Journal of Analytical Psychology, 2019, 64, 5, 780–797

Synchronicity and meaning

Philip Kime, Zürich

It is usually thought that synchronicity, characterised as ‘meaningful coincidence’, is

therefore understandable in relation to the concept of ‘meaning’. I will explore the
largely unhelpful symbiotic relationship between ‘coincidence’ and ‘meaning’ by
comparing synchronicity with synchoricity - coincidence in space rather than time.
These two concepts are often mixed together and I will attempt to describe a ‘pure’
synchronicity in order to sharpen our sense of how meaning is felt to arise from
coincidence. It will then be suggested that the standard concept of synchronicity is
mostly psychologically irrelevant and, when adjusted to remove elements which are
explained quite naturally by evolutionary theory, we are left with a concept which has
implications both for the metaphysical foundations of Analytical Psychology and the
individualistic emphasis one commonly finds in the field.

Keywords: coincidence, evolution, meaning, synchoricity, synchronicity

Introduction
In all branches of psychology, including depth psychology, the fear of being
academically minimised often drives a desire to be seen as ‘scientific’.
Unfortunately, the general level of awareness of the vast and complex
landscape of 20th century philosophy of science is quite poor and as a result
psychology regularly presents itself in naïve empiricist forms. A side effect of
this is that we lose sight of the properly psychological aspects of the field by
importing phenomena and accounts of phenomena which lie clearly in the
realm of irrelevant empirical sciences. This obscures the essence of psychology
and gradually undermines the very idea of it by inviting psychologically
irrelevant explanations which call into question the legitimacy of psychology
as a subject. What follows is part of a general attempt to pick apart central
concepts of analytical psychology, removing those elements which are
accounted for perfectly well by other disciplines. In this way, I hope to
highlight and preserve concerns which I believe are essentially psychological
and for which a psychological explanation is ineradicable.
Rather than tackle the more obvious flirtations with naïve empiricism in
analytical psychology such as the Association Experiment, statistical typology
and astrology, I will concentrate on the notion of synchronicity because

0021-8774/2019/6405/1 © 2019, The Society of Analytical Psychology

Published by Wiley Publishing, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA.
DOI: 10.1111/1468-5922.12546
Philip Kime 781

breaking apart this concept shows most deeply the disturbing, difficult and
necessary consequences of following the theoretical programme outlined
above. It is perhaps not correct to say that it is time to take another look at the
concept of synchronicity because, in my view, the concept is unique in being so
enthusiastically abused. The typical treatment in popular Jungian literature is
to include the word in lists of implicitly positive things which accompany some
sort of psychological work. This sort of treatment is usually accompanied with
a passing definition remarkable for its vagueness. A typical example is Stein
(2006) where synchronicity is listed many times as something, implicitly
positive, which accompanies the individuation process. It is there defined once
in passing as ‘…. a union of psychic images and meanings and outer persons
and events ...’ (ibid., p. 142). The lack of explanation of the nature of this
‘union’ renders such a definition little more than a paraphrase of the common
stock of association from which it was drawn. Other commonly given
definitions mention the cases where the coincidence is not of inner and outer
but of two outer events such as two people feeling the same pain at the same
time or saying the same thing at the same time.
More serious attention has been paid to the concept through the influence of
Atmanspacher and Fach (2013) which attempts to locate the concept within a
framework resulting from an interpretation of the Jung-Pauli correspondence.
It has also received contemporary attention through the psychoanalytic
theories of Matte Blanco as discussed, for example, by Carvalho (2014). Such
recent work aims to elucidate the nature of the connection or union involved
in supposed synchronicities in terms of mathematical concepts better able to
withstand scrutiny than vague terms such as ‘meaningfulness’. I will not
comment on these recent developments as I am more concerned with the
problems caused by the rather incestuous relationship between the concept of
synchronicity and the concept of meaning. I do not think that the concept of
‘meaningfulness’ can help much in approaching synchronicity because for
something to qualify as synchronistic in the usual sense simply is that it
qualifies as meaningful. Put another way, to describe an event as synchronistic
and to describe it as meaningful is often saying the same thing with different
words and this makes ‘meaningfulness’ no explanation or foundation for an
investigation of synchronicity. If something is frightening, it is also scary,
which makes it impossible to explain fright by being scared (or indeed vice
versa); the words simply point, perhaps with a different emphasis, to the same
underlying thing which is still in need of an explanation.

Identifying synchronicity
Let us start with a puzzling aspect of mainstream reports of synchronicity: their
typically clear and obvious identity criteria. Jung’s scarab beetle example (Jung
1960a) is paradigmatic in this respect: a reported dream beetle is paired with a
782 Synchronicity and meaning

literal similar beetle at the window. I quote the example in full here as I will refer
to it throughout what follows:

A young woman I was treating had, at a critical moment, a dream in which she was
given a golden scarab. While she was telling me this dream I sat with my back to the
closed window. Suddenly I heard a noise behind me, like a gentle tapping. I turned
round and saw a flying insect knocking against the window-pane from outside. I
opened the window and caught the creature in the air as it flew in. It was the
nearest analogy to a golden scarab that one finds in our latitudes, a scarabaeid
beetle, the common rose-chafer (Cetonia aurata), which contrary to its usual habits
had evidently felt an urge to get into a dark room at this particular moment. I must
admit that nothing like it ever happened to me before or since, and that the dream
of the patient had remained unique in my experience.

(Jung 1960b, para. 844)

This is not at all untypical of reports of alleged synchronicity, the internal

images and external events are easily connected by an identity of objects or
properties in a straightforward manner. Often the connection is a basic
identity of, for example, thoughts or sensations of different people at the
same time. This should make us a little suspicious since nowhere else in
analytical psychology, where we are dealing with putatively unconscious
material, are connections so obvious, ego-syntonic and clear. Why should
synchronicity, the most mysterious of concepts, be evidenced by clear, obvious
connections far removed from the complex and murky connections we find
in, for example, dreams?
The obviousness of the connection in reported synchronicities is, it seems to
me, a confounding factor in the mainstream view since such obvious
connection could not be meaningless; such connections are essentially
meaningful and are in fact a primitive part of the very definition of
‘meaningful’. In Jung’s scarab example, I do not think that there was on the one
hand the event of the coincidence of the dream and real beetle and then on the
other hand the imputation of meaning to this. Such an obvious and relatively
primitive ‘match’ is the very essence of ‘meaningful’. To put this another way,
the idea of a ‘meaningful coincidence’ implies that there are meaningless
coincidences and this in turn implies the ascription of meaning to coincidences
is an extra step, apart from the coincidence itself. I do not think that this is the
case for the typical reported synchronicity: the simple and obvious nature of
the connection is part of the very definition of what humans mean by the word
‘meaningful’. So, to say that a ‘meaningful coincidence’ has occurred is merely
to say that an easily identifiable coincidence has occurred and this says nothing
synthetic about the meaning of the coincidence at all. Saying that in Jung’s
example, the scarab coincidence is meaningful is merely to say that there is an
obvious connection, easily noticeable and necessarily notable. If I dream that
my father will die and the next day he does in fact die, to say that this was a
Philip Kime 783

‘meaningful’ dream merely obscures the fact that such coincidence of themes is
the very essence of ‘meaningful’ and so is guaranteed to be thought of in this
manner. If I had the same dream but my father did not die, I would not think it
so ‘meaningful’, which demonstrates that the ‘meaning’ is the coincidence of
themes. There is nothing mysterious about such meaning, it is explicable by
biology since the matching of patterns is a core aspect supporting survival and
evolution. Animals match imprinted templates to predators, food and mates.
Humans do this too but in much more sophisticated ways which, as a side-
effect, predispose us towards having a reaction called ‘ascribing meaning’ to
coincidences of widely diverse characteristics.
Suppose someone had a vivid dream about a person they had not seen for a
long time and then received a telephone call from them the next day. It would
be remarkable if they did not notice this coincidence because such a clear,
simple match of ‘inner’ and ‘outer’ is practically definitive of what it means to
experience the world in a normal, human fashion. Indeed the lack of such
matching of internal and external experience is partially identifying of some
configurations of mental disorder. It is peculiar, in my view, to say that such a
coincidence demonstrates an acausal connection of meaning between the two
events. It rather merely demonstrates that it is precisely this sort of connection
which provides our most primitive and natural examples of meaning.
I do not believe that we can credibly support a concept of synchronicity
which only involves clear, obvious connections and simple matches of
semantic content because such examples are in fact degenerate forms of
coincidence which simply are the meaning which they are supposed to
demonstrate the independent existence of. Unfortunately, such clear and
obvious connections exhaust the common stock of reported synchronicities as
obviousness is the feature most narratively desirable of reported
synchronicity. Of course we use such obvious examples in order to try to
argue most forcefully for synchronicity in the first place. What such examples
establish is, if anything, a degenerate definitional form of synchronicity. All
that Jung’s scarab beetle story establishes is that we inevitably take as
meaningful the noticed coincidence of ‘scarab-like beetle’ in two forms within
a short space of time and at the same place. It does not establish anything
other than an example of what the word ‘meaningful’ generally means. It
cannot be an answer to the question of why the talk of the dream beetle and
the appearance of the real beetle coincided to say that they share a ‘meaning’
connection because the very reason that we are prompted to ask this question
is because we consider the coincidence an example of meaningfulness.
As an aside, in depth psychology, it is a common or perhaps even
exceptionless practice to give as demonstrations of complex concepts, the
most simple and clear examples one can find. Discussions of dream
interpretation are rife with this; we all know that the vast majority of our
dreams are so detailed, idiosyncratic, dense and complex that they would be
hopeless examples in, say, a pedagogical context. One therefore chooses
784 Synchronicity and meaning

examples for their rhetorical force, clarity of demonstration and thereby,

simplicity. This is natural and follows from long human experience of
educational practice. However, it is not at all clear to me that this is a good
teaching method in depth psychology, as the assumption in such an approach
is that we can extrapolate in some manageable way from simple examples to
more complex ones. This holds for empirical subjects precisely because the
empirical world is indeed organised to a great extent in a continuum from
simple to complex, because such structural regularity is part of what makes
the world tractable. However, I agree with Giegerich that psychology is not
fundamentally like empirical science and this assumption of extrapolation
from simple to complex examples does not hold in psychology. I claim that
simple examples essentially misrepresent the nature of psychology to a
compromising degree and this claim will constitute the background of what I
have to say about synchronicity below.
Now, it may be that in Jung’s scarab beetle example, as alleged in similar
reported cases of synchronicity, there is some sort of deep, acausal connection
between the internal and external world manifesting, but such examples are
essentially worthless since the connection is also evidence of an overwhelming
evolutionary tendency towards making meaning by matching patterns.
Credible evidence for synchronicity would have to come not from obvious,
clear connections couched in terms of simple objects and properties drawn
from the consciously constructed world, but rather from connections so subtle
and deep that everyday vocabulary would be hardly adequate. This would
make the identification and discussion of synchronicity like dream analysis. I
suspect the desire to support Jung’s most controversial concept with the least
controversial evidence has led us to the lamentable state where we think of
synchronicities in the most banal way imaginable, just a mere connection of a
waking-life concept with its appearance in a dream or fantasy. Beetle-in-the-
dream/beetle-at-the-window, thinking-of-person/receive-phone-call-from-
person or leg-pain-in-patient/leg-pain-in-analyst (Carvalho 2014). Again, the
simplicity of the real-world granularity of the objects and properties involved
in such examples should make us suspicious, given how complex dream
analysis is by comparison.
We can sharpen our intuition regarding the canonical examples of
synchronicity with some thought experiments which demonstrate that simple
matching of events is not at all necessary. Such experiments have certain
implications which, I believe, will force us to change our ideas regarding
synchronicity and the identity criteria thereof.
In the well-known Sherlock Holmes story of ‘Silver Blaze’, the absence of an
action is critical to the solution of the crime, the fact of a dog not barking is the
essentially meaningful element. There is no reason I can see that non-occurrence
of an obvious coincidence should not be included in the class of synchronicities.
For example, suppose I am used to solving an impasse in external reality by an
imagination exercise where I open a cupboard and the first object I see is
Philip Kime 785

relevant in some way to the solution to the impasse. This is not so different from
historically well-established imagination and memory exercises (Yates 1966) or
certain forms of meditation. We might even consider this practice as some sort
of induced synchronicity. Suppose that one day I have a problem and I turn to
my usual method but I cannot manage to imagine the cupboard at all for some
reason. We might say that the procedure has failed. But perhaps not, perhaps
the inability to conjure the internal image is the synchronicity and that the
inability to perform and therefore the absence of internal image in the usual
trick is the ‘meaning’ in this case. It might be meaningful that the coincidence
does not occur or, conversely, that there is a coincidence of an external event
with an absence of an internal event. There is no reason why synchronicity
should be evident in accord of manifestations rather than non-manifestations,
which can be just as ‘meaningful’. This significantly broadens the identity
criteria. Jung’s discussion of Taoism and the story of the rainmaker (Jung
1963, para. 604) demonstrates this sort of structure. This famous example
shows that the lack of connection is in fact a highly meaningful connection,
which means precisely that there is … a lack of connection. A connection
involving absences does not mean an absence of connection. If it is so difficult
to state the identity criteria for synchronicity, why is it not the case that the
seemingly banal ‘connection’ of most external events with no particular
internal state or the ‘connection’ of most internal states with no particular
external event are not also meaningfully, acausally ‘connected’? That is, why
is the common lack of synchronicity not a meaningful connection of absences
and therefore synchronicity itself?
Returning now to the famous case of the beetle, so often quoted as a canonical
example of synchronicity, suppose the following: during the conversation about
the scarab beetle, a common house fly lands on the window instead of a beetle.
However, it turns out that the patient, in their childhood, used to mistake flies
for beetles and this was a source of amusement to the parents, passing into oft-
repeated childhood stories. It is fairly certain, I take it, that this would not
change the canonical status of this example at all and it would still count for
everyone as a case of synchronicity. Perhaps this variation would be even more
suggestive to most people because of the occurrence of highly personal
autobiographical elements which somehow make the connection more
‘meaningful’. One can imagine, in this way, far more complex chains of
connection between events which would be extremely difficult to follow, even
for the person or persons involved. Anyone in doubt about how tenuous,
subtle and important such chains of connection can be has clearly not read
Freud’s great work The Psychopathology of Everyday Life.
With the variation introduced to the example, the simple extra step to
connect the fly with a beetle, it is clear that synchronous events are not, so to
speak, universally synchronous.
Identification of synchronicity depends upon the person involved and their
own particular history and sensitivities. This also likely means that every
786 Synchronicity and meaning

coincidence could quite reasonably be identified as synchronistic to someone.

Notice that this conclusion brings us into line with related phenomena such
as dreams where the connections between images and waking life are usually
extraordinarily complex and where it is impossible to imagine a dream
which did not mean something to someone. This, I think, is a much better
place to start than a naïve view which has synchronicity generally
manifesting in simple noun matching such as ‘inner beetle/outer beetle’,
‘thought of John/meeting John’ or ‘pain in my leg/pain in your leg’ etc. If
synchronicity is a fundamental aspect of reality, examples which manifest in
terms of one-to-one matching of common everyday entities or experiences
are presumably neither qualitatively nor quantitatively significant. They are
merely more identifiable.
Suppose now another variant; a fly landed on the window instead of a beetle
and the patient used to mistake flies for beetles but this memory was not readily
available. Perhaps the memory would take several hours to come forth due to
complex chains of association which would have to be followed. The time
required to traverse the chain of associations to make the fly/beetle
connection available would be outside the time window required to make the
association of the fly with the beetle and therefore no synchronicity would be
identified. It only takes a little bit of extra associative complexity, far less
complexity indeed than most dreams evince, to suppress the identification of
synchronicities which we would theoretically want to so identify. Again, this
sort of consideration radically broadens the identity criteria since ex-
hypothesi failures of identification are merely contingent and have no bearing
on the theoretical point.
If synchronicity is identifiable in long, complex, subtle chains of connection
of which our usual examples are merely a degenerate subset, then
synchronicity is far more common than we usually conceive. This makes
sense if it is to be thought of as a fundamental aspect of reality and instantly
makes us suspicious of the common view where it is a rare occurrence
indicating some special configuration, to be noted only perhaps in particularly
favourable moments of psychological work. An obvious corollary of this
would be if Jung had not noticed the beetle at the window. We would still
generally want to identify the event as a synchronicity even though it was
never identified as such by those present simply by virtue of them not noticing
something at the time. Presumably countless putative synchronicities pass by
unnoticed in this way.
An interesting case is when the external event occurs much later than the
internal such as when the beetle in the example comes to the window two
weeks after the conversation. Strictly speaking, this is by definition not
synchronicity (note the emphasis as I think we need a different term for this)
since the events were not reasonably contemporaneous. However this has
always puzzled me, a non-causal connection with temporal conditions for its
identification seems very odd. Take the following two examples:
Philip Kime 787

• I see John in the street and then shortly afterwards I am thinking about him.
• I am thinking about John and then I see him shortly afterwards in the street.

The first case is just the normal flow of empirical experience and is of no
particular interest. The second is a canonical example of synchronicity for the
mainstream of Jungian thought. The difference is clear - the order in time of
the events. When an outer event comes first, there appears to be no mystery
but when an inner comes first, we start to be tempted to identify
synchronicities1. However consider the following. In the first case, where I see
John, think nothing much of this but then find myself thinking about him a
month or so later, I would not necessarily notice any connection with having
seen him in the street a month earlier. The time window for the connection
between the external and the current internal event would be felt to have
passed and I would rather explain the current thoughts another way,
unconnected and probably stemming from some other association but not
directly and simply from having seen him a month ago. Now note that this is
exactly the same in the case of the supposed synchronous event where I think
of John first and then see him. If I were to think of John and then see him a
month later, the time window for an identification of synchronicity would
have passed and I would not think of it this way.2 This synoptic view of the
examples regarding the temporal windowing element is strange. It shows that
despite the seemingly different role of the order in time in interpreting a
coincidence, we are not really giving up basic temporal assumptions when we
identify synchronicity. This is suspicious for a connection that is supposed to
be acausal. If my thinking of John did not cause John to appear in the street,
why should I insist that John’s appearance must occur shortly after the
thought in order to count as synchronicity?
The simple empirical example of seeing and then thinking of John shows that
a temporal window of coincidence implies that seeing John caused me to think
of John. If I posit an acausal connection, why do I retain the temporal window
requirement? Put rather paradoxically, why do synchronistic events have to
occur around the same point in time when the concept of ‘the same point in
time’ is something implying a causal connection? We can put this even more
plainly: since causality and temporal sequence are such tightly coupled
concepts (if not in some way the same concept), why should an acausal
connection care about temporal sequence?

1
As an aside, it is pointless here to say that the inner outer order is all we mean by ‘synchronicity’
as that is most certainly not what Jungians mean by the term. It clearly has far more metaphysical
and explanatory import for those who use the term than a mere label for an ordering of types of
event.
2
Otherwise I would think that practically everything was synchronicity and be tremendously
irritating as a result.
788 Synchronicity and meaning

Another puzzle - what if I see John in the street and then shortly afterwards
think about him but the thinking about him was not caused by seeing him
and had some other cause? Is this synchronicity? It is ex hypothesi acausal
and probably counts as ‘meaningful’ in some sense.
Such an example seems to remove the relevance of the time sequence of the
events. Indeed, there are often cases of alleged synchronicity where the time
sequence is irrelevant, as when patient and analyst simultaneously experience
some physical symptom (e.g. Carvalho 2014); but of course even here, the
time window for the occurrence of the symptoms must be within certain
limits to count. Again, strange when the connecting factor is said to be
‘meaning’, to which it is at least problematic to ascribe a respect for time.
If my examples so far carry any weight, then we are in a strange place where
we are talking of synchronicity without the necessary aspect of chronos. Let us
see if we fare any better by explicitly dropping temporal considerations and
concentrate on solely spatial connection.

Synchoricity
Let us distinguish between two types of coincidence which are often confused
when discussing synchronicity. Synchronicity is defined as a non-causal
meaningful connection but what is often omitted is that the name indicates
that the connection is temporal; synchronicity is a meaningful connection in
time. A feature of most reported synchronous events however is that they
include a spatial component in that the events occur in an often narrowly
circumscribed location. This is an aspect orthogonal to the temporal
coincidence which we would better indicate by a new term. For my purposes,
I will distinguish then between synchronicity, a putatively meaningful
temporal coincidence and synchoricity, a putatively meaningful spatial
coincidence, from the Greek chros (χώρος) for space as opposed to chronos
for time. Our concept of and attitude towards synchronicity can be helpfully
sharpened by comparing with the often conflated idea of synchoricity3.
Synchoricity is then a putatively meaningful coincidence of events at a
particular location. Clearly, our common stock of examples of synchronicity
often involve synchoricity too since they describe events occurring at the same
time and in the same place. As noted earlier, the common examples are quite
flexible about what constitutes ‘the same time’ or ‘the same place’; rarely do
we literally mean this but we do require a certain narrowness in their
interpretation. For example, had Jung’s scarab-like beetle turned up at the
window several months later than the recounting of the dream, it is unlikely

3
Jung made the rather confusing distinction between ‘synchronous’ and ‘synchronistic’ to capture
the difference between situations which involve a time simultaneity and those which do not (Jung
1960a, para. 985).
Philip Kime 789

that it would have been seen as a synchronous event. However, it could still be
seen as a synchorous event since this is a coincidence in roughly the same place
at a different time.
I assert that there is no reason to prefer synchronicity over synchoricity as
canonically representative of acausal, meaningful connection. In fact, since
synchoricity is not concerned with temporal sequence, there is at least some
relief from the potential contradiction between acausality and sensitivity to
temporal sequence inherent in synchronicity. An example of a synchorous
coincidence might be when a location was the scene of an external event at
one point in time and at another time, the same location evoked inner images
or feelings congruent with such an event even though there was no causal
connection between them. There are many legends and tales about such
things, people feeling ‘chills’ in places where murders happened and so on.
Note that the time sequence does not matter here, the external event could
have taken place before or after the inner event and even though the latter
configuration would be stranger, it makes no fundamental difference. With
synchoricity, there is a spatial windowing requirement in that when what
counts as ‘the same place’ becomes stretched too far, we cease to identify
synchoricity. If Jung’s beetle had turned up at the window of his office a
month later, this would still count as synchorous but presumably not if it had
turned up at a window in the next town.
I do not see how we can refuse the entry of synchorous connections into the
class of potential phenomena that we must take into account when we begin to
think about the concept of synchronicity. Given that synchoricity eliminates the
problematic time element which conflicts with the concept of acausality, it
seems to be that synchorous coincidence has even more right to be in the class
of considered phenomena. Along with the previous observation that the
connective chains can be arbitrarily complex, far in excess of our usual
primitive examples, the result of this inclusion is that it hugely expands the
ubiquity of the phenomena under scrutiny. Such connections cannot, I think,
be rare or remarkable but must be the norm and fundamental in our model of
the world. However, this does not mean that such connections are
fundamental in a psychological model of the world and so in which sense can
we consider synchorous coincidence fundamental?

Evolution and Meaning

The acausality of the connection between coincident events in cases of
synchronicity is, according to Jung, something essential; there is a connection
between the events but not one of causality. It is held to be a meaningful
connection. This is ambiguous as it stands: is it intrinsic to the connection
that it is meaningful or is the meaningfulness something created by the
connection from outside? Is the meaningfulness a result of the bare
790 Synchronicity and meaning

synchronous or synchorous coincidence or is it rather that meaningfulness

results in the coincidence? Let us first briefly take the first idea, that
synchronicity produces meaning. I think that Giegerich successfully
demolishes this idea in his paper describing the consequences of not
understanding Jung’s use of sinngemäß (roughly ‘analogous’) as compared
with sinnvoll (‘meaningful’) connection (Giegerich 2012). Jung speaks of
sinngemäße Koinzidenz which is a coincidence of geometries, the
compatibility of the sense of the things coinciding, and says nothing about
whether something is sinnvoll or meaningful in the English sense. Meaning as
an independent property is not something which arises out of synchronicity at
all and is an artefact of English usage and translation. Put another way, the
sort of meaning involved in synchronicity for Jung is not meaningful to
anyone and I will come back to this later as I believe that we are led to this
inevitable conclusion by another route which I aim to travel in a more
detailed manner.
Let us take then the second possibility - that synchronistic or synchoristic
coincidence is the result of some sort of meaningful arrangement. I think that
is it fair to say that the idea that meaning is primary, a primitive conception
which underpins acausal connections is one to which many mainstream
Jungians would assent in some form (witness Stein’s reifying talk of ‘.. .
psychic images and meanings.. .’ [Stein 2006, p. 142] mentioned earlier). To
speak loosely, we tend to think that meaning causes the acausal connections.
Such a view requires an account of the primitive notion of ‘meaning’ which
has an almost ontological status in the minds of many Jungians. Since such an
account of meaning adequate to fill this metaphysically primitive role is, I can
say without fear of contradiction, never forthcoming, we seem to be at an
impasse.
If our two possibilities, that meaning is produced by synchronicity and that
synchronicity is produced by meaning are both dead ends, what can we say
about the role of meaning? I propose to give up treating meaning in this
popular Jungian usage as an independent primitive and to say rather that it is
the evolutionary result of coincidences and can be considered as the name
given to coincidences of evolutionary significance. This will allow us to
dismiss certain aspects of meaning and synchronicity into the realm of biology
and leave us free to deal with any properly psychological aspects which are left.
Legends of the evil mountain, the terrible valley, the haunted vale and so on
can be accounted for in this way, as a repeated tragedy, perhaps simply due to
natural dangers being more concentrated in a particular location and turned
into meaningful legends to palliate the ill-understood natural dangers. We still
have this in pale form in the modern world with the idea of ‘accident black-
spots’ on the roads, blind corners, crossroads and so on with a reputation for
tragedy, which often come to be imbued with a certain haunted quality due to
repeated ill-luck over time. Here, the anthropologist has little problem in
accounting for this by the evolutionary benefit of myths which serve to give
Philip Kime 791

future generations a reason to avoid a place without having to suffer tragic

consequences themselves there in order to have a reason to so avoid it. The
repetition need not be negative: vales and mountains may become meaningful
due to mere coincidences of natural abundance, for example.
Synchoricity in this evolutionary model is the feeling of meaning given to a
repeated series of events over time which is the inevitable, biological result of
repeated experience. One of the most fundamental tasks required of a
biological organism is to be able to identify repetition since repetition has the
potential for energy saving habits, life-saving preemptive avoidance and the
beginnings of complex learning. Repetition of experience or events associated
with a common spatial location has a strong advantage since it is rooted in
something concrete and recognisable to the senses as ‘the same’, that is, the
same place. So synchoricity is, I think, a matter of evolution, an automatic
preemptive strategy that makes animals re-visit good places and avoid bad
places. This is mediated in humans by the meaning-making process which
mythologises in order to provide pre-experiential motivations to visit or
avoid. In humans, the location need not be a specific location and can be
abstracted into types of location: ‘don’t walk through forests at night as they
are haunted’. No particular forest, just forests in general. It is not difficult to
see how such a synchorously mediated meaning would arise since forests are
indeed often dangerous at night for all sorts of banal and obvious reasons.
Here we are employing a very important principle which psychology requires
in order to avoid a needless obsolescence: do not give a psychological account
of something which can be easily accounted for by a naturalised field like
anthropology or biology. Forgetting this principle makes it very difficult, if
not impossible, to see the real psychological aspects of a phenomenon. It also
trivialises psychology by reducing it to the level of a mere sub-species of
science where it is often and rightly ridiculed for the banality of its domain
and conclusions.
Synchronous events are often also synchorous, as in Jung’s famous example
of the scarab beetle. This makes evaluation of synchronicity as a concept
difficult because synchoricity is, I think, biologically reinforced due to the
more fundamental significance of space in evolutionary biology. Animals
often have superb spatial sense and the significance of spatial patterns and
coincidences are crucial to their survival. Temporal sense is not so crucial or
indeed developed in animals and it is not clear that it is meaningful at all to
talk about a temporal sense in most cases. There are instinctive patterns such
as hibernation, nesting and mating which have a temporal aspect but this
temporal aspect is not the cause or purpose of such behaviour. Higher
mammals do exhibit a rudimentary ability for delayed gratification which
must involve a basic sense of temporal continuity (see, for example, Gallup
1979 for a summary) but this is a long way from the human ability to
contemplate time in the abstract and death in particular. Spatial coincidence is
inevitably meaningful for any organism and so synchoristic events must be, I
792 Synchronicity and meaning

think, avoided in any study of synchronicity. So, keeping to the principle of not
invoking psychology proper when it is unnecessary, I claim that the essence of
synchronicity is a putatively meaningful coincidence in time alone since the
‘meaningfulness’ of coincidence in space is easily accounted for by
evolutionary biology. Hence ‘meaningfulness’ is just a name for (evolutionally
relevant) coincidence in space.
What happens when one eliminates synchoricity from synchronicity? Then,
the identification of synchronicities becomes largely impossible. Using again
Jung’s scarab beetle as an example, taking away the synchorous arrival of a
beetle at the nearby window means that, for example, the arrival of a beetle
at any window at all would have been just as relevant. Naturally, for Jung
and his patient in the room, this would not have been spatially visible and so
the identification of an alleged synchronicity would not have been made at
all. We may be tempted at this point to abandon synchronicity since we have
removed a psychologically irrelevant component to leave something with
hopeless identification criteria. However, I think that we may retain the
concept but this requires a shift in our conception in the perhaps alarming
direction where synchronicity is a structural feature of reality and does not
represent a special event. This is the case because the chances are close to
certainty that, for every conceivable event, some other ‘meaningfully
connected’ event is occurring somewhere at the same time. This is not at all
far-fetched: recall that earlier we rejected the idea that the connections under
consideration are only of the simple type we are used to seeing in mainstream
literature. To be plausible, they must be allowed to be as complex as any
other phenonemon which we accept as being indicative of manifestations of
depth-psychological primitives. Therefore, synchronicity in this view would be
nothing extraordinary but would rather be a fundamental aspect of the
universe. After re-orienting ourselves to this view, it does now seem rather
strange that the sorts of meaningful coincidence which we take to be so
important and significant in mainstream analytical psychology should cohere
with the anthropomorphic requirement that they must occur within a spatial
radius small enough for humans to notice them. A useful thought experiment
would be to imagine the human race with enhanced senses: given that
improved sight, smell and hearing would certainly mean a greater ability to
notice coincident phenomena and given also that putatively ‘meaningful’
phenomena are a rarer subset of coincident phenomena, it is not difficult to
see how purely biological the commonplace notion of ‘synchronicity’ is
and that such a concept is just not relevant to psychology. Put plainly, having
better eyes would result in more meaningful coincidences and thus more
meaning. This is a very banal view to entertain for a psychology that takes
itself seriously and an example of how retaining a naïve empirical ingredient
trivialises psychology.
Conceived of in this way, synchronicity is a structural feature of a broadly
dual-aspect view of reality which does away with fundamental metaphysical
Philip Kime 793

distinctions between mind and matter. On the other hand, the popular view of
synchronicity is reduced to an epistemologically relevant subset of connections
which are spatially coincident enough to be noticeable. However, what of the
common mainstream view that synchronicity in some sense ‘increases in
frequency’ when the ‘unconscious is activated’? I think that this can be
accounted for by saying that synchronicity does not increase in frequency at
all since it is a fundamental structural feature of reality and does not vary.
Instead, synchoricity (that is, noticeable because spatially localised
coincidence) increases in frequency simply because that is partly what
‘unconscious activation’ means. An increased sensitivity to spatial coincidence
is an inevitable part of any increased sensitivity because it is such a
fundamental evolutionary ability. One becomes temporarily more sensitive
and notices more things which are available to be noticed. Since
psychotherapy of any sort is at minimum about increasing individual
sensitivity in various directions, which is after all what ‘making conscious’
means, then the argument is complete.
Psychoanalysis or therapy makes you notice more things and if you notice
more things then you are going to have more instances of broadly synchorous
experience and ex hypothesi, this is explicable by evolutionary biology. The
popular view of synchronicity is therefore barely psychological at all and is
better thought of as a disguised description of the biological results of
increasing awareness of spatially localised coincidence. This is due to the
element of synchoricity which is involved. Without this element, synchronicity
is a structural feature of reality which is best described by basic metaphysical
systems rather than as events which are pertinent to the development of
individuals.

Conclusion
Having concluded that synchronicity proper is a concept belonging to the
domain of metaphysical systems rather than individual meanings, the natural
question to ask is ‘what kinds of metaphysical systems’? Ubiquity of
connection is a clear sign that one is not dealing with a multiplicity of
ontological entities. A synchronicity where putatively mental and non-mental
events are ubiquitously temporally connected regardless of the connections
being noticed or even noticeable strongly indicates that the mental and non-
mental are not two different things. This type of connection transformed our
understanding of the world with, for example, the identity of electricity and
magnetism. As soon as it was realised that there was a ubiquitous connection
between the two supposedly separate phenomena, the crucial leap was made
to an ontologically monistic model which exhibits epistemic duality only in
certain contexts. The same might be said of the illusory dualities of energy
and matter or of gravity and space-time geometry. I believe that some careful
794 Synchronicity and meaning

thinking about the concept of synchronicity leads in a similar direction in

respect to the duality of the mental and non-mental. Once we realise that the
rarity of supposed synchronicities is an epistemological artefact of our
perceptual horizons, we must move from a model where the internal and
external are connected under extraordinary circumstances to one where only
the epistemic visibility of the identity of internal and external is the
extraordinary event. That is, the remarkable thing about synchronicity is
merely that a general fact about ontological identity is temporarily visible. A
consequence of this formulation is that synchronicity can no longer be
considered as a ‘connection’ between things because ex hypothesi, there are
no separate things to connect. Further, there is no ‘meaningful connection’
because the qualifier ‘meaningful’ is determined by the accidental temporal
and spatial scope of typical human perception and therefore is not
metaphysically fundamental. Whether an individual or group of individuals
find a particular connection meaningful is a psychologically irrelevant adjunct
that depends upon highly contingent facts about the temporal and spatial
windows around the connection. The problem with meaning being an identity
criterion for connection is that ‘meaning’ can be found anywhere and in
anything, in presence, absence and even in notable meaninglessness (because
here ‘notable’ means ‘meaningful’).
A structural principle can only manifest itself to human beings in specific and
therefore individual circumstances, but this does not establish the individualistic
credentials of the principle. Gravity is a structural phenomenon of the physical
world but it manifests itself to individuals as chairs falling over, apples falling
from trees and so on. The chairs, the apples are incidental and any attempt to
understand gravity in terms of chairs and apples is obviously a mistake. It is
less obviously but no less a mistake to hold as essential the individual
manifestation itself. Gravity exists and is defined quite apart from its
manifestations. However, with synchronicity, we emphasise, to the detriment
of our understanding of the concept, the individual manifestations. Just
because the beetle at the window was individually relevant to the dreamer, it
does not mean that synchronicity has anything to do with individuals, let
alone ‘individual meaning’. Sometimes I fall over but this does not mean that
gravity has anything fundamentally to do with me personally.
If we consider only the simplistic, popular notion of synchronicity, then I
agree with Giegerich when he says that ‘Psychology and the theory of
synchronicity are not commensurable’ (Giegerich 2012, p. 506). However,
extracting the spatial element which disguises the biological contribution, we
are left with a notion which is relevant but only in a way which describes a
structural feature of reality. This psychological sense of synchronicity is not
relevant to individuals at all and does not ‘provide meaning’, let alone
provide personal meaning.
Synchronicity without synchoricity is a structural phenomenon supporting
something like a dual-aspect metaphysic and has nothing to do with
Philip Kime 795

individuals4. Given the often emphasised connection between synchronicity and

meaning, this implies that ‘meaning’ as discussed by Jungians is in need of a
much less individualistic treatment too. Discussions of synchronicity have
been the stage where mainstream Jungian thought tries to perform the task of
reconciling a hugely inflated and transpersonal concept with, to paraphrase
Jung, the ‘little clods of earth that we are’. This is an impossible task and we
must humble ourselves in order to approach this difficult concept (which is
either not relevant to us as individuals or is relevant, as with synchoricity),
without recourse to psychology.

References
Atmanspacher, H. (2017). ‘Contextual emergence in decompositional dual-aspect
monism’. Mind and Matter 15, 1, 111–29.
Atmanspacher, H. & Fach, W. (2013). ‘A structuralist-phenomenological typology of
mind-matter correlations’. In Journal of Analytical Psychology 58, 2, 218–43.
Carvalho, R. (2014). ‘Synchronicity, the infinite unrepressed, dissociation and the
interpersonal’. In Journal of Analytical Psychology 59, 3, 366–84.
Freud, S. (2001). The Psychopathology of Everyday Life. The Standard Edition of the
Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. Vol. VI: Trans. by James
Strachey. London: Vintage.
Gallup, G.G. (1979). ‘Self-awareness in primates’. American Scientist 67, 4, 417–21.
ISSN: 00030996. URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/27849330.
Giegerich, W. (2012). ‘A serious misunderstanding. Synchronicity and the generation of
meaning’. In Journal of Analytical Psychology, 57, 4, 500–11.
Jung, C.G. (1960a). ‘Synchronicity. An acausal connecting principle’. CW 8.
——— (1960b). CW 8.
——— (1963). CW 14.
Matte Blanco, I. (1975). The Unconscious as Infinite Sets. London: Duckworth.
Stein, M. (2006). The Principle of Individuation. Wilmette, Illinois: Chiron Publications.
Strawson, G. (2006). ‘Realistic monism - why physicalism entails panpsychism’. Journal
of Consciousness Studies 13, 10–11, 3–31.
Yates, F.A. (1966). The Art of Memory. London: Pimlico.

TRANSLATIONS OF ABSTRACT

Il est généralement accepté que la synchronicité, caractérisée comme « coïncidence ayant

du sens », est de ce fait compréhensible en relation avec le concept de « sens ». Je vais
examiner la relation symbiotique entre « coïncidence » et « sens » et montrer que cette
relation est problématique. Je vais comparer synchronicité et synchoricité – la
coïncidence dans l’espace plutôt que dans le temps. Ces deux concepts sont souvent

4
It is an open question as to whether the solution goes in the direction of a dual-aspect monism
(Atmanspacher 2017) or of a panpsychism with a vastly broadened concept of the physical
(Strawson 2006).
796 Synchronicity and meaning

assimilés et je tenterai de décrire une synchronicité « pure » afin d’affiner notre sentiment
de comment le sens est perçu comme provenant de la coïncidence. Je proposerai ensuite
qu’en fait le concept standard de synchronicité n’a pas de pertinence du point de vue
psychologique. Et que si l’on procède à un ajustement en y retirant les éléments qui
sont expliqués assez naturellement par la théorie de l’évolution, on se retrouve avec un
concept qui a des incidences à la fois pour les fondations métaphysiques de la
psychologie analytique et pour l’accent individualiste que l’on trouve communément
dans ce champ.

Mots clés: synchronicité, synchoricité, évolution, sens, coincidence

Üblicherweise wird angenommen, daß Synchronizität, die als ’sinnvoller Zufall’

bezeichnet wird, deshalb in Bezug auf den Begriff ’Bedeutung’ verstehbar ist. Ich werde
die weitgehend nicht hilfreiche symbiotische Beziehung zwischen ’Zufall’ und
’Bedeutung’ untersuchen, indem ich Synchronizität mit Synchorozität vergleiche -
Zufall im Raum und nicht in der Zeit.
Diese beiden Konzepte werden oft miteinander vermischt und ich werde versuchen,
eine ’reine’ Synchronizität zu beschreiben, um unseren Sinn dafür zu schärfen, wie sich
Sinn aus Koinzidenz ergibt. Ich werde weitergehend vertreten, daß das
Standardkonzept der Synchronizität psychologisch weitgehend irrelevant ist und, wenn
es zu dem Zweck modifizi
ert wird, um Elemente zu entfernen, die ganz natürlich durch die Evolutionstheorie
erklärt werden, uns ein Begriff übrigbleibt, der Auswirkungen sowohl auf die
metaphysischen Grundlagen der Analytischen Psychologie hat, als auch auf die
individualistische Emphase, die man üblicherweise auf diesem Gebiet findet.

Schlüsselwörter: Synchronizität, Synchorozität, Evolution, Bedeutung, Koinzidenz

Di solito si pensa che la sincronicità, caratterizzata come ‘coincidenza significativa’, sia

comprensibile in relazione al concetto di ‘significato’. Esplorerò la relazione simbiotica,
essenzialmente inutile, tra ‘coincidenza’ e ‘significato’ confrontando la sincronicità con
la sincoricità – coincidenza nello spazio piuttosto che nel tempo. Questi due concetti
sono spesso confusi tra loro e tenterò quindi di descrivere una sincronicità ‘pura’ al
fine di affinare la nostra percezione su come il significato emerga dalla coincidenza.
Verrà suggerito che il concetto standard di sincronicità è perlopiù psicologicamente
irrilevante e, quando adattato per rimuovere elementi che sono spiegati in modo
abbastanza naturale dalla teoria evolutiva, ci rimane un concetto che ha implicazioni
sia per i fondamenti metafisici della psicologia analitica, sia per l’enfasi individualistica
comunemente presente nel campo.

Parole chiave: sincronicità, sincoricità, evoluzione, significato, coincidenza

Обычно считается, что синхрония, определяемая как «значимое совпадение», имеет

отношение к понятию «смысла». Я буду исследовать по большей мере неполезные
Philip Kime 797

симбиотические отношения между «совпадением» и «смыслом», сравнивая синхронию

с синхронией-совпадением в пространстве, а не во времени. Эти два понятия часто
смешиваются, поэтому я попытаюсь описать «чистую» синхронию, чтобы заострить
наше понимание смысла, возникающего из совпадения. Затем будет предположено,
что стандартное понятие синхронии в большинстве случаев психологически
иррелевантно. Когда мы пытаемся применить понятие синхронии, чтобы убрать
элементы, которые можно естественным образом объяснить с помощью
эволюционной теории, то мы остаемся с понятием, которое влияет и на
метафизические основания аналитической психологии, и на индивидуалистический
оттенок подхода.

Ключевые слова: синхрония, эволюция, смысл, совпадение

Usualmente se piensa que la sincronicidad, caracterizada como ‘coincidencia

significativa’, es comprendida en relación al concepto de ‘significado’. Exploraré la
largamente inútil relación simbiótica entre ‘coincidencia’ y ‘significado’ a través de la
comparación entre sincronicidad y sincroricidad – coincidencia en espacio más que en
tiempo. Estos dos conceptos a menudo son confundidos, e intentaré describir una
sincronicidad ‘pura’ con la intención de aclarar como el significado pareciera emerger
a partir de la coincidencia. A continuación, se sugiere, que el concepto standard de
sincronicidad es fundamentalmente psicológicamente irrelevante, y cuando adaptado
para remover elementos explicados de modo natural por la teoría evolutiva, nos
quedamos con un concepto que tiene implicancias para el fundamento metapsicológico
de la psicología analítica y el énfasis individualista que uno encuentra a menudo en
este campo.

Palabras clave: sincronicidad, sincroricidad, evolución, significado, coincidencia

共时性常被认为具有“有意义的巧合”的特征, 因此它和“意义”的概念有关被认为是可
以理解的。 我将在空间而非时间维度上比较共时性和同时性巧合, 基于此来探索“巧
合”和“意义”之间极为无益的共生关系。共时性与同时性巧合这两个概念常被混用,
我将试着描述一个“纯粹”的共时性, 从而让我们更清楚地明白我们是如何从巧合中
获取了意义感的。文章认为, 共时性的标准概念很大程度上是与心理无关的, 当去除了
用进化理论可以很自然地进行解释的元素后, 所剩下的概念即暗含了分析心理学超自
然的基础, 又暗含了在此场域常见的个人主义所强调的内容。

关键词: 共时性, 巧合, 进化, 意义, 同时发生