Synchronicity in Psychotherapy: When Meaning Manifests

By Miyuki Maekawa, AJAJ, Japan

Meaningful Coincidences: Beginning with a Personal Experience

Meaningful coincidences may occur in psychotherapy. Although connecting “accidental” events with personal meaning can be dismissed as superstition or pseudoscience, Jungian analysts may encounter such events as psychologically significant.

Let me begin with a personal experience.

When I began writing this paper, I suddenly felt that I wanted to visit my mother in Kansai. I had planned to go in September, but unexpectedly changed my plans and visited her in early August. She looked more energetic than ever, delighted by photographs of her great-grandchildren. We had an unusually lively conversation.
On the Shinkansen returning to Tokyo, I received news of her death. Only two hours after we had waved goodbye, she had died suddenly from an aortic dissection.
I had no particular reason for visiting. There was no clear premonition, no Japanese mushi no shirase. I simply wanted to see her. Yet this ordinary decision gave me the chance to spend a final, happy time with her.

One month earlier, a client had come to see me who had spent two years blaming herself for her father’s death, believing that something she had done might have hastened it. She had carried this suffering alone. At the time, I too had been thinking about the death of a parent living away from home and about mourning. When I received the news of my mother’s death, I suddenly wondered whether I might somehow have caused my mother to overexert herself, and I remembered this client.

Jung’s Synchronicity: An Acausal Connecting Principle

Jung described synchronicity as the meaningful coincidence of a psychological state and an external event that cannot be explained through causality. Rather than mere coincidence, “a coincidence in time of two or more causally unrelated events which have the same or a similar meaning” (Jung, 1960/2011, p. 25). Such “meaningful coincidences” (p. 23) may indicate that an archetype has been constellated (p. 24).
Shamdasani (2011) relates Jung’s thinking about synchronicity to his uncanny visions of floods overtaking Europe after his break with Freud and their coincidence with the First World War. Later, through Richard Wilhelm and The Secret of the Golden Flower, Jung encountered correspondences involving the I Ching and astrology. His encounter with the physicist Wolfgang Pauli eventually led him to rethink the interdependence between psyche and the physical universe (Shamdasani, 2011, p. ix).

Meaning Manifested in Sandplay Therapy: A Clinical Case

I would now like to consider a clinical case (Maekawa, 2010).
The client was a woman in her twenties with connective tissue disease. She spoke calmly about her illness but frequently criticized her workplace for its lack of understanding and staff reductions. One day, while describing her physical suffering and the tense atmosphere at work, she became tearful and said, “My feelings have stopped.” She repeated the same story for nearly thirty minutes.

She had previously wanted to try sandplay therapy, so we began.
When the therapist opened the sandbox, the white sand had become mottled, as though wet and dried, and its surface was rippled like a dry, barren wasteland. The therapist was shocked. The room was shared by several therapists who normally dried and leveled the sand after use. Yet, for some reason, on that day it had been left in this condition.

The client initially stood still, overwhelmed by the vivid miniatures and then by the sand. Slowly, she began to move. She touched the lower right corner of the sand and made a small fan-shaped ridge. From the shelf she chose a small pink cowrie shell, placed it inside the ridge, buried it in the sand, and quietly said:
“This may perhaps be a seed of hope that might exist.”

After sitting down, she sobbed:

“It’s too much … this desolate feeling fits me too perfectly. The things on the shelf felt so alive that I couldn’t put any of them in the tray. I think that one has to be alive in order to …”

Until then, she had feared that taking a rest would make her a failure. After this experience, however, she chose hospitalization and gradually changed how she confronted her illness. She also became able to communicate her suffering to her workplace and family.

Later she said:

“I became frightened when I saw that desert stretching out in front of me. I wondered whether it would remain like this forever. I feel that I began to understand that unless I did something here, somehow, it would remain like this forever.”

When consciousness denies profound suffering and attempts to distance itself from it, that suffering may be expressed from a deeper dimension. The sand, muddied, stirred, and then left unattended, had manifested before us.

To be overtaken by the shock of such an appearance, while receiving its meaning rather than immediately dismissing it, may be one significance of synchronicity in psychotherapy.
Such an event cannot simply be dismissed as carelessness, accident, or coincidence. It may also manifest in dreams. “Meaningful coincidences” can be understood as situations in which an important archetype has been constellated.

Activation of the Archetype and Jinen

According to Jung (pp. 24–25), when a situation is sufficiently serious, archetypal dreams may emerge, suggesting a path that consciousness could hardly have conceived. Such situations activate an archetype. When a problem is profound and insoluble, the “primordial images” in the deeper layers of the unconscious may become activated.
The client’s difficulty could not be resolved through consciousness alone. The sand in the sandbox seemed to suggest a path forward: a primordial image of life and the body may have been activated.

When such a primordial image emerges, Kawai (1986) describes the analyst’s task as facing “the infinitely mysterious realm,” entrusting oneself to the workings of jinen beyond the ego, and attempting to understand what arises (p. 182). He emphasizes remaining committed to the phenomenon while apparently doing nothing. To “participate with one’s whole being” while remaining aware of suffering is to “eliminate human contrivance and rely on nature (jinen)” (Kawai, 1986, p. 183).
For a client who needs to descend to a deeper level of consciousness and transform how they have been living, the analyst may need to “continue participating without doing anything,” relying on jinen. Kawai invokes the Zen master here; this may also be understood as a mediating role between the human and the supernatural.
I would like to consider the meaning of jinen on another occasion.

From Death to Life: Seeing from My Mother’s Perspective

As I wrote this paper, I continued to think about my mother’s death and our final time together. Then I suddenly realized that I could see the event not from my own perspective, but from the perspective of my mother’s life.
Perhaps, in her final moments, my mother was spending time with the lives extending from her to her children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren. Perhaps she was retracing memories of her life with the family members there, looking at photographs.

When I realized this, I felt grateful that I had been able to share such a moment with her at the end of her life. I am also deeply grateful for having been given the opportunity, at this particular moment, to think and write about synchronicity.

References

Jung, C. G. (1960/2011). Synchronicity: An Acausal Connecting Principle. With a new foreword by Sonu Shamdasani. Translated by R. F. C. Hull. In The Collected Works of C. G. Jung (Vol. 8).
Kawai, H. (1986). Shūkyō to kagaku no setten [The meeting point of religion and science]. Iwanami Shoten.
Maekawa, M. (2010). Shinri ryōhō ni okeru gūhatsuji: Hakaisei to chikara [Chance events in psychotherapy: Destructiveness and power]. Sōgen-sha.
Shamdasani, S. (2011). Foreword to the 2011 edition. In C. G. Jung, Synchronicity: An Acausal Connecting Principle. With a new foreword by Sonu Shamdasani. Translated by R. F. C. Hull. In The Collected Works of C. G. Jung (Vol. 8).

※This article was written in Japanese by Miyuki Maekawa and this English translation was supported by ChatGPT.