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The Occurrence of two events in an analysis, immediately and spontaneously recognised by the patient as synchronistic, prompted me to give more thought to an area of Jung's work which is still sometimes regarded as esoteric or even suspect; an area which has perhaps not yet been effectively rescued from ‘the realms of prelogical thinking and animism and the dubiety of prophecy’, as Mary Williams noted in 1957 (WILLIAMS 7, p. 95). I was struck by certain common factors in synchronicity and deintegration and, in particular, how these events facilitated a deintegrative and reintegrative process for the patient.
One of Fordham's outstanding contributions has been to distil a theory of human psychological development from those of Jung's writings, in which the material is implicit though not obvious. His resultant theory of deintegration provides a model and a language which bridge an apparent gap between Jung's more abstract ideas—what might be called the macrocosmic aspects of analytical psychology, that is, culture, religion, mythology and so on—and the microcosmic, or the actual stuff of everyday living: the concrete detail, for instance, of infant-mother interaction, or, in a different context, of the give and take between patient and analyst in the clinical setting. Against this background, deintegration and synchronicity, at first sight unlikely bedfellows, emerge as different aspects of the same overall schema.
Jung defines synchronicity as ‘the simultaneous occurrence of a certain psychic state with one or more external events which appear as meaningful parallels to the momentary subjective state’ (JUNG 6, para. 850). The essential elements of synchronicity are therefore the correspondence of inner and outer events and the sense of meaning that attaches to this.
In his paper, ‘Reflections on the archetypes and synchronicity’,