Marks-Tarlow, Terry, & Shapiro, Yakov. (2021). ‘Synchronicity, Acausal Connection, and the Fractal Dynamics of Clinical Practice’.  Psychoanalytic Dialogues,  31, 4,  468-86. Harris, Adrienne. (2021). ‘Discussion: “Synchronicity, acausal connection, and the fractal dynamics of clinical practice”’.  Psychoanalytic Dialogues,  31, 4,  487-92. Cartwright, Duncan. (2021). ‘Can we sing potatoes? Primary substrates, synchronicity, and fractal dynamics in clinical practice’.  Psychoanalytic Dialogues,  31, 4,  493-502.

These three papers constitute a set with Marks-Tarlow and Shapiro providing the target article and Harris and Cartwright adding commentaries. Terry Marks-Tarlow is a psychoanalyst with an extensive publication record. Yakov Shapiro, M.D., is clinical professor of psychiatry at the University of Alberta in Canada.

The argument presented by Marks-Tarlow and Shapiro combines the basic acausal model of synchronicity originally proposed by Jung and Pauli in 1952 with the fractal geometry of Benoit Mandelbrot. Marks-Tarlow has developed related material in other publications, notably for the present paper in her books, Psyche's Veil and A Fractal Epistemology for a Scientific Psychology (Marks-Tarlow 2008; Marks-Tarlow, Shapiro, Wolf & Friedman 2020). Linking synchronicity and fractal geometry brings this paper and the other work of Marks-Tarlow into dialogue with several other psychoanalysts and analytical psychologists, but regrettably does not engage much of the literature developed by the latter. I will return to this issue below as I believe it points to larger issues in the development of psychoanalytic theory broadly construed - that is, to include both the traditional psychoanalytic view and the Jungian view.

Reading the paper from the point of view of analytical psychology, I was struck from the outset when in their abstract Marks-Tarlow and Shapiro write that ‘Psychoanalysts have written about synchronicity, or meaningful coincidence, from the beginning of the field’. This raised an eyebrow as I do not associate synchronicity with the larger psychoanalytic literature, so it is important to start by locating what exactly Marks-Tarlow and Shapiro take to be instances of synchronicity in the psychoanalytic tradition until the more recent appearance of Jungian ideas into the Freudian tradition. What quickly becomes evident is that Marks-Tarlow and Shapiro view Freud's discussions of the uncanny, and his ambivalent interest in thought transference as early expressi