Quest for the Self, Part 5

The final chapter of Murray Stein's book Jung's Map of the Soul: An Introduction, the ongoing concern of my Quest for the Self series of posts, is about synchronicity. This topic is the single most controversial one in the theory of the human psyche proposed by the late Swiss psychologist Carl Gustav Jung.

Jung, over a very long and productive lifetime as a psychologist and psychological theorist, came to believe many hard-to-believe things about how the psyche is constituted. For example, he found there to be, in addition to the personal unconscious mind that each of us instantiates individually, a collective unconscious that is the same from one person to the next.

In this deep, universal realm of the unconscious psyche he found a set of potent personifications: divine infant, hero, king, queen, mother, father, etc. — along with powerful images that are not personifications, such as the mandala and the cross familiar in the East and the West, respectively, as religious symbols.

These images make their presence known in our dreams and myths, our stories and our art, in every time and place and culture. Where do they come from?

Basically, Jung said, they come from the Self.

The Self is the master of all the archetypes. Many images come directly from it, including hero, king, queen, cross, and mandala images. Any archetypal image whose basic meaning is "wholeness" or "growth toward wholeness" comes from the Self. Thus, when we dream of a tree, it is the Self that hides behind it.


The human task during the first half of our normal lifespan of 80 years or so is to manifest the ego, the center of our conscious mind. During the second half, this changes. We are then on a quest to realize the Self.

But what is the Self?

An archetype, yes. As an archetype, it is a source of numinous power. It is by means of this power that the Self and the other archetypes provide the unconscious psyche with their archetypal images, which then gather strength and invade the conscious psyche in the form of symbols.

Provide? Invade? Yes. For the archetypes, including the Self, lie outside the psyche proper, in a "psychoid" region that builds bridges between the mind and the body.

In fact, the Self — and here is where controversy arises — exists independently of the psyche of the individual person. It exists independently of the body of the individual. It pre-exists each of us, and it goes on existing after we die.

Within each one of us, the Self represents the image of God, the imago Dei. As a Being that transcends our own limited being, the Self is like unto God himself.


The transcendent Self, furthermore, is the basis for synchronicity.

Jung defined synchronicity as coincidence with meaning. Life is filled with uncanny coincidences between external, objective events and internal, subjective events. Here is one such coincidence. Jung wrote of synchronicity in an essay called "Synchronicity: An Acausal Connecting Principle." It appeared in a book co-authored with physicist Wolfgang Pauli, whose contribution was an essay called "The Influence of Archetypal Ideas on the Expression of Scientific Theories of Kepler."

Whence the synchronicity? Today I perused Stein's chapter discussing these two essays; last night, by pure coincidence, I watched an episode of Carl Sagan's Cosmos series in which Sagan dramatized Johannes Kepler's life, spent in quest of an understanding of the planets' motion around the sun.

As of last night, I had no idea that Kepler's struggles were of Jungian import ... though I recognized that Kepler's original ideas, discarded only after a long, failed attempt to harmonize them with actual observations of planetary movements, were projections of Jungian archetypes onto the natural world.

Kepler spent his life trying to show how the world in its adherence to natural laws exemplifies ideas in the mind of God.

My watching a TV show about Kepler and the very next day reading of the importance of Kepler in Jungian discussions of synchronicity is itself an example of synchronicity: "the simultaneous occurrence of a certain psychic state with one or more external events which appear as meaningful parallels to the momentary subjective state" (p. 211).

Put more simply, synchronicity is a "falling together in time" of two events in such a way as to produce a subjective sense that the falling together is meaningful in some way. Synchronicity is coincidence with meaning.


In my example, the falling together of two "Kepler events" means subjectively to me that I'd better put aside my ordinary skepticism and take synchronicity seriously, as a sign of the Self.

Stein puts it all this way:

Synchronicity is defined as a meaningful coincidence between psychic and physical events. A dream of a plane falling out of the sky is mirrored the next morning in a radio report. No known causal connection exists between the dream and the plane crash. Jung posits that such coincidences rest on organizers that generate psychic images on one side and physical events on the other. The two occur at approximately the same time, and the link between them is not causal. Anticipating his critics, Jung writes: "Skepticism should ... be leveled only at incorrect theories and not at facts which exist in their own right ... " (p. 210)

Synchronicity is acausal. The internal image, a fact in its own right, does not cause the external event. Nor does the external event cause the associated appearance of the internal image.

In my example, the external event is the coincidence of two apparently unrelated "Kepler events." The internal image is, I'd say, another way in which the Self presents itself to the psyche: as a world which, in Jung-speak, is more of an unus mundus than we normally give it credit for. Things that go on in such a close-coupled world have meaningful, if surprising, connections. They have hidden "organizers" that generate coincidences that are uncaused but meaningful.

The Self is chief among these hidden organizers. From a Jungian perspective, the Self is God.