Synchronicity: Nature and Psyche in an Interconnected Universe

Excerpt- Joseph Cambray

The impetus for this book arose out of clinical work. Analytic explorations have the potential to activate, energize, and focus unconscious processes, which often lead to experiences that are perceived as extraordinary from the perspective of ego consciousness. As I began to notice clusterings of such activations around certain themes and clinical situations, with some similarity to what Jung discussed in formulating his concept of synchronicity, I felt the need to reexamine his notion in light of new models of the mind and changes in scientific understanding. The challenge was to formulate my thoughts about it from both clinical and theoretical perspectives against the backdrop of Jung’s profound reflections on the topic. Fortunately this coincided in time with the emergence of the field of complexity studies, allowing me to bring my background in the sciences into dialogue with my work as an analyst in a way that felt fresh and fruitful.

Then the very act of working on this material in which I sought to describe and analyze these experiences seemed to become embedded in and a part of the experiences themselves, forcefully impressing me with the interconnectedness of our world. Synchronicity as “a meaningful coincidence” and “an acausal connecting principle”1 was a provocative hypothesis when it first was published and has remained so up to the present. In it C. G. Jung aimed at expanding the Western world’s core conceptions of nature and the psyche. By requiring that we include and make room for unique individual experiences of life in our most fundamental philosophical and scientific views of the world, Jung challenged the status quo, urging us to go beyond the readily explainable, beyond the restrictions of a cause-effect reductive description of the world, to seeing the psyche as embedded into the substance of the world. As in so many of his ideas and projects, his genius resided in his capacity to see great depth in the odd, curious, and seemingly erroneous aspects of existence. This was already evident in his first research efforts, studying mediums; then examining the associations of the insane, discovering meaningful narrative fragments in what others discarded as only nonsensical. His was a mind open to exploring the possibility of meaning in chance or random events, deciphering if and when meaning might be present even if outside of conscious awareness.

In these endeavors Jung was radically transgressive; he cared little for the confines or boundaries of different disciplines but sought the most profound patterns in mind, culture, and nature, what he called “archetypes.” Science and religion were not inherently opposed, and he discovered a science of the sacred, especially in his clinical work…

You can see the Jung and the World Podcast with Joseph Cambray on YouTube