The Barker: A Synchronistic Event in Analysis

Synchronistic events are striking for many reasons, but certainly one element of their dramatic impact is the way in which diverse and scattered strands of experience get combined into a single occurrence pregnant with symbolic meaning on many levels. The liminality of the analytic situation does not cause such events, obviously; synchronicity is by definition an acausal connecting principle. However, the liminality created within the analytic relationship, the betwixt and between character of the interaction, in which the patient is aided in letting go of previous self-understandings in order to be initiated into new awareness, seems related to the many synchronistic phenomena that occur during the course of analysis. If analysis is fundamentally a search for meaning, then coincidences connected through meaning are perhaps to be expected.

A number of Jungian authors have discussed the clinical use of synchronistic events that occur during analysis. Jung's own well-known story of the scarab beetle flying into his consulting room in the course of discussing a scarab dream with a patient has by now become paradigmatic (Jung 5, pp. 437-440). Williams's report of a patient's dream which synchronistically seemed to foretell the death of the patient's father and the patient's subsequent pregnancy is an example of how events outside of the analysis may be connected to material discussed in session (Williams 9). Likewise, Williams refers to synchronicity in her discussion of a patient she came to call ‘The poltergeist man’, whose analysis was dramatically punctuated, both during sessions, and outside them, by various telekinetic phenomena connected to the patient's parental complexes (Williams 10). Fordham, in an article first published in Harvest, and later included in New Developments in Analytical Psychology, gives yet another example of how analytic work with a patient concerning a conflict with his father about his participation in a boat race seems to create a psychic