Jung and Synchronicity#

A word that didn’t exist before Jung#

In 1952, the psychiatrist Carl Jung published an essay called “Synchronicity: An Acausal Connecting Principle.” He proposed a category of event that he believed existing psychology had no vocabulary for.

Synchronicity: two or more events, connected not by cause and effect, but by meaning, to the person experiencing them.

The scarab#

Jung’s most frequently cited case, from his own clinical practice:

A patient is describing a dream about a golden scarab beetle. At that exact moment, something taps at the consulting-room window. Jung opens it — a real, scarab-like beetle flies in.

He treated the coincidence itself as clinically significant, not as an interruption to the session.

Why not just call it a coincidence?#

Jung’s own background matters here. He had already built a theory of archetypes — recurring symbolic patterns he believed were shared across human minds, part of what he called the collective unconscious.

A coincidence that lines up with an archetype in progress, for Jung, wasn’t “just” chance. It was the same underlying structure surfacing in two places at once — the dream, and the world.

Why not just call it causation, either?#

Jung was careful not to claim the beetle was caused by the dream, or the dream by the beetle. That would be an ordinary (if extraordinary) causal claim, testable in principle.

Synchronicity was pitched as a third option: connected by meaning, without either causing the other. This is the most contested part of the whole theory — a connection that isn’t causal is doing a lot of unexamined work.

Objection 1 — base rates#

From week 2: across a life full of half-remembered dreams and half-remembered insects, some dream is going to line up with some real event, purely by chance, given enough attempts.

You don’t remember the thousands of dreams that predicted nothing. You remember the scarab.

Objection 2 — confirmation bias#

From week 1: once you’re primed to notice “meaningful” coincidences, you get better at noticing them and worse at noticing the misses.

A patient already deep in symbolic, dream-attentive work is exactly the person most likely to register — and report — a coincidence like this one.

Objection 3 — unfalsifiability#

The hardest objection. If a matching event counts as synchronicity, and an unmatching event just means the synchronicity hasn’t happened yet, no observation could ever count against the theory.

A claim that no possible evidence could disprove is doing something other than describing the world.

What survives#

Not the metaphysical claim — that meaning-without-causation is a real connective force in the universe. Serious philosophy of science has not been kind to that part.

What survives is a psychological description: some experiences carry a felt sense of significance that plain “it’s a coincidence” doesn’t capture — and that felt sense is real, measurable, and worth studying, whatever produces it.

Forward to week 10#

Jung didn’t have the vocabulary for confirmation bias or illusory correlation — those terms came later, from psychology, not psychiatry.

Week 10 names the mechanism properly. Keep the scarab in mind when you get there.