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Synchronicity
Also known as: meaningful coincidence, acausal connecting principle
Synchronicity is a term coined by Carl Gustav Jung to designate a meaningful coincidence between a psychic event — a dream, vision, or premonition — and an external event in the physical world, where no causal relationship connects the two. The concept rests on the archetype as a psychoid factor capable of manifesting both psychically and physically.
What Distinguishes Synchronicity from Coincidence?
Jung was precise on this point. Synchronicity does not mean mere simultaneity. As Jung defined it, the term applies to “a coincidence in time of two or more causally unrelated events which have the same or a similar meaning” (Jung, 1952). The critical element is meaning, not temporal overlap. Two events may coincide in time without synchronicity; what makes the phenomenon distinct is that the correspondence strikes the observer as deeply significant and yet resists causal explanation.
“Meaningful coincidences are thinkable as pure chance. But the more they multiply and the greater and more exact the correspondence is, the more their probability sinks and their unthinkability increases, until they can no longer be regarded as pure chance but, for lack of a causal explanation, have to be thought of as meaningful arrangements.” — C.G. Jung, The Structure and Dynamics of the Psyche (1952)
The arrangement is not random, but neither is it caused. This is the conceptual difficulty Jung spent two decades refining before publication.
What Role Do Archetypes Play?
According to Jung, synchronistic phenomena occur most frequently when an archetype is activated, what he called “constellated”, in the unconscious (Jung, 1952). Von Franz elaborated that this activation produces an “excited state” in which the constellated archetype appears not only within the psyche but also in the material environment (von Franz, 1974). Jung termed this capacity “transgressivity”: the archetype’s ability to manifest simultaneously as inner image and outer event (Jung, 1952).
How Does Synchronicity Fit Jung’s Cosmology?
In collaboration with Pauli, Jung proposed a quaternio of explanatory principles: indestructible energy, the space-time continuum, causality, and synchronicity (Jung, 1952). As Stein notes, this framework inserts the psyche, and with it the element of meaning, into the full account of reality (Stein, 1998). Synchronicity in its broader definition becomes a principle of acausal orderedness underlying cosmic law itself.
Sources Cited
- Hoeller, Stephan A. (1982). The Gnostic Jung and the Seven Sermons to the Dead.
- Jung, C.G. (1952). “Synchronicity: An Acausal Connecting Principle,” in The Structure and Dynamics of the Psyche (CW 8). Princeton University Press.
- Stein, Murray (1998). Jung’s Map of the Soul: An Introduction. Open Court.
- von Franz, Marie-Louise (1974). Number and Time. Northwestern University Press.