Close Encounters with Synchronicity

I've been blogging about the human psyche as mapped by the late Swiss theorist Carl Gustav Jung. His theory has it that "archetypes" common to every last one of us are responsible for putting certain patterns into our heads, so to speak. For example, we all have an inbuilt image of what a mother is, thanks to the Mother archetype.

Toward the end of his long and fruitful life, Jung began to realize that the archetypes are not just psyche-internal. They exist outside the individual person, as well as being active within the soul.

Jung developed a notion of the real existence of independent, potent, numinous archetypes. This came as an outgrowth of his work on "synchronicity," an often-encountered phenomenon in which internal images found in our dreams and fantasies match patterns occurring approximately simultaneously in objectively real events. The pattern-matching between inner and outer realities happens with no apparent cause, but it is not by chance either, Jung said. Instead, it reflects an "acausal orderedness" in the world that conveys meaning to us, where external events and their timing might by themselves appear to be meaningless.

All that is quite a mouthful, and a headful to boot. I'd like to give an example of synchronicity that may make it easier to understand. The example comes from the movie Close Encounters of the Third Kind.


In this 1979 classic of the science fiction genre by celebrated filmmaker Steven Spielberg, the main character is Roy Neary, played by Richard Dreyfuss. Neary is a lineman for the electric company who, while out in the field dealing with a puzzling electrical outage, has his pickup truck buzzed by an alien spaceship. He winds up with an inexplicable sunburn and an irresistible urge to sculpt his mashed potatoes into replicas of a place he's never seen: Devil's Mountain, Wyoming, also known as Devil's Tower.

Neary is so obsessed with trying to somehow externalize the Devil's Tower image that has been seared into his unconscious, in fact, that his constant preoccupation with doing so loses him his job, his wife, and his family.

Finally, he happens to see a picture on TV of the natural landmark in Wyoming and twigs to the fact that it matches his mashed-potato sculptures precisely. The TV coverage has it that the U.S. Army has been forced to clear the area around Devil's Tower of all human occupants, owing supposedly to an unexplained outbreak of anthrax that is killing livestock and wildlife. Neary, however, knows deep, deep down that the simultaneous occurrence of his mashed-potato obsession and the anthrax news story means something. He considers it absolutely necessary that he go to the very place that people are being evacuated from.

Along the way, he meets up with Gillian Guiler, a woman whom he knows only casually as someone who was likewise exposed to an alien spacecraft. Her small son has in fact been abducted by the aliens. She, like him, has been unable to stop thinking of and drawing shapes resembling Devil's Tower, and she has felt the same compulsion to travel to it that Neary has himself.

Neary and Guiler have to fight their way past the authorities in the region, but they make it to a spot overlooking an area that scientists have been secretly readying for a return visit by the aliens. The scientists have managed to decode messages from the aliens couched in the form of music and other containers of information. The messages have promised the scientists that the aliens will come in their spaceships to Devil's Tower on a certain night. On that night, Neary and Guiler are there towatch from their hiding place as the aliens make good on their promise.

This is not a hostile encounter, as some might expect. Instead, the massive "mother ship" of the alien race engages in a sort of otherworldly jam session with the music the earthlings play for it. This is music that has been taught to us by the aliens during previous encounters. We play the simple theme we were taught, and the aliens play back for us a bevy of ever more complex variations on that theme. Thus is the idea signaled to all those assembled that the aliens have come to us in harmony and peace.

Then comes the pièce de resistance: the alien mother ship opens its vast "mouth" and out march not only representatives of the alien race themselves but also former abductees who are being returned unharmed ... including Gillian Guiler's son. Next, pre-selected volunteers from earth march up the ramp to become the new generation of abductees, as it were. Among them is Roy Neary, who scampers down from his hiding place nest to Gillian and, even though he has not officially been pre-selected, is understood by the scientists to have been chosen for inclusion by the aliens themselves.


In order to see this narrative as betokening synchronicity in action, we have first to stipulate that the aliens in Close Encounters are stand-ins for archetypes of the collective unconscious. Indeed, it is generally understood by Jungians that our ideas about alien encounters pattern with our ideas about encounters with angels and gods ... or, if the aliens are hostile, as in H.G. Wells' War of the Worlds, with devils and demons. To a Jungian, angels and demons are symbolic of the influences of certain crucial archetypes.

For example, there is a Messenger archetype, an ally of the most important Jungian archetype of all, the Self. In classical myth, the god Mercury was a messenger. In Christian belief, angels serve as messengers from God. In Jung's theory, the Self archetype represents the very image of God in the soul, so messenger angels are of great importance as symbols of personal transformation.

Extending that notion to Close Encounters, the visitors from another world are likewise symbols of the transformation of Roy Neary as "everyman." Neary clearly grows as a person as a result of his experiences during the film. This growth could not have come to pass without the synchronicity between the particular image that keeps inexplicably popping into his head and the distinctive shape of Devil's Tower in the real world. That synchronicity gives meaning and content to his obsession with a certain "meaningless" form, and that meaningful content winds up transporting him to a higher plane of consciousness, symbolized by his being carried away in a spaceship by friendly aliens.