Synchronicity – When and how does it happen?

Website design By BotEap.comIt’s easy to be a little surprised and awed when experiencing synchronous events. It’s easy to feel like the experience is “magical” or mysterious.

Website design By BotEap.comEarly psychologists shared our fascination with experience. Carl Jung is famous for his musings on the phenomenon, calling it the “acausal connection principle”, by which he meant that it was produced by something inexplicable rather than the usual process of cause and effect.

Website design By BotEap.comSigmund Freud also struggled to understand these kinds of experiences, which he called “occult.” He linked the experience to the influence of unconscious processes saying: “The differences between the superstitious and me are two: first, he projects outwards a motive that I look for inside; second, he interprets chance due to an event, while I follow it” . to a thought. But what is hidden for him corresponds to what is unconscious for me” (Freud, 1919, The Sinister).

Website design By BotEap.comIt could be said that synchronicity is a phenomenon that arises from the interaction between internal and external realities. When a synchronicity is described as a “meaningful coincidence”, the emphasis should perhaps be placed on the quality of meaning.

Website design By BotEap.comJungian analyst James Hollis perceptively observes that whenever “the internal and the external are involved, come together, we experience this as meaning.” When we experience synchronicity, we marvel at the co-occurrence of an external reality and an internal event such as a dream or fantasy. We are tempted to believe that this co-occurrence indicates some “world endorsement” of our internal product. I might even suggest that it is exactly the point of the exercise since too often we are willing to discount our unconscious products, our intuitions, dreams and fantasies. We don’t value or pay attention to them because we lightly dismiss them as “not real.”

Website design By BotEap.comBut all psychologists and, for that matter, most self-reflective people will wryly admit that their inner fears and fantasies often push them to take action in the real world for reasons that are not entirely conscious or entirely deliberate.

Website design By BotEap.comFreudian psychoanalyst Gibbs Williams suggests that the awesome nature of synchronicities plays a useful role in allowing us to give credence to our psychic experiences and helping us give authority to our inner needs and desires. He proposes that the powerful experience of synchronicity leads to an expansion of consciousness through the incorporation of inner products and a resultant increase in felt creativity. Williams suggests that this expansion facilitates many positive psychological transitions, including moving from feeling under the influence of a projected external authority to experiencing oneself as one’s final authority; passive experience to active receptivity; black and white thinking to complexity and an overreliance on linear logic to divergent thinking. This expansion creates a consequent increase in flexibility, confidence, and a sense of personal freedom.

Website design By BotEap.comWhen do Synchronicities occur?

Website design By BotEap.comWilliams describes the conditions that evoke the experience of creating meaning around coincidence. It suggests that the phenomenon of Synchronicity tends to arise in psychological situations in which the individual has perceived himself as caught in what appears to be an irresolvable existential deadlock, for example, when he is caught between two positions, mental states, or mutually exclusive alternative choices. . When a person in such a state of existential stasis moves from a state of resignation to a desire to actively fight to find a way out of the dilemma, they initiate a creative process within which what was experienced as existentially hopeless or immutable is now perceived as humanly. . troublesome and solvable.

Website design By BotEap.comThe initial loosening of an internal deadlock may be due to a number of factors, including the encouraging and supportive influence of a therapeutic or other relationship, a significant change in real-world circumstances for better or worse, or simply because the unconscious has been directed autonomously. difficulty and pushes for resolution “because it’s time.”

Website design By BotEap.comWilliams distills it into a formula:

Website design By BotEap.comPsychological impasse + Desire for a creative solution = Evocation of an organizing concept.

Website design By BotEap.comWithin a well-defined statement of a problem, there is often a built-in solution.

Website design By BotEap.comIn the same way, the unconscious psyche naturally and autonomously recognizes and struggles with the essence of psychological stagnation. Unconsciously developed questions and attitudes define and refine the structure of the necessary “organizing concept” and subtly guide the search for a solution in the real world.

Website design By BotEap.comWhen the psychological situation becomes a “solvent problem”, the mind is enabled to search for solutions using both conscious and unconscious processes. This results in what Williams describes as a psychological “treasure hunt” that takes place both inside and outside of the individual as they explore both worlds in search of useful insights. Today’s cognitive researchers will agree that one of the defining qualities of “unconscious” processing is its ability to make nonlinear and nonrational connections; connections that are not based solely on cause and effect, but may be connected by relationships of similarity, contiguity in time or space, or even by emotional qualities. The unconscious engages in a creative, multi-perspective and multi-level search for solutions that accesses a variety of information streams, such as ideas, feelings, intuitions and sensations, and filters and examines them using the psychological, philosophical, physiological, scientific, spiritual. , artistic and political perspectives available to the individual.

Website design By BotEap.comWhen the unconscious begins to approach some kind of creative resolution of the problem at hand, it will try to engage conscious interest and reflection by seeking out and highlighting symbolically significant material in the outside world. Just as human needs can be met in many different ways, solutions to psychological issues can also be represented metaphorically in many ways and the symbolically representative situations chosen by the psyche are experienced by us as synchronicity…a connection between inner realities and external. . Consciousness must be involved to engage in action directed toward solutions. When consciousness refuses to engage with the psyche and apply real-world judgment, “creative” solutions unconsciously proposed by the psyche can manifest in the individual as pathologies: physical symptoms, addictions, obsessions, dissociations, or other psychological problems.

Website design By BotEap.comWilliams theorizes that synchronous experiences can therefore be understood as pointing toward solutions to psychological problems that may still be preconscious but are unconsciously well-developed enough to be available for decoding and understanding. He proposes that synchronicities should therefore be treated as “waking dreams” and investigated as indicators pointing towards the resolution of psychological “blocks” or “hangups.”

Website design By BotEap.comTherefore, synchronicities need not be understood as occult phenomena, but remain marvelous and mysterious nonetheless, as examples of the ongoing interplay between conscious and unconscious thought and of the creative and self-healing capacities of the human psyche.

Website design By BotEap.comReferences:

Website design By BotEap.comWilliams, GA (1999) A theory and use of meaningful coincidences: synchronicities.

Website design By BotEap.comFreud, S. (1919) The Sinister. The standard edition of the complete psychological works of Sigmund Freud, Volume XVII

Website design By BotEap.comHollis, J. (2005). Find meaning in the second half of life. New York, Gotham Books, p.191.