Synchronicity
Synchronicity is the term Jung coined for meaningful coincidence: two or more events that are connected not by cause and effect, but by meaning. You think of an old friend and they call that afternoon; a striking image from a dream appears in waking life the next day. The events have no causal link, yet their coming together feels significant.
Meaning rather than cause
Jung called synchronicity an “acausal connecting principle.” This is not a claim that one event magically produced the other. It is an observation that the psyche sometimes registers a coincidence as deeply meaningful, and that this meaning is worth taking seriously rather than dismissing. The significance lies in how it lands for the person, not in any mechanism linking the outer events.
Why it tends to appear
In clinical experience, synchronicities often cluster around moments of significant psychological change, a turning point in analysis, a loss, a decision long avoided. Jung suggested that when something important is stirring in the unconscious, the boundary between inner and outer can seem to thin, and the world briefly appears to echo what is happening within.
“I do not ask a patient to believe anything about a synchronicity. I ask what it meant to them. The meaning is the data.”
Philippe Jacquet
In analysis, held with care
Synchronicity is easily misused, either dismissed as mere chance or inflated into superstition. Neither is helpful. In Jungian analysis these moments are held thoughtfully: not as omens to obey, but as signals worth attending to, often marking that something in the individuation process is on the move.
Book a consultation with Philippe Jacquet, psychotherapist and Jungian analyst, London.