interpreted the pattern of the results as synchronistic in its own right, apparently mirroring the expectations of the researchers. Jung studied astrology as a psychological phenomenon, as projected psychology, rather than as a theory of planetary causes.

Synchronicity and the archetypes

Jung observed that synchronistic events tend to cluster at moments of intense emotion and crisis, when an archetype is activated or, in Jungian language, constellated. Death, birth, love and major turning points are typical. He connected this to his late idea that the archetypes are psychoid, extending beyond the psyche into the physical world.

What psychologists and skeptics say

Most scientists regard synchronicity as untestable and explain meaningful coincidences through ordinary mechanisms. The human mind is strongly inclined to find patterns, a tendency the psychiatrist Klaus Conrad called apophenia. Confirmation bias makes us remember the hits and forget the misses. And the statisticians Persi Diaconis and Frederick Mosteller showed in 1989 that, with enough people and enough events, seemingly impossible coincidences are bound to happen; they called this the law of truly large numbers.

None of this denies that coincidences can feel meaningful, or that this feeling can matter in a person’s life. The psychiatrist Bernard Beitman, among others, has studied meaningful coincidence as a psychological experience without making claims about its cause. The historian of religion Roderick Main has written a careful study of Jung’s theory and its religious dimension. Whether synchronicity describes something in the world or something in the way we experience it remains an open question.

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