It can be said in summary that a synchronistic phenomenon consists of two parts: (1) An unconscious image comes directly (that is, directly corresponding to the real situation that will occur later) or in symbolic form (that is, referring to the real situation through a symbolic meaning) into consciousness, as a dream image, an idea, or a premonition. (2) With this mental representation coincides an external state of affairs equivalent in meaning.31 Since the perception of the latter is also a psychic event, we require a more precise formulation: There is a coincidence of two psychic states: (1) The normal, causally explainable state of our perception of the outer world; (2) the state represented by a critical experience that gives the impression of an overlay or interruption of the normal state by an archetypally conditioned constellation. These two states of affairs are often not completely simultaneous (that would be "synchronous"), but rather synchronistic, in that an event that frequently becomes verifiable somewhat later is seen in the inner mental representation as already present.32It is also conceivable that equivalent events of this type often take place in the absence of an observer who could perceive their meaning. Jung suggests speaking in such cases of "equivalence" or "conformity." Thus, the factor of meaning is an inalienable part of the synchronicity phenomenon. What this meaning factor might consist of largely eludes our cognitive capacity.
— Marie-Louise von Franz
Von Franz is doing something quietly radical in this passage: she is pulling synchronicity away from the mystical register where it so easily lands — the shiver of coincidence, the feeling of being cosmically addressed — and insisting that meaning is not a feeling but a structural feature, and yet simultaneously confesses that we cannot think our way to what that structure is. The phenomenon requires an observer not because observers create it, but because meaning, by definition, needs a psyche capable of recognition. Where no one perceives, the "equivalence" may still obtain — the acorn still falls beside the dream of an acorn — but nothing is released. Significance is real and yet utterly dependent on the apparatus that registers it.
This is where the passage bites. The soul that encounters a synchronism almost always wants it to mean something about its own trajectory — confirmation, warning, calling. That desire to be addressed, to be the intended recipient of the universe's oblique speech, is its own kind of inflation. Von Franz does not indulge it. She places meaning squarely in what she calls "archetypally conditioned constellation," which is to say in something impersonal, patterned, and not authored by the ego's wish. The universe, if it speaks at all, does not speak to you specifically. It speaks, and you are occasionally present enough to catch the syllable.
Marie-Louise von Franz·Psyche and Matter·2014