From Individuation, Through Synchronicity to the Psychoid Imagination and the Re-Enchantment of the World1

With the success of the scientific method of the past 350 or so years, the animated, enchanted world of our ancestors has been overtaken by a reductive, mechanistic, technologically powerful description of reality. Early attempts to challenge this disenchantment were only partially successful but swept aside by “progress.” Depth psychology emerged out of the tensions between these worldviews. As a part of this, Jung's experiences chronicled in The Red Book offer a renewed challenge. Along the way towards revitalization, Jung articulated a model of individuation, focused on a realization of the self. Here, I suggest he implicitly extended this to the external world through the notion of synchronicity and later based on the psychoid nature of the archetypes I have reconsidered this through the lens of complexity theory. Further, evidence is offered for the functioning of a previously unacknowledged psychoid level of imagination. This in turn allows a reconsideration of reveries, noting synchronistic aspects to their appearance. Suggestions for working both clinically and ecologically with reveries are offered here as a part of larger project of re-enchantment, including the work of some surrealist painters.