Synchronicity in Psychotherapy

C. G. Jung was probably the first Western psychotherapist to recognise the importance of transpersonal psychic events in his psychotherapeutic work and his emergent general psychology. In so doing he greatly enlarged the spectrum of meanings and interpretations that could be attributed to physical events and to the psychological experiences of his clients—especially the states of consciousness exhibiting the unique emotional quality akin to that of the existential concept of Augenblick—a German word which means literally, the ‘blinking of the eye’ but which is usually translated as ‘the pregnant moment’. It is the moment when a person suddenly grasps the meaning of an important symbolic event. The pregnancy consists of the fact that it is never an intellectual act alone; the grasping of the new meaning always presents the possibility and necessity of some personal decision, some shift in gestalt, some new orientation of the person towards the world and the future. This is experienced by most people as the moment of most heightened awareness (referred to in psychological literature as the ‘aha’ experience).

Since the quality of personal meaning has a central focus in Jung's system of psychotherapy, all events during therapy (including the transpersonal) are examined for the real as well as the potential meanings they may have for the client. Towards this end, Jung used the principle of synchronicity as a nodal point to bring meaning to many phenomena which were inexplicable within a traditional causal or Newtonian paradigm; and he believed that the assimilation into consciousness of synchronistic phenomena was an important aspect of individuation. In speaking of the journey toward individuation, Jung writes, ‘It always seemed to me as if the real milestones were certain symbolic events characterised by a strong emotional tone …’ (JUNG 10, p. 377). Indeed, according to Frey-Wehrlin, ‘Jung himself and a number of his followers have stated that in many instances a synchr