What is synchronicity?
Synchronicity is the term the Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung gave to a meaningful coincidence: two events that have no causal connection, yet fall together in a way that carries unmistakable meaning for the person who experiences them. Jung’s insight was that, just as events can be linked by cause and effect, they can also be linked by meaning. He called synchronicity an “acausal connecting principle”, a form of order in experience that ordinary cause-and-effect thinking cannot account for.
Meaning, not just coincidence
The distinction matters, because not every coincidence is a synchronicity. If a passenger sneezes just before a plane makes an emergency landing, that is mere chance, two unrelated events happening close together. But if you think of an old friend you have not seen in years, and that afternoon they call, at a moment when their return means something to you, the coincidence is charged with meaning. What makes an event synchronistic is not its improbability alone, but that the outer event mirrors an inner state, and that the correspondence feels significant rather than random.
Jung’s scarab beetle: the classic example
Jung set out the idea most fully in his 1952 essay, Synchronicity: An Acausal Connecting Principle, developed in dialogue with the physicist Wolfgang Pauli. He illustrated it with a case from his own consulting room. He was treating a woman whose rigid rationalism made the work impossible to move. One day she recounted a dream in which she was given a golden scarab, a symbol of rebirth. As she spoke, Jung heard a tapping at the window: a rose-chafer beetle, the closest local equivalent to a scarab, was trying to get in. He caught it and handed it to her with the words, “Here is your scarab.” The coincidence broke through her rationalism where argument had failed, and the treatment finally began to move.
Synchronicity and the unconscious
For Jung, synchronicity was not a party trick of the universe but a window onto the deeper structure of the psyche. He connected it to the archetypes and the collective unconscious: at moments of psychological significance, when an archetype is activated, inner and outer can seem to arrange themselves around the same meaning. Synchronistic events cluster around exactly the times of upheaval, loss, love and transformation when the unconscious is most active. This is also why they so often accompany dreams and the process of individuation, the movement toward a more integrated Self.
A necessary caution
Jung was careful, and it is worth being careful too. He repeatedly acknowledged that much of what looks improbable is simply improbable, without purpose or meaning. The human mind is a pattern-seeking instrument, and it will find significance where there is none. Synchronicity is not a licence to read messages into every coincidence, nor a substitute for judgement. It becomes worth attending to when the correspondences accumulate, when they touch something already alive in the person, and when the meaning is felt rather than manufactured.
Making sense of your own experiences
Many people have a synchronistic experience and do not know what to do with it: it feels important, but the rational mind dismisses it, and there is no one to help them think about it seriously. This is precisely the kind of material that Jungian analysis takes seriously, not as prophecy, but as a communication from the unconscious worth understanding. Working with a Jungian analyst offers a space to explore what such moments are pointing to in your own life, without either inflating them or explaining them away. The Jungian Confrerie is the practice of Dr Philippe Jacquet, offering Jungian analysis in central London and online worldwide.