Synchronicity: a Psychological Intervention

This post is written by me, a human. This is an AI-free zone.

Sunday, September 6th, 10- 11 a.m. PST: we’ll continue our exploration of Jung’s Red Book. Reading assignments + registration links are here. 📕

The classic story of synchronicity in the Jungian world goes like this:

Jung is sitting with a patient, listening as she tells him about a recent dream in which she is given an expensive piece of jewelry in the form of a golden scarab. Jung’s back is to the window, but he hears a tapping sound against the glass. He gets up to investigate, opens the window, and sees a scarabaeid beetle, a Swiss varietal with golden-green coloring, fly into the room. Jung quickly captures the insect in his hands and presents it to his patient.

“Here is your scarab,” he famously announces.

It’s a great story that conveys the uncanny experience of inconceivable odds.

It was a meaningful coincidence, the simplest definition of synchronicity. But it was also a critically important psychological intervention, one that arrived unprompted, of course. This aspect of things often gets lost in the telling.

Jung explains the therapeutic value for his client of this encounter with the scarab, a woman he describes as “psychologically inaccessible.”

In his essay, “Synchronicity,” he explains:

The difficulty lay in the fact that she always knew better about everything. Her excellent education had provided her with a weapon ideally suited to this purpose, namely a highly polished Cartesian rationalism with an impeccably “geometrical” idea of reality.

After several fruitless attempts to sweeten her rationalism with a somewhat more human understanding, I had to confine myself to the hope that something unexpected and irrational would turn up, something that would burst the intellectual retort into which she had sealed herself.

Any therapist who has had a patient like this—and I think we all have—know what Jung is saying here. There’s a helpless experience, often a demoralizing one. It’s the feeling of trying to break someone out of a cult who, meanwhile, knows their superiority for being a part of that cult and your inferiority for believing otherwise. There’s an inherent power struggle, however quietly conveyed. If the hyper-rational grip on the client can’t be loosened, the therapy is likely doomed.

In his articulation of what needed to change, Jung expressed a hope that “something unexpected and irrational would turn up.” This is really a uniquely Jungian idea: that the intervention is needed from outside the therapeutic space, and that it be of an almost spiritual nature.

Jung uses the term “irrational” not as a diminutive, but as a co-equal partner to the rational. He knew that his patient needed something to shake her fundamentalist belief in rationalism, because it was just that belief system that was making her—and keeping her—sick.

Jung, as a mere human clinician, couldn’t divine this intervention on his own.

Dreams can help in this context, up to a point. They originate in the deep unconscious and may provide material that can wake a rationalist up. But if a client is disinclined to “believe” in dreams, or trust them, then it’s unlikely for a dream alone to loosen the grip.

But when the “scarab” came flying in through the window in actual fact, her natural being could burst through the armor.

Only then did Jung begin to see progress with this patient. She had received a shock to her system; an unexpected, inexplicable, startling synchronicity that conveyed at least the possibility that something other than rationalism was at work in the world.

This allowed the therapy to proceed.

Jung knew it could be a turning point, and it was:

This experience punctured the desired hole in her rationalism and broke the ice of her intellectual resistance. The treatment could now be continued with satisfactory results.

I’ve had a few encounters like this recently with people in my universe. Well, the icy grip of rationalist dogma anyway, not so much the desired intervention, though I waited patiently and prayed it would show up.

We’re in an era where the battle against cult-like rationalism and its AI progeny threatens everything: relationships, families, communities, the economy, and nature. All we can hope for is some kind of wholly unanticipated intervention to break the unfeeling, inhumane blockade.

I’ve come to see the modern affliction of hyper-rationalism as an autoimmune disorder of the psyche.

In autoimmune diseases, the immune system attacks healthy cells instead of sick ones. Its intended function to protect the body becomes a self-directed weapon, and interventions that might typically support a person to heal either have no effect or are themselves co-opted by the disease. Before the disorder is identified, both the patient and the clinician can feel profoundly frustrated, confused, and helpless to make an impact.

In psychology, this same dynamic emerges when a person’s rational system—which typically works on behalf of the individual’s well-being—goes rogue and becomes dictatorial. It can feel as though you’re witnessing an abusive relationship within a single person: you know your patient’s best nature is being dictated to, yet you can’t separate them into two separate rooms even to try to intervene.

Hyper-rationalism is a worldview in which the only useful form of decision-making is through logic and intellectual performance, meaning all healing interventions must likewise prove themselves as rationally rooted. Most likely, the patient is assessing their therapist’s credentials: degrees, schools, awards, and so on. They have no interest in how the relationship with the therapist feels, nor what a satisfying life might look like. Those are eye-roll questions. The goal is simply some ineffable “better,” and it's the therapist’s responsibility to get there. Never mind that the therapist's recommendations are discarded out of hand.

For individuals caught in this autoimmune feedback loop of cult-like rationalism, they feel like the only sane people (despite their evident psychological suffering and loneliness), and are sure that their providers are inept and failing them.

Meanwhile, the unconscious of these people exhibits an entirely different personality, and one their intellect is desperate to suppress. Their other self is often witchy, prone to irrational belief systems, deeply feeling, sad and isolated, vulnerable, and scared. But if approached directly in therapy or via any direct interventions, this side is quickly hidden again by the rational personality. It is as if it does not exist because the patient's rational side wants it not to exist, cannot acknowledge that it exists, and is embarrassed by anyone suggesting it has any relevance to their life or treatment.

I tell my clinical students that the therapeutic mandate with patients like this requires subversion: you need to find a way to almost shake the baby rattle to distract the rationalist dictator, while you slip notes to the patient’s deeper self you’re trying to serve.

Your patient, in this case, is not the rationalist, but the person imprisoned by its suffocating abuse. Just as in couples therapy, once you’ve identified abuse, your work is not to get the woman to stay and work it out, but to find a way to help her leave, and safely.

Jung’s patient with the scarab was utterly stuck and had already fired two doctors, if not more before that. She was simultaneously suffering very deeply and resisting anything that could help her. It was an autoimmune disorder of the psyche. Then in came this ancient image of transformation, first in her dream in the non-material world, and then right through the actual window of her therapy session and into her hands in three-dimensional form. She was shaken. For a moment, her rationalism was stunned and unable to explain away her feelings of awe. This was all Jung needed to help her trust that he might know something about how to make her better. In this case, synchronicity was the therapeutic intervention.

I’m Satya Doyle Byock, director of The Salome Institute of Jungian Studies, psychotherapist, and author of Quarterlife: The Search for Self in Early Adulthood. My work has been featured in The New York Times, The Guardian, Oprah Daily, and on NPR, the BBC, 10% Happier with Dan Harris, Apple News in Conversation, The Podcast with a Thousand Faces, and Pulling the Thread.