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Synchronicity and the limits of re-

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Roderick Main
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University of Essex , UK
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International Journal of Jungian Studies, 3:2, 144-158, DOI: 10.1080/19409052.2011.592723

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International Journal of Jungian Studies
Vol. 3, No. 2, September 2011, 144158

Synchronicity and the limits of re-enchantment

Roderick Main*

University of Essex, UK
(Received 2 May 2011; final version received 13 May 2011)

Since C.G. Jung’s (18751961) death fifty years ago the majority of work on
synchronicity has concentrated, like Jung’s, either on the connections of the
concept to science, religion, and the relationship between science and religion, or,
more fully than Jung’s, on the clinical implications of the concept. However, Jung
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also hinted at important social and cultural implications of synchronicity that so

far have been little explored. The present paper looks at synchronicity in relation
to disenchantment a theme that connects to both science-religion debates and
sociological and cultural debates. Using as a reference point Charles Taylor’s
characterisation in A secular age (2007) of the transformations that led from the
enchanted, pre-modern world to the disenchanted, modern world, the paper
considers the extent to which Jung’s concept of synchronicity contributes to a
re-enchantment of the world. It concludes that the re-enchantment is substantial
but avowedly partial, for Jung was attempting not, impossibly, to return to
pre-modernity but rather to transform modernity by retrieving important aspects
of the pre-modern.
Keywords: C.G. Jung; synchronicity; disenchantment; re-enchantment; Charles
Taylor; modernity

Synchronicity since Jung’s death

Fifty years since C.G. Jung’s (18751961) death and 60 years since he delivered his
lecture ‘On Synchronicity’ at the 1951 Eranos Conference, the significance of the
concept of synchronicity ‘meaningful coincidence’, ‘an acausal connecting principle’
(Jung, 1952b, para. 827 and subtitle) remains difficult to gauge both within
analytical psychology and beyond. Jung only wrote extensively about synchronicity
late in life and as a result the concept had not been clearly or fully integrated into his
thought at the time of his death. In the subsequent years there have been many
attempts to elucidate and evaluate the concept, whether as a whole or focusing on
some of its facets. In this article, I first briefly review some trends in publications on
synchronicity since Jung’s death and suggest possible directions for future studies.
Identifying one of the hitherto neglected areas as the relationship of synchronicity to
social and cultural thought, I then examine synchronicity in relation to disenchant-
ment a theme that connects to sociological and cultural debates as well as to the
debates about science and religion which, following Jung, have been one of the
principal foci of previous commentators.
Jung’s main essay on synchronicity (1952b) draws on a variety of disciplines and
perspectives: mainstream sciences such as physics and biology; newer or aspiring

*Email: [email protected]

ISSN 1940-9052 print/ISSN 1940-9060 online

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International Journal of Jungian Studies 145

sciences such as psychical research and parapsychology; philosophy and intellectual

history; analysis and psychotherapy; and the study of religion and spirituality,
including divination and esoteric traditions (see Main, 2004, pp. 6590). Subsequent
works on synchronicity have broadly done the same. Most touch on several of these
disciplines and perspectives, while focusing on one or on selected relationships
among them.
Jung published his principal essay on synchronicity in a co-authored volume
alongside an essay by the Nobel-prize-winning physicist Wolfgang Pauli (Jung &
Pauli, 1955), and this alliance is reflected in the predominantly scientific framing
of Jung’s essay (Main, 2004, pp. 104105). Not surprisingly, much subsequent work
has also reflected on the status of synchronicity in relation to science. Among the
most substantive contributions with a predominantly scientific focus are books
by von Franz (1974, 1992), Peat (1987), Mansfield (1995, 2002), Cambray (2009),
and Haule (2010). The scientific discipline most discussed is physics, though von
Franz and Peat in their different ways survey a range of historical and contempo-
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rary developments in science, Cambray explores complexity theory, and Haule takes
account of evolutionary theory before moving onto field theories in physics. All
of these works, however, also connect synchronicity to conspicuously non-scientific
frameworks, whether psychotherapy, divination, esotericism, ancient philosophy,
mythology, Buddhism, politics, or shamanism. None treats synchronicity as of
exclusively scientific interest.
Jung’s work on synchronicity was also inspired by psychical research and
especially by the work of J.B. Rhine in the new discipline of parapsychology. These
newer or aspiring sciences have provided significant foci within the work of Mansfield
(1995, 2002), Main (1997, forthcoming [2012]), Storm (2008), and Haule (2010).
But again the focus never remains exclusive for long, with religious, psychological,
anthropological, and other perspectives also being invoked.
Jung’s own grasp of philosophy and intellectual history, in relation to
synchronicity as to the rest of his thought, was impressive in scope but sometimes
unreliable, as his primary aim was usually to amplify his own thought rather than
to understand the thought of others on its own terms. Later attempts to situate
Jung’s concept philosophically or in relation to intellectual history have included
wider-ranging books by Progoff (1973) and Main (2004) and more focused studies
by Bishop (2000), who considers Jung’s preoccupation with the mind-body problem
and the notion of intellectual intuition in German Idealist philosophy, and by
Lindorff (2004) and Gieser (2005), who closely examine Wolfgang Pauli’s influence
on and collaboration with Jung.
One field by which Jung was clearly influenced but within which he explored the
significance of synchronicity surprisingly little was his home field of analysis or
psychotherapy. A few subsequent books contain substantial discussions of synchro-
nicity in relation to therapy, notably those by Bolen (1979), Aziz (1990, 2007), and
Hopcke (1997). Mostly, however, the existing in-depth discussions of synchronicity in
the therapeutic context have appeared in journal articles. Main (2007c) reviews both
Jung’s limited clinical discussions of synchronicity and the more extensive clinical
discussions by later analysts published in a variety of articles between 1957 and 2005.
At the other end of the spectrum from the consideration of synchronicity in
relation to science is its consideration in relation to religion and spirituality. Jung
himself seems to play down the religious sources and significance of synchronicity
in his principal essay (1952b; see Main, 2004, pp. 105107), though these are easy
146 R. Main

enough to detect or extrapolate. Among subsequent commentators the religious

implications are especially addressed by Aziz (1990, 2007), Mansfield (1995, 2002),
and Main (2004, 2007a). Some of the works of these authors focus almost exclusively
on religion and spirituality (Main, 2007a), sometimes with a psychotherapeutic
inflection (Aziz, 1990, 2007). Others specifically address the dual religious and
scientific influences on and significance of the concept of synchronicity (Mansfield,
1995, 2002; Main, 2004).
All the works mentioned above are written by authors sympathetic to Jung’s
thought, even if sometimes also critical of it. Two books, both by psychoanalysts,
have directly challenged Jung’s concept of synchronicity by explaining synchronistic
experiences, and in particular their putative spiritual character and implications,
in purely causal, naturalistic, psychoanalytic terms (Faber, 1998; Williams, 2010).
Other works less focused on Jungian thought, whether positively or negatively, have
addressed coincidences from a variety of statistical, psychological, psychoanalytic,
parapsychological, holistic science, holistic spirituality, religious, and other perspec-
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tives (see Main 2007a, pp. 59).1

Despite all of this work, the concept of synchronicity, while fairly widely diffused
within popular culture, especially within holistic science and holistic spirituality, has
so far achieved very little integration within mainstream academic and intellectual
fields. It is not that the concept has been decisively disproven or discredited it tends
to be too poorly understood and too cursorily evaluated for this but rather that
it has been disregarded. Part of the reason for this mainstream neglect may be
the multidisciplinary complexity, incompleteness, and sometimes downright confu-
sion of Jung’s expositions of synchronicity (see Main, 2004, pp. 3662). Also off-
putting is the frequent superficiality of the more popular uses and presentations
of the concept. But a further factor likely inhibiting its wider serious consideration
is that, with its propositions that there are uncaused events, that matter has a
psychic aspect, that the psyche can relativise time and space, and that there may
be a dimension of objective meaning accessible to but not created by humans
(Main, 2004, p. 2), synchronicity challenges the positivist, realist, and humanist
epistemological assumptions that predominate in the sciences and social sciences
(Main, 2007b, pp. 21, 3435). Because it presents this challenge, the concept can
hardly be proven, or perhaps even rendered plausible, in terms of these dominant
epistemologies.
There do, however, seem to be some prospects for improving the understanding
and possibly the credibility of synchronicity. First, there are several areas where
work on synchronicity could be undertaken which would not necessarily involve
stepping outside currently prevalent epistemologies. For example, it may be possible
to conduct at least some levels of experimental testing of synchronicity, especially
in those respects where synchronicity resembles parapsychological phenomena (see
Storm, 2008; but note Mansfield, 2002, pp. 161179). Again, rigorous social
scientific methods of data gathering could be used to accumulate richer synchronistic
case studies, which would be more sensitive than existing accounts of synchronistic
experiences to psychological, sociological, and other contexts. Or again, detailed
historical or anthropological studies could be undertaken to test the extent to which
the pre-modern, non-Western, and esoteric sources that influenced Jung’s formula-
tion of the concept of synchronicity really were, as Jung claims, based on similar
principles. And there could be deeper philosophical explorations of the core
International Journal of Jungian Studies 147

concepts that Jung, usually without much philosophical reflection, used to build up
his case for synchronicity, such as time, acausality, meaning, and probability.
Second and more difficult, it may be worth, if only experimentally, stepping into
the assumptive world of synchronicity and attempting to find ways of using that
perspective to analyse social and cultural phenomena; that is to say, looking at the
phenomena in terms of the acausal patterns of meaning they exhibit instead of, or
in addition to, looking at them in terms of their causes and effects. The test of such
an exercise would be whether it yielded insights that would not otherwise or so
readily have been available. To date only a few attempts at this have been made
(e.g. Main, 2006; Cambray, 2009, pp. 88107),2 from which the difficulties of the
venture are apparent. However, the efforts are worth continuing, for it is difficult to
see how synchronicity could ever be considered integrated into mainstream thought
until it forms not just an object of inquiry, as in all the studies suggested in the
previous paragraph, but part of a method of inquiry.
Particularly interesting are the recent attempts to explore synchronicity in
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relation to complexity theory and the phenomenon of emergence (Cambray, 2009;

see also Hogenson, 2005, 2009). For complexity theory is consistent with, even if
challenging to, current mainstream science; applies at different scales and hence,
like synchronicity, draws on and could potentially be relevant to a wide range of
disparate disciplines; and provides scope for treating synchronicity both as an object
of study (through exploring its phenomenological and theoretical connections to
complexity theory) and as a method of study (through applying it in ways analogous
to how complexity theory is applied). However, further work still needs to be done to
clarify the exact relationship between synchronicity and emergence. If, for instance,
emergence is ultimately understood as a causal phenomenon and if synchronicity
is understood as a form of emergence, this would seem to undermine Jung’s claims
for the acausal character of synchronicity.
Jung himself clearly hoped that the concept of synchronicity would become
integral to the way reality was understood; that it would, as he put it, be added to
the categories of time, space, and causality and thereby make possible ‘a whole
judgement’ that would adequately take account of meaning even in the most
demanding case of our understanding of the physical world (1952b, paras. 961962).
It is perhaps less demanding to hope that it might be possible to find a way of
integrating synchronicity into methods of social and cultural study. Although Jung’s
own discussions tend to focus on the axis between science and religion, he does also
hint at the significance of synchronicity for our understanding of the social and
cultural worlds. For example, he describes his concern for the depersonalising effects
of excessive rationalisation and the resulting mass-mindedness in society as ‘the
reason and the motive of my essay [on synchronicity]’ (1976, p. 216) and he notes,
suggestively for the arts, that synchronicities should be seen as ‘creative acts’ (1952b,
para. 967; see also Main, 2004, pp. 117121, 135142).

Enchantment, disenchantment, re-enchantment

In the remainder of this paper, I would like to look at synchronicity in relation to
the theme of disenchantment. This theme connects to debates about religion and
science, in that it is an encompassing religious worldview from which and an
encompassing scientific worldview into which Western culture has largely been
disenchanted. But the theme also connects to sociological and cultural debates
148 R. Main

in that disenchantment both is part of the broader sociological discourse of

secularisation (see, for example, Greisman, 1976) and has prompted various attempts
at re-enchantment through appeal to the arts (see, for example, Graham, 2007). The
following discussion does not yet involve looking at social phenomena through the
lens of synchronicity. It does, however, aim to clarify an important sociological
context that can explain and perhaps make more creditable what Jung was trying to
do in introducing his concept of synchronicity, and thereby it might help to prepare
the way for more direct attempts to apply synchronicity in social and cultural
analysis.
The discourse of disenchantment stems from Max Weber’s use of the term,
most famously in his lecture on ‘Science as a vocation’ (1918). ‘The fate of our times’,
he writes, ‘is characterized by rationalization and intellectualization and, above all, by
the ‘‘disenchantment of the world’’’ (1918, p. 155). For Weber, this means that ‘there
are no mysterious incalculable forces that come into play, but rather that one can, in
principle, master all things by calculation. [. . .] One need no longer have recourse to
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magical means in order to master or implore the spirits [. . .]’ (1918, p. 139).
Jung was no less aware than Weber of the extent to which modern western society
was dominated by rationalisation and intellectualisation (see, for example, 1947/
1954, para. 426; 1957, paras. 496501), and he characterised the resultant state in
similar terms: ‘The modern world’, he remarked, ‘is desacralized’ (McGuire & Hull,
1978, p. 230). But, unlike Weber who described and explained disenchantment and
seemed to accept it as the condition of the modern world, Jung diagnosed
desacralisation as the reason why the modern world was ‘in a crisis’ and actively
sought to remedy this crisis through bringing about a form of re-enchantment or
re-sacralisation: ‘Modern man’, he stated, ‘must rediscover a deeper source of his
own spiritual life’ (McGuire & Hull, 1978, p. 230). The core process of his
psychological model, individuation, is his proposal for how this rediscovery can
be made.
Elsewhere I have argued that before Jung developed his concept of synchronicity
his psychological model was only capable of effecting a limited re-enchantment,
because the spiritual forces and values that were rediscovered through the process
of individuation were conceived to be intrapsychic (Main, 2007b, p. 22). What
was rediscovered was the ‘god within’ (1938/1940, para. 101). To the extent that
the outer world appeared to be re-enchanted, this was only the result of the
projection of inner contents onto a universe that in reality was completely alienated
from human meaning and purpose. With the introduction of the concept of
synchronicity, I argued, Jung felt able to postulate a parallelism and acausal
connectedness between inner and outer events that allowed him to find spiritual
forces and values not only intrapsychically but also, non-projectively, in external
situations and events, thus enabling a more far-reaching re-enchantment (Main,
2007b, p. 26).
I would now like to consider what might be the extent of this fuller re-
enchantment enabled by the concept of synchronicity. To do so, I shall use not
Weber’s account of disenchantment but the more recent, more extensive, and more
differentiated account by the Canadian philosopher and social scientist Charles
Taylor in his book A secular age (2007). In this book Taylor describes a number of
transformations that took place in Latin Christendom between about 1500 and
2000, which resulted in the replacement of the enchanted, pre-modern world with
the disenchanted, modern world, the ‘secular age’ in which we currently live (2007,
International Journal of Jungian Studies 149

pp. 2561). I shall consider each of these transformations in turn, reflecting in each
case on the extent to which the transformation might be reversed by the concept of
synchronicity.

The location of meaning

The first of the transformations described by Taylor concerns the location of
meaning meaning understood not linguistically but ‘in the sense in which we talk
about ‘‘the meaning of life’’, or of a relationship as having great ‘‘meaning’’ for us’
(2007, p. 31). In the enchanted, pre-modern world, meaning thoughts, feelings,
‘spiritual élan’ was experienced as residing not only in human minds but also in
non-human subjects and in things: for example, in God, saints, and good and evil
spirits or in religious relics and artefacts (2007, pp. 2935). In this world, according
to Taylor, objects could be ‘charged’, ‘magical’, they could ‘impose meanings and
bring about physical outcomes proportionate to their meanings’, they had ‘influence
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and causal power’ (2007, p. 35). In the disenchanted, modern world, by contrast,
meaning resides exclusively in the inward space of human minds. God, saints, spirits,
moral forces are no longer unproblematically experienced as existing (2007, pp. 30
31), objects are not ‘charged’, and ‘the causal relations between things cannot be
in any way dependent on their meanings, which must be projected on them from
our minds’ (2007, p. 35).
Jung recognises this picture of the modern world as disenchanted. Understanding
meaning in much the same way as Taylor (see, for example, Jung, 1952b, paras. 916
923; 1963, p. 373), he acknowledges that ‘we have absolutely no scientific means of
proving the existence of an objective meaning which is not just a psychic product’
(1952b, para. 915). And in his Terry Lectures on ‘Psychology and Religion’, he writes
of ‘the historical process of world despiritualization’ in which ‘everything of a divine
or daemonic character outside us must return to the psyche, to the inside of the
unknown man, whence it apparently originated’ (1938/1940, para. 141). In other
words, gods and daemons have been recognised for what they always were: ‘an
anthropomorphic projection’ (1938/1940, para. 141). However, while Jung recognised
this condition of disenchantment, he did not acquiesce in it. Even before he developed
his concept of synchronicity, he was vigorously attempting to undo the disenchant-
ment by stressing that the psyche, the ‘inside of the unknown man’, is, at its deeper
levels, structured by factors archetypes of the collective unconscious which are
experienced identically to how in the pre-modern world God, spirits, and demons
were experienced (1934/1954, para. 50; 1938/1940, para. 102; 1945/1948; 1952a, paras.
15041506).
With the concept of synchronicity, however, Jung arguably goes further in
reversing the transformation described by Taylor. For this concept reasserts the
possibility of meaning in the world beyond the mind. In the third chapter of his
principal essay on synchronicity, Jung considers various Chinese, Greek, Mediaeval,
and Renaissance forerunners of his idea, noting how they each presuppose the
existence of ‘transcendental’, ‘objective’, or ‘self-subsistent’ meaning (1952b, paras.
916946). He acknowledges that the idea seems ‘naive’, ‘an archaic assumption that
ought at all costs to be avoided’ (1952b, para. 944). But he argues that modern
psychology and parapsychology have demonstrated the existence of phenomena
whose explanation requires just such an idea (1952b, para. 944). For Jung, the
concept of synchronicity ‘postulates a meaning which is a priori in relation to
150 R. Main

human consciousness and apparently exists outside man’ (1952b, para. 942). It is
thus possible for a scarab beetle (1952b, paras. 843, 845), a fox (1973, p. 395), a
watch (Aziz, 1990, p. 86), some randomly falling coins (1952b, paras. 863866), or
a meteorological phenomenon such as the wind (1952b, para. 830) to behave in ways
which, while independent of human influence, exhibit meaning that is humanly
discernible and significant. Far from this being projection, the possibility of such
meaning reportedly led Jung to question whether ‘the concept of projection should
be revised completely’ (Quispel, 1995, p. 19). The notion allows, indeed, for an
enhancement of the objectivity and otherness that can attach to archetypal
experiences: the meaning of archetypes turns out to be something patterning not
just inner, psychic events but outer, physical ones too; it can be other not just to one’s
consciousness but to one’s mind and organism as a whole.

The ‘porous’ and the ‘buffered’ self

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Concomitant with this change in the way meaning is experienced is a second

transformation: that of the self from, in Taylor’s terms, ‘porous’ to ‘buffered’ (2007,
pp. 27, 3541). In the enchanted, pre-modern world, the self was experienced as
‘porous’ in the sense that the boundary between the mind and the world was hazy,
leaving people feeling vulnerable to spirits, demons, and cosmic forces, which
therefore needed to be propitiated (2007, pp. 3539). Equally hazy was the boundary
between the physical and the moral, so that, for example, what ailed or healed the
body at the same time ailed or healed the mind: ‘illness and sin were often seen
as inextricably related’ (2007, pp. 3941). A further consequence of experiencing the
self as porous was that people tended to live more socially, as bound up with one
another rather than as separate individuals, and as a result put ‘a tremendous
premium on holding to the consensus’ (2007, p. 42). In the disenchanted, modern
world, however, the self is experienced as ‘bounded’ or ‘buffered’. In this world,
it is possible to disengage from whatever is beyond the boundary of the mind, to feel
less vulnerable, and hence to develop greater levels of self-control and self-direction
(2007, pp. 3839). A clear line is drawn between physical laws and the moral
meanings things have for us, and disengagement is as much from the social as
from the natural world, resulting in weaker social bonds (2007, pp. 3942).
The experience of the self as ‘bounded’ or ‘buffered’, with the accompanying
heightened levels of self-control, is a condition instantly recognisable in Jung’s
discussions both of particular patients (for example, 1938/1940, paras. 3839, 56)
and of modern society generally (1957). The separation between physical laws and
moral meanings is also something of which he was acutely aware and commented
on at both the beginning and end of his professional life (189699, paras. 13738;
1957). With his concept of the unconscious, especially the collective unconscious, and
its challenging relationship to consciousness, Jung theorised both the inevitability
and the desirability of such a buffered state being undermined as the psyche
expressed its natural propensity to develop towards a state of greater wholeness in
which more unconscious content was integrated into a widening field of conscious-
ness. In this understanding, however, the main challenge to the self’s boundaries
comes from within, from the unconscious. A more radical challenge was introduced
by the concept of synchronicity. For this concept draws attention to experiences in
which content seemingly belonging to the self can, acausally and non-projectively,
find expression also in the external world. The separation between inner and outer,
International Journal of Jungian Studies 151

psychic and physical seems to be transgressed. And insofar as the outer, physical
content that parallels the inner, psychic content shares the meaning, and in particular
the individuating purpose, of the latter, it is not easy to separate the moral from
the material dimensions of the experience.3
Jung’s example involving the scarab beetle (1951b, para. 982; 1952b, paras. 843,
845) provides a clear illustration of how synchronicity can challenge a buffered self
and render it more porous. Jung’s patient, it will be recalled, was ‘psychologically
inaccessible’, enclosed in the ‘intellectual retort’ of her rationalistic attitude,
impervious to outside influence, until the synchronicity between her dream and
the appearance of a scarab beetle in Jung’s consulting room ‘punctured the desired
hole’ in her rationalism (1951b, para. 982). The spirits, demons, and cosmic forces
to which she was thereby opened up and made vulnerable were the archetypal forces
of the collective unconscious. But, as noted above, with the concept of synchronicity,
the archetypes were rethought by Jung as not simply psychic factors; they were
now conceived of as ‘psychoid’ (1947/1954, para. 420; 1952b, paras. 840, 947, 962)
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and hence capable of organising matter as well as mind and not just matter in the
organism associated with a particular mind but ‘matter in general’ (1958, para. 780).
The patient experienced these forces as involving the physical world external to
herself. And since the behaviour of that external, physical world was promoting
her individuation, it was clearly of moral significance to her.

Anti-structure and its eclipse

A third transformation highlighted by Taylor is from societies in which the
equilibrium between self-transcendence and ordinary human flourishing is main-
tained to societies in which such equilibrium is lost. On one level this equilibrium
was maintained in the pre-modern world by organising society according to
complementary, albeit hierarchically valued, functions: celibate clergy and married
laity (2007, pp. 4345). On another level, it was maintained by the official
recognition of moments of what Taylor calls ‘anti-structure’. His prime example
of this is Carnival and similar festivals, where ‘the ordinary order of things was
inverted, or ‘‘the world was turned upside down’’’ (2007, pp. 4546). In these
moments chaos is temporarily admitted into the social, moral, and even spiritual
order, thereby releasing or reconnecting with pent-up energies and so bringing about
the renewal of structures threatened with exhaustion (2007, pp. 4649). In the
modern world, Taylor argues, anti-structure has been ‘eclipsed’, the need for it is
‘no longer recognized at the level of the whole society, and in relation to its political-
jural structure’, for the necessary ‘spiritual context’ that ‘the human code exists
within a larger spiritual cosmos’ no longer obtains (2007, p. 50). Modern anti-
structures either take place in the private, voluntary sphere (as in the arts or
privatised religion) or, if they occur in the public sphere (as in the case of certain
modern revolutions), tend to lead not to renewal but to the birth of ‘a new and
perfect code’ that itself ‘will brook no anti-structure’ (2007, pp. 5253); that is,
to a society in which the regnant political, moral, and spiritual code leaves no
official space for contradictory, equilibrating principles.
Jung’s analysis of modern society, for example in ‘The undiscovered self: Present
and future’ (1957), largely tallies with Taylor’s depiction here. Jung emphasises the
rationalistic one-sidedness of modern society, which values scientific knowledge
based on statistics to the neglect of everything unique, exceptional, and individual
152 R. Main

(1957, paras. 493499). He notes in particular that the weakening of religion has
removed ‘an extramundane principle capable of relativizing the overpowering
influence of external factors’ (1957, para. 511), leaving society vulnerable to
totalitarianism, from which anti-structural, equilibrating forces are precisely
excluded. Jung’s whole psychology, of course, is predicated on the recognition of
the anti-structural at once disruptive and regenerative effects of the unconscious
vis-à-vis consciousness, as well as on the need to foster equilibrium among the
various opposites of psychic life, including the instinctual and spiritual poles of
the archetypes. Synchronicity, however, is arguably the most anti-structural of all
of Jung’s concepts. At a theoretical level, Jung considered synchronicity a necessary
equilibrating principle at the very foundation of our worldview and as such wished
to instate it as a complement to causality (1952b, paras. 961964). At an experiential
level, synchronistic events are doubly disrupters of established order. On the one
hand, their content, like that of dreams, generally stands in an uncomfortable,
compensatory relationship to individual and collective states of consciousness,
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while on the other hand through their very form as anomalous experiences
they intrinsically defy what is considered possible or probable. Again, in their
unexpectedness and bizarre conjoining of events they often have a subversive,
carnivalesque quality that not surprisingly has led to their being symbolically
associated with the figures of the trickster and alchemical Mercurius (Combs &
Holland, 1994; E. Jung & von Franz, 1970, p. 366).

Higher times and secular time

The fourth transformation in Taylor’s account is from higher time to secular or
homogenous time (2007, pp. 5459). He notes three kinds of higher time. The first
of these is Platonic eternity, according to which ‘The really real, full being is
outside time, unchanging’ and time is ‘a moving image of eternity’ (2007, p. 55). The
second is Augustinian ‘gathered time’, in which all times are present to God,
held in God’s ‘extended simultaneity’, and ‘rising to eternity is rising to participate in
God’s instant’ (2007, pp. 5657). The third kind of higher time is the Eliadean
‘time of origins’, the ‘illud tempus’, ‘when the order of things was established, whether
that of the creation of the present world, or the founding of our people with its
Law’ (2007, p. 57). Each of these higher times contrasts with ordinary, secular,
homogeneous, chronological time. Taylor’s point is that in the pre-modern world the
time-consciousness of people was partly formed by each of the three kinds of higher
time, so that ‘as well as the ‘‘horizontal dimension’’ of merely secular time, there is a
‘‘vertical’’ dimension, which can allow for the warps and foreshortenings of time’
(2007, p. 57) found for example in the way that ‘Good Friday 1998 is closer [. . .] to
the original day of the Crucifixion than mid-summer’s day 1997’ (2007, p. 55). In the
modern world, according to Taylor, ‘we tend to see our lives exclusively within
the horizontal flow of secular time’ (2007, p. 59), which is ‘what to us is ordinary
time, indeed, to us it’s just time, period. One thing happens after another, and when
something is past, it’s past’ (2007, p. 55).
Jung only rarely has occasion to refer directly to ordinary, secular, or, as he puts
it, ‘objective’ time with its ‘relentless advance’ (1945, para. 212), but it is always
implicit as that in contrast to which he describes other kinds of time. The concept
of time was central to Jung’s understanding of synchronicity, as the etymology of
the word ‘synchronicity’ implies (Gk. ‘syn’ with, together; ‘chronos’time). Its
International Journal of Jungian Studies 153

precise role, however, is not clear-cut (see Main, 2004, pp. 5153, 110111).
Sometimes Jung refers to ‘simultaneity’, ‘a kind of simultaneity’, and the notion of
moments of time having specific qualities (1952b, paras. 840, 850).4 For example, in
his discussions of divinatory techniques such as astrology and the I Ching Jung
explains how everything that happens in a particular moment of time is considered to
have the qualities of that moment of time; in other words, simultaneous events,
whether physical or psychic, whether near or far, are considered to share the quality
of the moment in which they occur (1930, paras. 8182; 1950, para. 973). As he wrote
to a correspondent in 1934: ‘Time thus proves to be a stream of energy filled
with qualities and not, as our philosophy would have it, an abstract concept or
precondition of knowledge’ (1973, pp. 138139). Other times, mostly in later
writings, Jung tends to refer instead to the ‘psychic relativisation of space and time’
(1951b, para. 984; 1952b, para. 840), a notion that better allows for events such as
precognitive dreams where the component events, the dream and its actualisation, by
definition are not simultaneous. He even explicitly repudiates his earlier use of the
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notion of qualitative time (1976, p. 176). However, whether writing about qualitative
time or the psychic relativisation of space and time, Jung is clearly not writing
about ordinary time but about something that very much includes the possibility of
the warps and foreshortenings described by Taylor. In an interview with Mircea
Eliade in 1952, he even defined synchronicity as ‘the rupture of time’ (McGuire &
Hull, 1978, p. 230).
Before his writing on synchronicity these kinds of possibility were arguably
implied in the concept of archetypes, since archetypes bring the accumulated
experience of the past vividly into the present in a way that can distort or override
normal senses of time. With synchronicity, however, the further notion that
qualitative or relativised time is ‘higher’ in the senses mentioned by Taylor is also
present. Jung argues that the relativisation of space and time in synchronistic events
implies that the psyche ‘touches on a form of existence outside time and space’ (1934,
para. 814; cf. 1976, p. 561; 1963, pp. 335337) and thereby ‘partakes of what is
inadequately and symbolically described as ‘‘eternity’’’ (1934, para. 815). In his
principal essay on synchronicity he describes synchronistic events as ‘the continuous
creation of a pattern that exists from all eternity’ (1952b, para. 967), and in relation
to this he cites several early Christian theologians, including Origen, Augustine, and
Prosper of Aquitaine, for whom, in Jung’s words, ‘Continuous creation is to be
thought of not only as a series of successive acts of creation, but also as the eternal
presence of the one creative act’, since ‘What happens successively in time is
simultaneous in the mind of God’ (1952b, para. 967 n. 17). This understanding of
time underlies Jung’s work in Aion (1951a) on the history of the development of the
western psyche in relation to the unfolding of the astrological Age of Pisces, which
Jung describes as one of the factors which ‘led to the problem of synchronicity’
(1963, p. 248).

Cosmos and universe

The fifth and last transformation described by Taylor is from a sense of living
in a cosmos to a sense of living in a universe (2007, pp. 5961). In the pre-modern
world the totality of existence was considered to consist of a limited and bounded
‘cosmos’ with a hierarchy of being reaching its apex in eternity; it was an ordered
whole in which, crucially, ‘the order of things was a humanly meaningful one’
154 R. Main

(2007, p. 60). In the modern world, by contrast, the totality of existence is conceived
as a universe ordered by exceptionless natural laws, without hierarchy, flowing on in
secular time rather than pointing to eternity, and not immediately or evidently
related to human meaning (2007, p. 60).
With his scientific training, Jung will certainly have recognised the universe of
modern science with its millions of years of evolutionary time, its vast interstellar
spaces, and its uniform natural laws. While he differentiates between material,
psychic, and spiritual aspects of reality (1947/1954, para. 420), he does not order
these into a traditional hierarchy of levels of being. He acknowledges that ‘meaning
is an anthropomorphic interpretation’ (1952b, para. 916) and considers it impro-
bable that the ‘extremely indirect methods of creation, which squander millions of
years upon the development of countless species and creatures, are the outcome
of purposeful intention’ (1963, p. 371). Right at the end of his life he even entertains
the possibility that the universe might be, as the disenchanted view suggests,
ultimately meaningless (1963, pp. 392393). Jung’s psychology, even without
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reference to the concept of synchronicity, fully allows for the possibility that life
and the universe can be experienced as meaningful and, for the sake of personal and
social well being, strongly advocates that it should be (1963, p. 373). But since the
psyche, which experiences in this way, seems to be a phenomenon that has arisen
within the vast and, in itself, meaningless universe, the suspicion may be difficult to
shake that it too (the psyche) could, objectively speaking, be meaningless.
Again, however, Jung’s concept of synchronicity contributes to restoring a view of
the world closer to the pre-modern, enchanted one. According to Gilles Quispel,
Jung considered that with his theory of synchronicity he had ‘forced a breakthrough
from the psyche to the cosmos’ (Quispel, 1995, p. 19); that is, he had discovered
a way of understanding how the meaning he found within the psyche could be
also objectively, non-projectively a property of the world beyond the psyche. This
viewpoint is reinforced by some of Jung’s late cosmogonic reflections. For example,
in a letter to Erich Neumann of 10 March 1959, Jung speculates that in the ‘chaos of
chance’ during the early stages of biological evolution ‘synchronistic phenomena
were probably at work, operating both with and against the known laws of nature’,
a view which ‘presupposes not only an all-pervading, latent meaning which can
be recognized by consciousness, but, during that preconscious time, a psychoid
process with which a physical event meaningfully coincides’ (1976, pp. 494495).
If Jung, as a modern person, recognises the possibility that the universe might
be objectively meaningless for humans, he at the same time and with more favour
takes seriously the possibility that it might be objectively meaningful.5

Limits of re-enchantment
It is clear from the preceding that Jung had a rich appreciation both of the
disenchanted condition of the modern world and the enchanted condition that had
existed in pre-modernity. It is clear too that many facets of his psychological
model had the effect, and probably the intention, of recovering some of that
enchanted condition. This is true especially of his late concept of synchronicity. For
with this concept Jung showed ways in which meaning could be restored to the
external world, the self could become again porous, the anti-structural forces needed
to maintain social equilibrium could be recognised, higher orders of time could
interact with ordinary time, and the world as a whole could be experienced as a
International Journal of Jungian Studies 155

humanly meaningful cosmos. But these ways in which the concept of synchronicity
reverses the earlier transformations described by Taylor do not by any means result
in a return to a pre-modern condition of naive enchantment. For alongside each
of the ways in which the concept restores enchantment, there are other ways in
which it does not do so but remains decidedly modern. I shall mention one or two
instances in relation to each of the transformations we have considered.
First, in relation to the location of meaning, Jung does not postulate the actual
external existence of the kinds of spirits and demons that were the taken-for-granted
agents in the pre-modern world. While synchronicity reasserts the possibility of
meaning in the world beyond the mind, this meaning does not for Jung generally
involve supernatural beings but mostly just natural and cultural phenomena
(insects, animals, weather, artefacts, and so on).6 Further, where in the pre-modern
worldview physical objects, such as religious relics, could be sources not just of
meaning but of influence and causal power, the meaning of synchronistic events does
not straightforwardly emanate from things but co-arises in things and in human
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minds. An enchanted world is a world of magical causes, but Jung specifically

repudiates the notion of magical causality, insisting that in synchronistic events
the meaning emerges acausally (1952b, para. 941).
Second, while synchronicity in one sense reverses the transformation from the
porous to the buffered self through transgressing the apparent separation of mind
and world, the state experienced in a synchronicity is almost certainly not the same
as that which would have been experienced in the pre-modern world. For the sense
of separateness and disengagement characteristic of the modern, buffered self does
not disappear in a synchronistic experience but rather comes to co-exist with a
retrieved more porous and vulnerable sense of self (cf. Main, 2007a, pp. 4850).
This paradoxical double sense of self both porous to and separate from the
external world arguably is a large part of the reason why synchronicities are
experienced as anomalous. A complete return to a porous sense of self, surren-
dering the capacity for disengagement and critical self-reflection, would likely be
experienced in the modern world as a pathological reversion to participation mystique
(see Aziz, 1990, pp. 185189).
Third, while synchronistic experiences can be profoundly anti-structural and can
help to restore social equilibrium in situations of one-sidedness, the concept of
synchronicity is currently not integrated into mainstream culture in a way that
would allow this anti-structural and equilibrating potential to be formally recognised
in the kind of way that, in Taylor’s account, Carnival and similar festivals were.
Indeed, it is questionable whether synchronistic experiences, which typically are
spontaneous and idiosyncratic, are even in principle susceptible to the kind of
ordering that would enable them to be socially integrated; certainly there is little
likelihood of entire communities experiencing synchronicities together at calendared
times. Furthermore, unlike in the pre-modern period, a ‘spiritual context’ for
the anti-structural effect of synchronistic experiences is not presupposed. Rather, the
experience of synchronicity is what, for at least some modern commentators, can
help to suggest a possible spiritual context (see Main, 2007a).
Fourth, while synchronicity vividly disrupts the sense of ordinary, secular time and
evokes notions of higher times that draw on and bear comparison with Platonic
eternity, Augustinian gathered time, and the time of origins, it is again the case that
these pre-modern notions are not asserted as part of Jung’s theorisation of
synchronicity but rather are presented as amplificatory analogies suggested by the
156 R. Main

phenomena. Jung’s prime concern is to elucidate the experiences rather than to

reinforce any particular metaphysical assumptions about the nature of time and
eternity.
Fifth and finally, while synchronicity suggests how the universe may be conceived
again as a humanly meaningful cosmos, it does so in a way that greatly differs from
the pre-modern conception. The cosmos that synchronicity can help us to conceive
is, in contrast to the pre-modern cosmos, one in which meaning is only a possibility
vying with meaninglessness, in which there is no assumed hierarchy of being
culminating in eternity, and which is not reassuringly bounded.

Conclusion
Viewing synchronicity in relation to Taylor’s account of the transformations from the
enchanted, pre-modern world to the disenchanted, modern world reveals how
substantially Jung’s concept addresses these transformations and contributes to
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reversing them. Clearly there were features of the enchanted, pre-modern world that
Jung wished to retrieve, as possibilities if not assurances. But at the same time it is
apparent that there are significant limits to the re-enchantment effected by
synchronicity, and there is no sense that Jung wished to relinquish such defining
achievements of modernity as science, differentiated consciousness, and a heightened
sense of individuality. Rather than promoting a return to pre-modernity, Jung’s work
on synchronicity seems to have aimed at transforming modernity, or at least our
understanding of it, through developing a perspective that draws on both pre-modern
and modern elements, enchantment and disenchantment. Clarifying what the
physical, social, and cultural worlds might look like when viewed from this perspective
and to what extent they might be illuminated is work that remains to be attempted.

Notes
1. For further surveys of work on synchronicity, see Main, 2004, 2007a, 2007c.
2. Some modern approaches to divination which are explicitly grounded in a synchronistic
understanding of reality could possibly be added to this. See, for example, Tarnas, 2006.
There are also a few hints of how synchronicity might be applied in the study of literature.
See, for example, Rowland, 2005, pp. 146147, 175177; Hammond, 2007.
3. For an account of synchronicity (reframed as ‘the syndetic paradigm’) that views the
activity of both the inner and outer worlds as inherently moral, see Aziz, 2007.
4. The phrase ‘a kind of simultaneity’ is several times used by Taylor when writing about
higher times (2007, pp. 5557).
5. In an explicit challenge to modern cosmologies that see the universe as disenchanted,
Richard Tarnas (2006) uses Jung’s concept of synchronicity to underpin his view of a
meaningful, participative cosmos.
6. This said, Jung does speculate about the possible external reality of spirits and, late in life,
even acknowledged that many putative paranormal phenomena could best be explained by
‘the spirit hypothesis’ (1973, p. 431; see also Main, 1997, pp. 67, 5571).

Notes on contributor
Roderick Main, PhD, is Director of the Centre for Psychoanalytic Studies at the University of
Essex, UK. He is the author of The rupture of time: Synchronicity and Jung’s critique of
Western culture (BrunnerRoutledge, 2004) and Revelations of chance: Synchronicity as
spiritual experience (SUNY, 2007) and the editor of Jung on synchronicity and the paranormal
(Routledge/Princeton, 1997).
International Journal of Jungian Studies 157

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