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In what follows, I shall present an account of a case of double synchronicity - double, that is, because the two subjects involved each experienced a parallel synchronistic event - followed by an interpretation which highlights the compensatory function of the archetype of the Self. To begin with, however, I shall review briefly the concept of synchronicity with reference to Robert Aziz's (1990) theoretical reconstruction of the synchronistic event.
Jung defined synchronicity alternately as ‘meaningful coincidence’ (see, for instance, Jung 1958, para. 593; 1955-6, para. 662) and as an ‘acausal connecting principle’ (Jung 1952a). Like archetypal dreams, synchronistic events manifest the same intentional autonomy of the ‘objective psyche’ or collective unconscious. While not all archetypal dreams are synchronistic, archetypes, according to Jung, are nevertheless ‘perhaps the most important basis for synchronistic events’ (Jung 1975, II, p. 289). It was, in fact, largely in response to the problem of synchronicity that Jung was driven to revise radically the theory of archetypes to the point where they were no longer conceived merely as intrapsychic ‘dominants’, but as inter- and trans-psychic factors pointing to the sphere of the unus mundus or ‘unitary world’ (see Jung 1955-6, paras 66off.; Peat 1987). As with the Romantic or perennial philosophical notion of the Ground of Being, or David Bohm's more recent theory of the implicate order (see Bohm and Peat 1987; Bohm and Kelly 1990), archetypes, for the mature Jung,