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Throughout the ages, man has retained a belief in the prophetic nature of certain dreams, and even today, in a highly civilized society, the correspondence of a dream to a future event tempts the dreamer or the interpreter into becoming a prophet, although he is usually wise only in retrospect. Where such phenomena occur in the course of analysis, the startling effect may be so blinding that the whole feeling for the analytic method may be lost. Old beliefs of man as the pawn of fate may get the upper hand: alternatively, a magical effect may be assumed, that is, of the power of the wish to influence matter. Both presuppose a causal principle, the former arising from the will of supernatural beings and the latter from the ego. The analyst, handicapped by the lack of a satisfactory theory, may himself get caught, or in an attempt to save himself, may swing to the opposite extreme and try to depotentiate the experience.
In this dilemma, if so it appears, we may find relief in Jung's concept of synchronicity (Jung and Pauli, 1955). In his book on the subject, written in conjunction with an eminent physicist, he makes use of the theory of relativity to explain the occurrence of “meaningful coincidences in time”. The concept is described as “an acausal connecting principle”. acausal because the law of causality loses its validity when the sequence of cause and effect is either relativized or abolished as it is in “synchronistic” phenomena.
The following example occurred before the concept was known to the writer, who got at least partially caught. It is of an apparently prophetic dream which cropped up after a year's analysis characterized by the projection of the “forbidding” mother. The patient was a married woman of thirty-eight, referred on account of psychic sterility, frigidity, and crying fits which dated from the onset of menstruation, an event which was treated as a calamity. She was an only child, completely dominated by her mother, who was described as an effici