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In this paper published in a psychoanalytic journal founded by Sigmund Freud and Hans Sachs in 1939, Joseph Cambray expands the analytic approach based on synchronicity. Synchronicity shows how scientific thought on emergence and adaptation works in psychology. Exploring emergence, Cambray discerns psychological depth in synchronicity not previously realized. Understanding his new synthesis of clinical practice with scientific conceptions requires review of the technical terms relating synchronicity to emergence.
Synchronicity and emergence denote developmental change. Developmental dynamics in the context of psychic energy have thematically dominated analytical psychology from its founding, with its model of individuation in the context of adaptation.
In synchronicity or meaningful coincidence, change happens through accidental occurrence of a psychical with an outer event in which connections emanate through perception of meaning, potentially motivating change.
In emergence, evolutionary development shows successively higher levels of complexity coming out of lower levels, and the higher level cannot be reduced to the lower one. Generally, higher level properties are regarded as emergent. A motor car is an emergent property of its interconnected parts. That property disappears if the parts are disassembled and placed in a pile. Further, the lower level does not necessarily ‘cause’ or determine the higher level of complexity. Thus development takes place by a new order or pattern supervening a prior one, much as psychology of archetypes recognizes how a new order of psychological reality supervenes a previous personality organization or complex.
An emergent developmental concept is not new to analytical psychology, which conceives of growth occurring holistically, such as the archetypal pattern of sacrifice, death, and rebirth. Rebirth means the supervention of a new image envisioned as a new life (a new order) emerging out of the old. The organizing operation of the s