Tag: Synchronicity

Hans had completed seven long years of work for his Master who rewarded him with a great lump of gold. The gold was very heavy and Hans was soon utterly worn out from carrying it. A kindly man passing on his horse asked what the trouble was, offering to swop his horse for the gold so Hans could ride along. Hans was extremely pleased at this sudden good fortune though when he mounted, the horse bolted and threw him down. A lady with a cow passed and helped him up, generously relieving Hans of the troublesome horse for the amazing cow which would supply him with milk and cheese for all eternity, though when he tried to milk her she kicked him in the head.

A compassionate swineherd gave up his pig for the horrible cow and now he had more bacon than he could imagine, though more fear too since it seemed that the pig was stolen and so he quietly swopped it with a very helpful man for his plump goose. Having said that, all these fortunate events gave him no coin in his pocket and so he swopped the goose for a grinding stone that was only a little damaged. It would be a great living but it was also pretty cumbersome and so when it accidentally fell in the well when he went there to drink it seemed he was now entirely free of troubles and so he went happily on his way.

The story appears absurd on the surface. Hans repeatedly trades for things of objectively lesser value until he owns nothing at all. Instead of regretting his losses, he becomes happier with each exchange, finally overjoyed after accidentally losing the final treasure.

From a conventional perspective, Hans is a fool. From another point of view, he may represent someone moving away from identification with material value towards psychological freedom. It’s as if the fairy tale quietly asks: What if our valuation system itself is mistaken?

The tale dramatises a journey from being possessed by the object to freedom from it, from the oppression of collective values toward a lighter relation to life. The repeated losses strip away identities that seem necessary but also prove to be hardships.

It seems the purpose of the story, like the bit in Jack and the Beanstalk where Jack trades his cow for a handful of beans, is to challenge our assumptions about what it means to be lucky, to reflect on the prejudice we tend to share that luck and increase are synonymous. The story also invites us to reconsider the notion that luck is simply something which befalls us from out of the blue, merely a matter of external forces acting upon a passive subject without reference to the attitudes or dispositions of the person in question.

And yet, before we’ve even thought about it too much, we know that some people seem to be more lucky than others. There seems to be more to it than a mere roll of cosmic dice. Jung went so far as to say that ‘what happens to a man has something to do with him.’

What does this mean exactly?

From the standpoint of psychological meaning what ‘befalls’ us is not merely accidental. Our unconscious dispositions, conflicts, and patterns are intimately connected with the events we experience or the way we experience them. In his work, ‘The Interpreted World’, Ernesto Spinelli says, ‘The definition or meaning given to events has as much to do with you, and the meaning system that you employ, as it does with the thing itself.’ 

He then develops this argument, ‘This interpretational process must be acknowledged in our statements about reality… Reality, as far as each of us experiences it, is this process. In other words, interpretation is inseparable from experience itself.’ Refraining from a knee-jerk interpretation of what we imagine things have to mean requires the development of what Jung calls the symbolic attitude.

The Symbolic Attitude.

The symbolic attitude is a way of relating to experience which neither takes it literally nor explains it away. It is an attitude of openness to the possibility that an image, event, dream, emotion, or coincidence expresses a meaning that has not yet been fully grasped by consciousness.

If a symbol is the best possible expression for something as yet unknown then a symbolic attitude is one which holds open the possibility that the significance of events is not necessarily as obvious as they might seem.

A symbol points beyond itself. It is a living image that mediates between conscious understanding and unconscious reality. By the same token the symbolic attitude is the willingness to relate to events as living realities, rather than objective givens of which we are the passive recipients.

The symbolic attitude avoids two opposing errors. Literalism on the one hand and reductionism on the other. Literalism says a dream of drowning means I am literally going to drown. A black crow means death is coming. I lost my job because I am cursed. The wafer is the body of Christ. etc. Here the symbol is collapsed into an external fact.

Reductionism does the opposite. The dream is ‘only’ anxiety. The crow is ‘just’ coincidence. Religious images are ‘nothing but’ wish fulfilment. Here the symbol is explained away as being no more than something already understood. Both attitudes are psychologically limiting because they prevent the symbol from doing its transformative work.

The symbolic attitude in practice.

If someone asserts, “I’m unlucky,” the literal attitude asks, ‘Is that objectively true? The reductive attitude asks, ‘Is this just cognitive bias? The symbolic attitude asks, ‘What psychic reality is being expressed through the experience of being unlucky?

This does not assume the person is objectively unlucky, nor does it dismiss their experience. Instead, it asks what the image of “unluckiness” might be saying about their relationship to fate, agency, suffering, hope, identity, or the unconscious. This is important because the symbolic attitude facilitates mediation between the ego and the unconscious, making psychological growth possible.

Without the symbolic attitude dreams become either meaningless or superstition, religious images become either dogma or delusion, myths become mere stories, suffering becomes either pointless or merely pathological. With the symbolic attitude each of these can become a source of psychological insight and development.

Gerhard Adler’s development

Adler extends Jung’s idea into clinical practice. For Adler, the analyst’s specific task is to protect the symbolic space. If the analyst interprets too quickly, the symbol dies because it has been reduced to a fixed meaning. If the analyst encourages literal belief, the patient becomes possessed by the image. Instead, analyst and patient stay with the image long enough for its meaning to unfold. Adler often describes this as allowing the symbol to remain “alive.”

The symbolic attitude is thus an epistemological stance, a way of knowing. It rests on the recognition that some aspects of experience are not yet fully intelligible and so we are ill advised to rush to any kind of definitive conclusion. Rather than forcing premature certainty, the symbolic attitude tolerates ambiguity while remaining engaged with the experience.

In this sense, the symbolic attitude is closely related to what the poet John Keats called ‘negative capability’, the ability to remain “in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.” It is the capacity to remain with the unknown rather than rushing to closure.

The essence of the symbolic attitude is thus the capacity to meet an experience by asking, “What is trying to become known through this?“ This shift, from explanation in terms of what-is-known to a dialogue with the yet-to-be-known, is what allows symbols and events to transform consciousness rather than merely decorate it, to participate in meaning rather than be bludgeoned by it.

Luck and archetypal identification.

Edward Edinger’s contribution to this thread is subtle but substantial. He doesn’t write specifically about luck, nor does he focus on the symbolic attitude in the way Adler does. Instead, he provides a compelling account of how the ego becomes identified with archetypal patterns, making certain self-descriptions feel unquestionably true.

In Ego and Archetype, Edinger argues that much of psychological suffering arises when the ego unconsciously identifies with an archetypal image. Rather than simply having experiences, the person becomes the rejected one, the victim, the chosen one, the failure, and so on.

Applied to luck, the question shifts from, ‘Am I un/lucky? to ‘have I become identified with an archetype whose story is one of perpetual misfortune?” In other words, “unlucky” may not be a neutral description of probabilities but part of an identity organised around an archetypal narrative.

The ego lives inside a myth.

One of Edinger’s recurring themes is that individuation involves discovering the myth one is unconsciously living. Someone who says, ‘Nothing ever works out for me,’ may be living the myth of Job (endurance amid suffering), the abandoned child, the scapegoat, the exile, or even the tragic hero. In Carl Orf’s ‘Carmina Burana’, the song ‘oh Fortuna’, expresses this sense of being identified with an archetypal reality which clearly has its own personality…,

‘Fate, monstrous and empty, you turning wheel, you are malevolent, your favour is idle and always fades, shadowed, veiled, you plague me too. I bare my back for the sport of your wickedness. In prosperity or in virtue fate is against me, Both in passion and in weakness fate always enslaves us. So at this hour pluck the vibrating strings; because fate brings down even the strong, everyone weep with me.

The song is full of the sense of being trapped in another’s narrative. Such identifications may not determine objective events, but they strongly influence the lens through which events are experienced, colouring and shaping which events are noticed, remembered, and imbued with certain meanings. Ego configurations dominated by archetypal patterns can produce a form of attachment to suffering which absolutely inhibits the possibility of experiencing oneself as lucky.

Edinger repeatedly emphasises developing what might be called a psychological objectivity, the capacity to observe one’s identifications rather than be wholly absorbed by them. This resonates strongly with Adler’s symbolic attitude. Instead of saying, ‘I am unlucky’, one might come to say, ‘Part of me experiences life through an image of being unlucky.’

That small shift, from identity to observation, is psychologically significant. So if someone persistently thinks of themselves as “unlucky,” Edinger’s distinctive contribution is to suggest that the belief may be less about objective patterns of chance than about an archetypal self-image. The work is not to prove or disprove the claim statistically, but to understand what psychic story has become fused with the ego and whether that fusion can be disentangled.

Luck and the symbolic attitude.

For someone capable of a symbolic attitude luck ceases to be merely external chance without reducing it to magical causation. This suggests that the symbolic attitude is not simply an intellectual stance one chooses to adopt; it rests upon a developmental achievement in which emotional experience has been successfully transformed into symbolic form. Where symbol formation has been compromised, the analyst may need first to help establish the capacity to symbolise before the patient can genuinely engage in the symbolic attitude which Jung regarded as central to individuation.

In his book ‘The Luck factor’, (2003) experimental psychologist Richard Wiseman’s central conclusion is that “lucky” people differ less in what happens to them than in how they respond to events. The first of his four principles of luck, derived from interviews and experiments with hundreds of self-described lucky and unlucky people is that….

1. Lucky people create, notice, and act upon chance opportunities.

Wiseman discovered that lucky people tend to have broad social networks; talk to strangers and maintain casual acquaintances; remain open to new experiences and avoid becoming so focused on one goal that they miss unexpected opportunities.

In one experiment, Wiseman gave participants a newspaper and asked them to count the photographs. A large message halfway through the paper read, “Stop counting—there are 43 photographs.” Self-described lucky people noticed the message far more often than unlucky people because they were less narrowly focused.

2. Lucky people make fortunate decisions by listening to intuition

Wiseman found that lucky people often trust their intuitive judgments. They pay attention to “gut feelings”; give themselves time to reflect before making important decisions and avoid overanalysing every possibility. He also found that reducing stress improved intuitive decision-making. Anxiety tends to narrow attention and interfere with noticing subtle cues.

3. Lucky people’s expectations help create good fortune

Lucky people generally expect things to work out well. Because of these expectations they persevere after setbacks; approach new situations with confidence; are more approachable socially; take opportunities they might otherwise avoid. Wiseman suggests positive expectations influence behaviour in ways that increase the likelihood of favourable outcomes.

4. Lucky people transform bad luck into good.

When something goes wrong, lucky people habitually imagine how the situation could have been worse; search for possible benefits; treat setbacks as temporary; learn from adverse experiences. Rather than seeing misfortune as evidence that life is against them, they reinterpret it as information or opportunity.

The connection with Jung.

Although Wiseman himself does not frame his work in Jungian terms, there are some intriguing parallels with Jungian psychology,

• Principle 1 resembles Jung’s idea of a symbolic attitude: openness to unexpected meanings and possibilities rather than rigid literalism.
• Principle 2 echoes Jung’s respect for intuition as one of the four primary psychological functions, capable of perceiving possibilities not yet consciously evident.
• Principle 3 aligns with Jung’s observation that our conscious attitude influences the kinds of experiences we are prepared to encounter and integrate.
• Principle 4 is perhaps closest to Jung’s concept of the transcendent function, in which conflict or suffering can be transformed into psychological development through a new symbolic perspective.

These principles resonate with our tale ‘Hans in Luck,. Hans repeatedly remains open to possibility and chance encounter; he pays attention to his intuition, expects things to work out and interprets apparent losses as gains. Wiseman would describe this as having a resilient cognitive style; Jung would likely observe that Hans embodies a symbolic attitude which transforms fortune and misfortune through his relationship to them rather than attributing the events themselves with intrinsic meaning.

I once overheard two men talking on the train. The first was telling the second that he had been in analysis. The second man was curious and asked him about it, whether it had helped and so forth, finally asking if he could specify what the difference was before and after the analysis. ‘Well,’ said the first man, ‘before the analysis life was just the same old boring daily grind.’ And afterwards?’ prompted the second man. ‘Well,’ said the first man perking up, ‘afterwards it was simply one thing after another.’

Synchronicity and the transcendent function.

So far we have been discussing how the interpretation of events governs the nature of the experience associated with them, the freedom of movement we have to experience causally connected phenomena which seem to have objective value but in fact do not. Then there is the question of how things might line up independently of our perception of them to produce experiences of being either lucky or unlucky.

Synchronicity could be described as the expressive emergence of the transcendent function. The transcendent function is an intra-psychic process which creates a new symbolic standpoint; synchronicity is an expression of that same process manifesting as a meaningful correspondence between psyche and the external world. In other words, they are distinct concepts, but they arise from the same underlying dynamics of individuation. The transcendent function is crucial to the manifestation of synchronicity. Without a symbolic attitude, synchronicities remain mere coincidences.

The transcendent function integrates opposites within the psyche, synchronicity reveals that psyche and matter themselves participate in a deeper unity. The transcendent function prepares consciousness for an experience of the unus mundus, while synchronicity offers occasional empirical glimpses of that underlying unity.

In her book, ‘The Inner World of Choice’, Frances Wickes gives an illustrative example of her patient, a mother who was struggling to let her grown up son live his own life. This mother was very controlling but in considerable denial of the fact. The son had fled her ‘care’ and gone to live several time zones away. Wickes steadfastly attempted to draw her patient’s attention to the fact that the young man’s departure was a response to her overbearing manner and that she had effectively been suffocating him, all of which jarred terribly with her own remonstrations as to his ingratitude. Finally the patient managed to hold the tension between the conscious realisation of her maternal task to let him go and the unconscious wish to hang on to him eternally.

‘It was her last hour of analysis before fall. As the hour drew toward a close, there came to her, like the breaking of a new dawn, a consciousness of her own separate life, a gift originally given, an individual potential which was hers to live, whatever might happen in the life of another. She said, ‘I am going to take up my own life and learn to live it even if I never see him again. My sorrow will go with me always but it will be my own life that I shall live.’

It was the end of the hour. The clock struck twelve.

Three days later she received a letter. Its date was the day of her decision. It read, ‘Dear Mother, I am sitting on a hillside three thousand miles away. Just now I heard the clock strike nine and suddenly I felt that a fear that had been with me always was gone. I know now that I can come home because you no longer need me.’ 

The mother recognises her possessiveness and her unconscious need to keep her son psychologically dependent. Then rather than trying to regain him, she bears the grief of letting him go. Subsequently a genuinely new attitude emerges, she discovers her own separate life and relinquishes identification with the maternal role. Finally, at the very moment of this inner transformation (marked by the striking of the clock), the son experiences an equally decisive inner shift thousands of miles away.

This is one of the clearest clinical examples suggesting that a transformation produced by the transcendent function is accompanied by a synchronistic event. It therefore provides a compelling bridge between Jung’s essay on the transcendent function and his later essay on synchronicity.

This lived sense of ‘Fortune favouring the brave’ is expressed in a remark by one of Goethe’s couplets, ‘Whatever you can do, or dream you can, begin it. Boldness has genius, power, and magic in it!”  

This is not about exercising the freedom to interpret events but is rather about generating the improbable occurrence of the event itself..’something that surpasses our powers of comprehension, and can only be conceived as possible by virtue of the most wonderful pre-established harmony’. Schopenhauer.

‘Synchronistic events rest on the simultaneous occurrence of two different psychic states. One of them is the normal, probable state (i.e., the one that is causally explicable), and the other, the critical experience, is the one that cannot be derived causally from the first.’ (Jung CW8 para 855) Circumstances are not simply open to interpretation such that a variety of meanings could be derived from them; rather, meaning presents itself despite one’s best efforts to look the other way.

Some years ago I lost my home and my artists studio which were being sold by the landlord. I found a new place to live but it didn’t have a studio. Despite the beautiful location I felt frustrated at this disruption to my artistic calling. I put an A5 ‘wanted’ advert into the village PO window with an image of my work and waited. Months past. I waited and waited, refusing to settle or accept my new situation. One day, I was looking out of an upstairs window onto a blustery day. In the far distance, way up in the sky, I saw what seemed to be a fluttering bird. The wind blew it closer and I realised it was not a bird but a piece of paper, hundreds of metres in the air. Closer still and I saw a familiar flash of colour. Could it be? No way and I pushed the thought from my mind. Minutes later, I opened the back door to find my advert squarely planted on the welcome mat. The message was undeniable. I had to accept where I was and be grateful for what I had.

Such events cannot help but have us wonder if the gods are not involved because they seem to border on the miraculous. ‘For want of a demonstrable cause, we are all too likely to fall into the temptation of positing a transcendental one.’ Jung’s objection to this is that,’ ‘a “transcendental cause” is a contradiction in terms, because anything transcendental cannot by definition be demonstrated.’ And yet it can be inferred. I wonder if Jung is anxious to steer away from speaking about divine intervention and that it is precisely this which he alludes to when referring to his reticence in broaching the subject of synchronicity in his essay’s opening remarks. (vol 8) Elsewhere he repeatedly emphasises and even underlines the intentionality of unconscious contents, poetically expressed by Kierkegaard’s own observation, ‘there’s what I want to think about and there is what wants to be thought.’

Jung’s explanation of synchronicity is two fold, ‘Synchronicity therefore consists of two factors: a) An unconscious image comes into consciousness either directly (i.e., literally) or indirectly (symbolised or suggested) in the form of a dream, idea, or premonition, b) An objective situation coincides with this content. ‘[859] He assiduously avoids Goethe’s reference to the intentions of Providence, though he inadvertently includes this factor, albeit from the writings of Albertus Magnus quoted lower down the page,

‘Whoever would learn the secret of [synchronicity] must [first] fall into a great excess … and he must do it at that hour when the excess befalls him, and operate with the things which the soul prescribes. For the soul is then so desirous of the matter she would accomplish that of her own accord. Everything she does with that aim in view possesses motive power and efficacy.’

This then seems to suggest a fourth factor, the emotional state of the ego personality. Seizing the day requires intense emotional involvement. Alchemical treatises often emphasise the need for patience, love, living with uncertainty, longing and humility. Yet there are also far more challenging feelings which must be endured and willingly entered into, the conscious suffering of bearing the opposites, the despair, confusion and grief of the Nigredo. In Shakespeare’s ‘the Tempest’ this is represented by the storm itself, the chaotic and mortifying collapse of Prospero’s status, certainty and identity; his renunciation of power and vengeance. In Dante’s Inferno there is the emotionally impactful suffering of a descent into hell which prefigures Purgatory and Heaven. In Faust, Goethe makes explicit the feeling tone of what it means to seize the day, ‘“Thus let it be! Henceforth I’ll fling me into the roaring tide of time, into the surge of circumstance, And then may pleasure and distress, Success and failure, interchange as they can; For man grows active only through unrest.”

The literal translation of this last line is,’ “Man errs as long as he strives,’ which accentuates the necessity of error, suffering, and misjudgment in the pursuit of wholeness. Faust’s renunciation of bookish scholarship, his willingness to engage with Mephistopheles brings about the death of an old way of being, a state described in alchemical literature as ‘the torments’, a process equivalent to psychic dismemberment.

The Unus Mundus.

The capacity to bear the tension between opposites eventually gives rise to new life, Heaven’s birth, the ‘filius philosphorum’. Jung writes that the union of opposites culminates in the appearance of a new personality, not a compromise but a third thing produced from the tension itself.

Alfred Ribi argues that this ‘unus mundus‘ (one world) represents a further stage in the evolution of consciousness, one that moves beyond the modern split between mind and matter. In ordinary consciousness, we experience psyche and the physical world as fundamentally separate. At the level of the unus mundus, however, this division is understood to be secondary to the idea that psyche and matter emerge from a deeper, psychoid reality in which they are originally united. Synchronistic events provide glimpses of this underlying unity because they reveal meaningful correspondences between ‘inner’ psychological states and ‘outer’ events without requiring a causal explanation. Rather than reducing the psyche to subjective fantasy, this perspective restores it as an objective aspect of reality, equal in ontological status to the physical world. The individual thus comes to experience consciousness as participating in a larger, cosmic order rather than existing as an isolated ego. 

One of Ribi’s original contributions is to place this idea within a developmental model of consciousness. He proposes that humanity has progressively moved, from an archaic, undifferentiated participation in the world, through the modern scientific separation of subject and object, toward a stage where differentiation is preserved but reunited within the unus mundus. This is not a regression to primitive consciousness but an integration which recognises the psyche’s objective reality while retaining reflective awareness.

For Ribi, the resolution of opposites is not simply an intra-psychic compromise but the realisation that both psychic and material realities participate in the same underlying ground. Individuation therefore culminates not merely in personal wholeness but in an experiential awareness of the unus mundus, where apparent dualities, subject and object, inner and outer, psyche and matter, are understood as differentiated expressions of a single, psychoid reality. 

This interpretation aligns closely with Jung’s late writings in Mysterium Coniunctionis, where the unus mundus is presented as the hidden, unitary background from which both psyche and matter arise, and where the coniunctio symbolises a restoration of this primordial unity rather than merely a reconciliation of psychological conflict. Thus increases in “good fortune” are to be understood as a by-product of living in greater accord with that unity, not as its purpose.