Journal of Analytical Psychology, 2015, 60, 2, 159178

Bridging the reductive and the synthetic: some

reections on the clinical implications of
synchronicity
Angela Connolly, Italy
Abstract: When Jung introduced the concepts of synchronicity and the psychoid
unconscious, he expanded analytical psychology into decidedly uncanny territory.
Despite the early interest shown by Freud, anomalous phenomena such as telepathy
have become a taboo subject in psychoanalysis. Today, however, there is an
increasing interest in thought transference and synchronicity, thus opening the way
for a fruitful exchange between different psychoanalytical schools on their clinical
implications. I propose to examine some of the ambiguities of Jungs thinking, to
clarify how we dene synchronicity, the relationship between synchronicities and
parapsychological events, and their clinical signicance. At the present moment, we
are still unsure if such events should be considered as normal and a way of
facilitating individuation, or as an indication of psychopathology in the patient or
in the analyst, just as we are uncertain about the particular characteristics of the
intersubjective eld that can lead to synchronicities. Making use of the typology of
mind-matter correlations presented by Atmanspacher and Fach, and the distinction
they draw between acategorial and non-categorial states of mind, I will use two
clinical vignettes to illustrate the different states of mind in analyst and analysand
that can lead to synchronicities. In particular I will focus on the relationship
between analytical reverie and synchronicity.
Key words: Telepathy, synchronicity, causality and acausality, role of acategorial and
non-categorial states of mind in synchronicity, reverie

Introduction
The relationship between psychoanalysis and the paranormal has, from the
very beginning, been both close and at the same time extremely ambivalent
and conictual. As Derrida says, Difcult to imagine a theory of what
they call the unconscious without a theory of telepathy. They can neither
be confused or dissociated (1988, p. 14). If telepathy is indeed the shadow
of psychoanalysis, what then is the relationship between analytical
psychology, synchronicity and telepathy? It is my contention that even this
0021-8774/2015/6002/159

2015, The Society of Analytical Psychology

Published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA.
DOI: 10.1111/1468-5922.12142

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Angela Connolly

relationship is complex and ambivalent. If the concept of synchronicity, as

Elizabeth Lloyd Mayer suggests, is the quintessential essential expression of
the Jungian model of mind (2002, pp. 9394), nevertheless there is still
much uncertainty in the Jungian community as to: whether this concept is
still valid; whether the concept of synchronicity should be extended to
include the paranormal; and, nally, whether synchronistic events are an
indication of pathology to be treated reductively or as a means of
facilitating the individuation process and therefore treated synthetically.
In addition, while there is an increasing consensus that there is something in
the nature of the analytical relationship that increases the probability of the
occurrence of synchronistic events, we still know comparatively little about
the states of mind in analyst and patient that are linked to synchronicity.
Synchronicity, the concept of the psychoid and the phenomenon of telepathy
are uncanny: they destabilize our certainties; strip away our illusion of a mind
conned within the space of an individual body; and confront us with the
reality of a radically interconnected universe. As Roderick Main puts it, With
his notions of the psychoid unconscious and the psychic relativisation of time
and space, he [Jung] expanded analytical psychological theory into territory
that even many of his followers would prefer not to enter (2004, p. 176).
Telepathic synchronicities in which the patient is able in a certain sense to
read the mind of the analyst, to dream our dreams, to take on the role of our
double, are indeed truly unsettling. Nevertheless, if we are to remain true to
the intuitions of Jung, it is essential that we follow in the footsteps of the
many Jungian analysts who have written on synchronicity and continue to
explore the theoretical and clinical implications of expanding into this
unknown territory.1
As the denition of synchronicity as an acausal connecting principle implies,
synchronicity is a bridging concept which can potentially bring together
some of the fundamental oppositions characteristic of Western thought,
including the opposition between psyche and matter, and mind and body, but
equally, that between the reductive, scientic and causal, and the synthetic,
prospective and symbolic approaches to the psyche. In the present paper, I
propose to look at the way in which we conceptualize and interpret
synchronistic events in clinical practice in order to delineate the different
aspects of the analytical relationship that are associated with synchronicity. In
particular, I will be looking at the way in which synchronistic events in
analysis allow us to explore the different states of mind associated with
analytical reverie, in the hope of creating a bridge between the reductive and
synthetic approaches in clinical practice.

See Roderick Main (2007). Synchronicity and analysis: Jung and after, European Journal of
Psychotherapy and Counselling, 9, 4, 359371, for a full bibliography on this subject.

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Psychoanalysis and the occult

The ambiguous and ambivalent attitude displayed by psychoanalysis to
anomalous phenomena such as extrasensory perception, thought
transference, precognition and psychokinesis can be traced back to Freud
himself. If Freud was only too aware of the dangers to his new science
represented by the tide of black mud of occultism, nevertheless he
remained throughout his lifetime both fascinated and repelled by the
paranormal. He was for a brief period a corresponding member of the
Society for Psychical Research, founded in 1882, and, along with Ferenczi
and Anna Freud, actually experimented with thought transference (Gay
1989, p. 445). In a 1921 letter to Hereward Carrington, a well-known
psychical researcher, Freud declared, If I had my life to live over again, I
should devote myself to psychical research rather than to psychoanalysis
(Jones 1957, p. 392). At the same time, however, Freud constantly struggled
to reduce and constrain the uncanny charge of telepathy to the boundaries
of the transference and of psychoanalytical theory. As Chertok and Stenger
state, the task of psychoanalysis is, on the one hand, to avoid being
fascinated by telepathy, and on the other, to elucidate the materials of
thought transference, just as it elucidates fantasies, ordinary dreams, and
other subjective productions (1992, p. 73).
In 1953, shortly after Jung published his paper on synchronicity, Georges
Devereux published Psychoanalysis and the Occult, a collection of 31
papers by analysts such as Helene Deutsch, Gza Roheim, Paul Schilder,
Emilio Servadio, Dorothy Burlingham, Nandor Fodor, Jules Eisenbud,
including six contributions by Freud himself, although any reference to Jung
is conspicuously absent. These essays were dedicated to psychoanalytical
studies of so-called psi phenomena dealing with data pertaining to three
different types of observed or alleged concordances: correspondences
between the thoughts of the analyst and those of the patient (telepathy or
thought transference); correspondences between the thoughts of patients and
events external to the analytical situation (telepathy and/or clairvoyance);
and correspondences between the thoughts of the analyst and events
external to the analytical situation (telepathy and/or clairvoyance). Devereux
(1953a, 1953b, pp. 199-204) reports the ndings of Hollos (1933), based
on 20 years of observation and more than 500 cases, which suggested that
it is usually the thoughts of the analyst which are transmitted to the
analysand and that telepathic events are more likely to occur during
critical moments in the life of the analyst (1953a, 1953b, pp. 199-204). For
the psychoanalyst, therefore, paranormal events are essentially categorized
as linked to a lowering of consciousness and are consequently dealt with
through a reductive analysis designed to uncover the cause of the event.
This ambivalence to parapsychology has remained until today as, although
in private many analysts report experiences of paranormal occurrences,

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by and large there seems to be a general agreement that anomalous

phenomena such as thought transference are simply not a tting subject
for any discussion in the public domain. Examples are the cases of Stoller
reported by Elizabeth Lloyd Mayer in 2001 and the case described by the
Botellas of an analyst who had the same dream as a patient on the
same night but concealed this fact until 25 years later when the patient was
dead and the analyst himself terminally ill. As they critically remark, it was
as though it was shameful to say openly what should remain secret (2005,
p. 85).
If anomalous phenomena became a taboo subject in psychoanalysis, this is
certainly not true for Jung, who from his earliest years was himself subject to
paranormal experiences and always showed a profound interest in the clinical
and theoretical implications of these phenomena; this was an interest that
found its culmination in his conceptualization of synchronicity. In his
writings on synchronicity, Jung continued to refer to and use the ndings of
parapsychology, and there are frequent mentions in the synchronicity paper
of researchers such as Frederic Myers, Edmund Gurney, Frank Podmore,
Charles Richet and J.B. Rhine (Jung 1952). The uncertainty and confusion
about what we actually mean when we talk about synchronicity and what
are the boundaries of this concept can in part be attributed to Jung
himself. Although Jungs principal writings on this concept date from late in
his career, the idea of meaningful coincidence was present from relatively
early on and, as Roderick Main has pointed out in his 2004 book, one
reason for the inconsistency in Jungs thinking is that he made use of many
different and sometimes contrasting sources as he gradually developed his
ideas on synchronicity.
Dening synchronicity
If Jungs principal writings on this concept date from relatively late and draw
together many different sources, in this paper I will be looking at the three
which I feel radically changed his thinking on synchronicity. The rst is Jungs
personal experiences and his life-long interest in parapsychology. The second,
as Joe Cambray has pointed out, was Jungs encounter with the theories of
Einstein on the relativity of space and time and on eld theory, which
provided Jung with a theoretical basis for his ideas on the possibility of
acausal connections between psychic events and material events. It was only
the collaboration with Wolfgang Pauli and the encounter with quantum
mechanics, however, that gave Jung the condence and the scientic backing
to publicly expose his theories. At the same time, however, this encounter
radically altered his approach to synchronicity, for, as Marialuisa Donati has
pointed out:
prior to the collaboration, Jung had stressed mainly the phenomenological and
empirical features of synchronistic phenomena, while in collaboration with Pauli, he

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focused his attention upon their ontological, archetypal character. in fact, as a

consequence of their collaboration, synchronicity was transformed from an
empirical concept to a fundamental explanatory-interpretative principle which
together with causality could possibly lead to a more complete world view.
(2004, p. 707)

The last and perhaps the most fundamental source for Jungs thinking on
synchronicity comes from his relationship with Richard Wilhelm, and through
him with Chinese traditions such as Daoism, as we can see from his memorial
address for Wilhelm where Jung states that Wilhelm inuenced him more
than any other individual in his life (1930/1971, para. 96). As Murray Stein
notes, Development as circular and synchronicity as fundamental principle of
reality were two essential ideas that Jung drew from Chinese thought and
adapted in his own theorizing about the psyche and the nature of the human
mind (2005, p. 219). In fact it was only after the encounter with Wilhelm
that Jung rst used the term synchronism in a 1928 seminar on dreams to
account for non-causal coincidences and in 1930 in the memorial address for
Richard Wilhelm he talks about a synchronistic principle (ibid., para 96).
How then does Jung draw together these different sources in his denition of
synchronicity? In the 1952 paper, which represents his nal take on the subject,
synchronicity is variously dened as acausal parallellism, as an acausal
connecting principle and more fully as the simultaneous occurrence of a
certain psychic state with one or more external events which appear as
meaningful parallels to the momentary subjective state (1952, para. 850). On
careful consideration, however, there are a series of problems with these
denitions, as writers such as Main (2004) and Yiassemides (2011) have
pointed out. Jung is not clear about the exact relationship of time, probability
and meaning to synchronistic events, and one result is that there is an
enormous variation in exactly how synchronicity is dened. In popular
culture and in the writings of more nave Jungians, any coincidence, no
matter how trivial, is labelled as synchronistic, as Warren Colman notes
(2012, p. 512).
Colman in a 2011 paper gives a rather limited denition of synchronicity. He
distinguishes two principal categories of synchronistic events: synchronicities in
which a coincidental external event occurs simultaneously with or shortly after
an internal event such as a thought, an image or a dream; and paranormal
experiences such as precognition where the internal event is predicative of the
external event (2011, p. 473). In the rst category it is the external event that
acts in a certain sense as a sign in a way that points towards the internal
event and gives it new meaning, while in the second kind, it is the internal
event, especially pre-cognition which constitutes the sign pointing towards the
occurrence of an outer event occurring in a different space-time (ibid, p.473).
According to Colman, it is only the rst category which is more likely to
generate strong transcendence and a shift into non-rational states of mind and

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is therefore highly signicant even if not remarkable (ibid, p. 474), while the second
category is held to be remarkable but not necessarily productive of transcendent or
symbolical meaning. From these premises, Colman hypothesizes that it is the
interaction between the subjective inner event and the objective outer event that
creates the meaning, arguing that Jung is mistaken when he suggests a psychoid
realm in which mind and matter are united and that there exists an acausal
orderedness in Nature which is the source of the transcendental meaning.
Colman therefore excludes both acasuality and paranormal occurrences from his
denition of synchronicity. Jung himself, however, is very clear that there is a
continuum between synchronicity and the paranormal. He sees his own
paranormal experiences as synchronistic and, in the Rsum to the 1952 paper,
Jung delineates three different forms of synchronicity:
a) the coincidence of a psychic state in the observer with a simultaneous, objective,
external event that corresponds to the psychic state or content;
b) the coincidence of a psychic state with a corresponding (more or less
simultaneous) external event taking place outside the observers eld of
perception, i.e. at a distance, and only veriable afterward;
c) the coincidence of a psychic state with a corresponding, not yet existent future
event that is distant in time and can likewise only be veried afterward.
(1952, para. 984)

If a) represents the classical denition of synchronicity, b) and c) are respectively

clairvoyance and precognition, experiences that fall within the domain of
parapsychology.
Joe Cambray, on the other hand, working from clinical experiences of the
distribution and affective intensity of meaningful coincidences in analysis,
argues for a much wider denition. As he notes in his 2009 book,
Synchronicity: Nature and Psyche in an Interconnected Universe:
As the examination of empathy gives substance to multiple levels of interactions in the
analytic eld (affective, cognitive, conscious, and unconscious), the question of
unconscious communication comes to the fore. In the context of clinical studies of
synchronicity, I have suggested a range of intensities of synchronistic phenomena
linked to frequency of occurrence and to types of interactions based on levels
of disturbance of or elements of genius in the psyche. Once a spectrum of
synchronicities is envisioned, we can imagine a layering of levels of depth in these
phenomena, including those of empathy, resonance, enactments, projective
identications, psycho-somatic events, and (unconscious communications generally, as
well as overt synchronicities, all likely having synchronistic cores.
(2009, pp. 10910)

In the present paper, alongside the frequency of occurrence, the affective

intensity and the types of interaction suggested by Cambray as possible factors
which could allow us to construct a classication of synchronistic events in
analysis, I will also be taking into account the degree of correspondence
between the psychic content and the objective outer process, and the different
levels of consciousness in both patient and analyst, in order to suggest a

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classication which encompasses a range of synchronistic events that goes from

weak synchronicities to very strong ones where the affective intensity, the degree
of correspondences, alterations in the state of consciousness and the acausality
increase as the psychoid archetypal level is approached.
Cambray also suggests that recent scientic discoveries that were not
available to Jung can allow us to begin to trace out possible causal factors in
synchronistic events. In a number of ground-breaking papers he makes full use
of certain new holistic and non-reductive scientic paradigms to suggest that
many features of synchronistic experiences can be reconsidered in the light of
contemporary science as a form of psychological emergence (ibid, p. 244). For
Cambray, the ndings of eld theory and of complexity theory, together with
new ideas on the role of symmetry breaking, all of which explore the way in
which order can emerge through self-organization at the edge of chaos (ibid.,
p. 230), allow us to hypothesize that synchronicities are evidence of a selforganizing complex system poised at or near a critical state (ibid, p. 238).
Synchronistic occurrences act to signal or actually act to bring a system
towards the optimum equilibrium between order and chaos in order to bring
about psychic phase transitions and facilitate individuation. As Cambray
writes, By analogy, meaningful coincidences in the synchronistic sense can be
recognized as psychological factors that spur the evolution of the psyche
(personal and collective). They can serve, when understood in this way, as
motivational spurs that potentially organize images and experiences into
previously imagined forms (ibid, p. 233).
Are we then to jettison the whole idea of the acasuality of synchronicity,
which, as Main notes, Jung clung to with great tenacity, in spite of the
difculties with it and the availability of alternative explanations for the
phenomena he evoked in support of it (2004. p. 56)?
In what was perhaps a meaningful coincidence for me, when I was in the
process of writing the introduction to the Italian translation of Cambrays
book, the latest copy of The Journal of Analytical Psychology arrived with an
article by theoretical physicist Harald Atmanspacher and a psychologist,
Wolfgang Fach, entitled A structural-phenomenological typology of
mind-matter correlations (2013a). They suggest that the mind-matter
distinction should be conceived of in terms of an epistemic split of the
symmetry of a psychophysically neutral domain (Jungs unus mundus)
and that this implies, as a direct and generic consequence, correlations
between mind and matter that are not however due to causal interaction
(ibid, p. 228). Atmanspacher and Fach put forward a sophisticated
phenomenological classication of anomalous or unusual human
experiences (extraordinary experiences or EE in their terminology), in
which Jungian synchronicities are to be considered as special cases of
induced positive mind-matter correlations with large deviations above the
baseline (ibid, p. 233), and would therefore be classied as belonging to
the same group as ESP (extrasensory perception) phenomena such as

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telepathy. Atmanspacher and Fach therefore offer us both a way to begin to

study experimentally the factors involved in paranormal events and
synchronistic experiences as Cambray suggests, but unlike Cambray, as
David Tresan writes in his commentary, their model of reality offers a
different paradigm which contemplates the existence of an interactive space
that is completely void of causality (2013b, p. 252).
If, in Atmanspacher and Fachs paper, the separation between the ontic and
the epistemic domains appears radical and impossible to overcome, in their
reply to the commentary of Tresan (2013) the authors suggest that this
division is far from being so clear. As they write:
In fact, one should conceive of a whole spectrum of boundaries, each one indicating
the transition to a more comprehensive level of wholeness until (ultimately) the
distinction-free unus mundus is approached. A viable idea in this context might be
archetypal levels with increasing degrees of generality: the unus mundus at the
bottom, the mental and physical on top, and intermediate levels in between make a
more rened sense of what we have in mind. Depending on the status of the
individuation process of the individual concerned, Jungs transcendent function
regulates the exchange among the levels.
(Atmanspacher & Fach 2013b, p. 255)

These considerations raise the question of what exactly are the factors that
are associated with a movement towards the possibility of accessing, at least in
part, the archetype and the unus mundus. While Atmanspacher and Fach stress
the importance of the transcendent function in the movement between
the different archetypal levels, I prefer to underline the changes in consciousness
that can allow us to move towards the psychoid level and that increase the
likelihood of synchronistic events. If there is a general agreement that
synchronicities and anomalous phenomena are associated with altered states of
consciousness, what is not clear is whether these alterations are purely linked to
a lowering of consciousness or to some other different alterations of
consciousness, just as there has been very little investigation as to whether the
role of the analyst in such occurrences is merely a question of personal
complexes or if there are other factors involved.
Parapsychological research ndings
One of the problems of investigating synchronicities in analysis is that there is
still comparatively little research into the frequency of such events, just as
there is still considerable debate as to whether they should be considered as
an indication of psychopathology and what are the personality traits and the
states of mind associated with them.
There are now, however, various statistical studies on the occurrence of
anomalous occurrences in the general population and some serious scientic
research on the association between paranormal experiences and personality
traits and psychopathology. According to Fach et al. (2013), and contrary to

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naive expectations, exceptional experiences (EE) are not rare but abundant and
there are now several studies which cite estimated frequencies of 30-50% for
populations in Western countries, and higher than that within other cultural
contexts. In addition, there is evidence that these experiences are not
necessarily associated with pathology as was often contended in the past.
Fach and his co-writers note that, while extraordinary events and altered
states of consciousness are associated with schizoid personality traits and
dissociation, they are also associated with high scores on personality traits
such as transliminality (a measurable concept introduced by Thalbourne to
refer to a gating mechanism modulating the ow of information and effect from
subliminal to supraliminal level) (Thalbourne 2000) and thin-boundariedness
(Hartman 1991). Both of these are also associated with creativity, with religious
experience, with lucid dreaming and with mystical experiences. As Fach et al.
suggest, even if there is a substantial overlap with many symptoms and
diagnoses of mental disorders, EE per se must not be categorized as such.
Instead, the evidence would seem to suggest that a continuous spectrumfrom
sound mental health to mental disorderreects the situation more properly
than a discrete distinction between them.
Synchronicity and clinical practice
These research ndings have important implications for clinical practice: for
how we conceive of synchronicities; for how we approach and interpret them;
and for the role of the analyst as a catalyst of synchronistic events. In the
past, there existed a fairly wide divergence between the different schools of
Jungian thought: more classical Jungians tending to see synchronistic events
as related to the constellation of an archetype, and considering them to be
compensatory to consciousness and as a way to furthering the individuation
process; while more developmental Jungians, like psychoanalysts, tended to
see synchronicities as signs of underlying pathology and of unresolved
complexes requiring a reductive approach, as Joe Cambray notes (2004, p.
236). Today, the tendency is more towards bringing together these different
approaches by underlining the diverse meanings linked to synchronistic
events. George Bright, in an important article, stresses that the concepts of
synchronicity and of the psychoid unconscious are fundamental in dening
the specic characteristics of Jungian clinical theory and practice. As he
writes, Analytical attitude, in Jungian analysis, is thus based on the concept
that there is an underlying psychoid dimension to meaning that is
unconscious and can therefore only be known indirectly and in a provisional
way (1997, pp. 633). For Bright (1997, pp. 6167), alongside the reductivecausal level, in which the meaning is derived from the personal history; the
teleological level, where the meaning is linked to the compensatory function
of the unconscious and the drive of the Self towards individuation; and the
hermeneutic level, where meaning is a co-creation of analyst and analysand,

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there exists yet another level of meaning: the objective level where the
synchronistic event postulates a meaning which is a priori to human
consciousness and apparently exists outside man. (Jung 1952, para. 960).
Bearing in mind the kind of classication of synchronistic events suggested by
Cambray and the idea of Atmanspacher and Fach about different archetypal
levels, the question then arises as to whether it is possible to distinguish
phenomenologically between different kinds of conscious experience that are
associated with synchronicity. To this purpose, I will make use of the
distinction suggested by Atmanspacher and Fach (2005), between categorial,
non-categorial and acategorial mental states, and the possible links between
these and anomalous experiences including synchronistic events.
Non-categoriality and acategoriality in different states of consciousness
At the end of the 19th century, William James hypothesized that the contents of
consciousness can be divided into two broad categories: substantive mental
representations which are relatively stable and on which it is possible to focus
attention, and transitive or fringe states which are unstable and do not have
distinct sensory content on which it is possible to focus attention. These latter
states function to create a feeling of relation between substantive contents of
consciousness and to provide germane relational informationi.e. context
information (Mangan 2007, p. 676) about a given substantive state of
consciousness. As James wrote:
I cannot but think that the most important step forward that has occurred in
psychology since I have been a student of that science is the discovery, rst made in
1886, that, in certain subjects at least, there is not only the consciousness of the
ordinary eld, with its usual centre and margin, but an addition thereto in the shape
of a set of memories, thoughts and feelings which are extra-marginal and outside of
the primary consciousness altogether, yet must be classied as conscious facts of
some sort, able to reveal their presence by unmistakable signs
(James 1902/1982, p. 233)

In a 2005 paper, Atmanspacher and Fach make use of dynamic systems theory and
the distinction drawn by the French philosopher Jean Gebser between categoriality
and acategoriality to explore the different states of consciousness associated with
categorial, non-categorial and acategorial states of mind. For Gebser, every
categorial system is an idealized ordering scheme through which actual
phenomena are xed and absolutized; as such they are a 3D framework with a
static and spatial character (1986, pp. 2856). Atmanspacher and Fach argue
that mental representations are based on categories in which the state of a mental
system is stable and as they note, the category of the 1st person singular, the I
or the ego can be regarded as one of the most basic representations (2005, p.
15). It is exactly these stability properties of the ego category, which are essential
for the continuous maintenance of the perception of ones own identity (ibid.,
p. 15). In other words, consciousness of the ego complex is substantive but, in

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non-categorial states such as regression, the ego representation becomes

destabilized. Here, there is a return to earlier levels of categorial differentiation
and integration of mental representations in which the boundaries between the
representations of self and other, self and world are gradually broken down.
Acategorial mental states, on the other hand, are unstable or transitive mental
states in which the existence of categories is maintained but the mental state
is located in between categories. As Taylor noted in 1984, such transitive
states may play a fundamental role in the anomalous states of consciousness
which occur in higher states of consciousness such as those experienced in
transcendental meditation and other Eastern techniques.
Atmanspacher and Fach (2005, p. 14), refer to the work of Petzold (1993, pp.
248-70), based on his clinical experience as a body-based therapist, in which he
draws a clear distinction between ordinary receptive and reexive awareness in
the waking state and anomalous states of consciousness in order to propose a
spectrum of consciousness, extending from areexive, (quasi non-categorial
unconscious) over increasingly reexive categorical states up to
acategorial hyper- and trans-reexive states. These different states are
accompanied by different qualities of experience in tinge, lucidity, intensity
and range. According to Atmanspacher and Fach (2005), in these higher
states of consciousness, the ego category is not weakened or dissolved but
maintained while, at the same time, consciousness is no longer within the ego
but rather in the borderland between ego and non-ego, between self and
world. My hypothesis is that, if synchronicities are clearly associated with
non-categorial states such as dissociation and regression, in which there is a
lowering of consciousness either on the part of the patient or the analyst, then
the capacity of the analyst to access these kinds of fringe or transitive states of
consciousness through a particular kinds of reverie increases the probability of
synchronistic events. This is very much in line with Cambrays suggestion that
the optimal mental state for analytical work based on a CAS (complex
adaptive systems) model would be for the personalities involved to be poised
near the interface of order and chaosthe creative edge (2004, p. 234).
Analytical reverie according to Antonino Ferro (2010, p. 132) depends on the
capacity of the analyst to take in the unmetabolized and therefore unthinkable
proto-emotions and proto-sensations of the patient and to transform them into
images which can be visual, acoustic, tactile or olfactory. Reverie allows the
analyst to access what Ferro, working from Bion, refers to as the waking
dream thought (2010, p. 7). For Bion, in fact, dreaming is not only a
nocturnal experience but one that continues also in unconscious waking life
(1962, pp. 15-16), a position shared by Jung who also saw dreaming as a
continuous process. As he writes in Childrens Dreams:
It is not always so easy, however, to delimit a dream series. It is a kind of monologue
taking place under the cover of consciousness. This monologue is heard, so to
speak, in the dream, and sinks down during the periods when we are awake. But in

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a way the monologue never ends. We are quite probably dreaming all the time, but
consciousness makes so much noise that we no longer hear the dream when awake.
(Jung 2008, p. 3)

For both Ferro (2010) and Bion (1962), the proto-emotions and sensations are
transferred into the mind of the analyst by projective identication, but there
are other, more primitive mechanisms through which contents can be
transferred from one psyche to another. Thomas Ogden stresses that, for
projective identication to take place, there must already be some sense of
inner space into which one can project an aspect of oneself or into which one
can take an aspect of the object (Ogden 1989, p. 135). Fordham, too, seems
to have some intuition of this difference when he speaks of projections onto
and projections into (1963, p. 7). When we are faced with a patient in which
there is a profound regression or dissociation and where there is, as yet, no
sense of inner space in which to store even proto-emotions or protosensations, the probability of a direct, telepathic or synchronistic transfer from
unconscious to unconscious is increased, just as there can be a direct transfer
of a somatic sensation from the patient to the unconscious of the analyst. If the
analyst is to access and make sense of these transmissions, they need to be able
to carry out what Csar and Sra Botella refer to as the analysts work of
gurability, a work whichaccording to these authorscan only come about
when the analyst is able to accept a regression to the most unconscious levels
of the psyche in which he or she becomes the analysands double (2005, p.
71). To illustrate this kind of analytical work, I will make use of a clinical case
I have previously described (Connolly 2010, p. 218).
After several months of analysis with a young woman I called Maggie, we
had reached an impasse in which it had become increasingly clear that what
was going on was merely an imitation of a good analysis, while in reality
nothing was happening. It was at this point that something rather dramatic
occurred. Maggie arrived at a session saying to me that she felt hopeless and
incapable, but this time, rather unusually, she described a physical sensation
of a heavy weight on her stomach. When I asked her to imagine this weight
she replied that it made her think of something brown, earth, a mass of
earthbut then she stopped and was unable to go further. I then suddenly had
an olfactory image of almost hallucinatory intensity of the smell of damp
earth which then translated into a haptic image of earth pressing on a face
and then into a visual image of a freshly dug grave. Instead of holding the
image as I would usually do I found myself saying to her that perhaps this
earth was the grave of a bad little girl who had never been able to live.
Maggie became extremely agitated and distressed, with apparently acute
feelings of depersonalization, and said that thinking of this image made her
feel as though she was split into two, as if doubled. Gradually she calmed
down sufciently to be able to leave the consulting room at the end of the
hour. This image of a dead baby remained with her however, and continued
as a central image in her dreams and in the analytical work.

Bridging the reductive and the synthetic

171

It is my hypothesis however, that the analytical couple, working as a double,

had entered into a synchronistic eld and, rather than a regression on the part
of myself, the analyst, we moved from a state of mind of a stable ego complex
towards a state characterized by a fringe consciousness which is acategorial.
With movements and shifts towards acategorial states of consciousness, I
could access the type of analytical reverie that had permitted me to access the
image of the dead baby, which had a powerful effect on the unfolding
analytical work to come.
To illustrate the non-categorial and acategorial states of consciousness that
can lead to synchronistic events in analysis, I will now explore two different
episodes of synchronicity from my own practice.
Two clinical vignettes
Many years ago, an attractive woman in her early forties, named Mary, began
an analysis for problems of depression and a sense of inner emptiness, of
feeling cut off from life and from other people, although at the time she had a
successful career and was in a rather symbiotic relationship with an older man.
She attributed her problems to the relationship with her father, a domineering
and emotionally detached man who tended to exert a rigid control over the
lives of his children. At the initial assessment she appeared extremely schizoid
with marked emotional dissociation and with occasional episodes of
depersonalization in which she felt that she no longer had any sensations, that
she was almost not alive and that everything around her was empty. In her
words, she felt she was living entirely in her own private world, as this was the
only way she could defend herself. In her early twenties she had also suffered
from a depressive episode treated with antidepressants for ve years following
an operation for a severe somatic illness.
The episode I will be describing happened after a year of analysis. Mary had
immediately developed a very intense positive transference to me and I too felt a
very warm maternal countertransference towards her. The analysis seemed to
be proceeding well as she felt more in touch with reality and the episodes of
depersonalization had almost disappeared. Out of the blue, she arrived at her
session one day saying that she had had a strange dream about my father. She
had dreamt that my father was very ill but that I was not looking after him
properly as his room was in complete disorder and she then described the
room in great detail. To my intense shock, the room she described was that of
my former analyst who had died some years before. The details corresponded
exactly, not with the room when I was in analysis, but the room when I had
visited him during his nal illness. Immediately, I was overwhelmed with
feelings of invasion and of being doubled, as it seemed as though there were
no boundaries between us and that she had complete access to my
unconsciousan extremely uncanny feeling. I had to struggle for a few
moments to maintain any kind of analytical attitude. I said nothing to the

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Angela Connolly

patient about what had happened and limited myself to exploring her feelings
about her own father. At the time, the dream signalled to me the lack of ego
boundaries, and the absence in her unconscious of a positive paternal function,
which could have helped her to establish a more adequate separation from the
maternal gure. Much of our subsequent work was directed towards reductive
interpretative work on the transference in order to strengthen her ego
boundaries, but over the years I have continued to reect on the signicance of
this passage of content from the mind of the analyst to that of the patient.
Ehrenwald (1947), who wrote extensively on paranormal events in analysis,
suggested that such events can occur when the analyst is preoccupied with
personal problems and has failed to recognize the transference projections of the
patient, and he advocates in such cases the need for a careful examination of the
countertransference to avoid what he refers to as telepathic leakage of
preconscious and unconscious preoccupations. Undoubtedly, this telepathic
leakage between my unconscious and that of the patient signalled the need for
me to become more aware of my strong maternal countertransference and the
need to use paternal function to help the patient emerge from symbiosis with the
maternal gure through more reductive causal interpretations, but there are also
other meanings which were less obvious to me at the time. Looking back, I now
believe that the image of a sick and neglected father in this synchronistic dream
can also be linked to the fact that both the patients and my own father suffered
traumatic war experiences about which they were unable to speak. For Mary,
the fathers trauma had been impossible to represent and it remained therefore
as a traumatic topos in her unconscious. The synchronistic episode can also be
seen in the light of the fact that the traumatic experiences of my father and their
effects on my own psyche, intensied probably by the loss of my analyst, may
have led me to neglect the importance of the paternal trauma for Mary. In my
later work with her, in fact, we were gradually able to reconstruct just how
much her fathers war experiences and the resulting affective dissociation had
damaged his capacity to perform a paternal and structuring function for Mary.
Even more importantly, however, on my part the dream led to the constellation
of the archetypal experiences of time and death. At that moment, I was not
conscious of the risk that the analytical dyad could remain frozen into a
symbiotic, claustrophiliac relationship from which time, separation and death
could be profoundly excluded. This intense synchronistic episode served to
bring about a phase transition in my mind, enabling a powerful shift towards
what Cambray describes as an emergent state of mind, poised at the edge of
order and chaos (2004, p. 233).
The second episode I wish to describe is very different, and the synchronistic
core is much less evident than the rst, although the affects and the
transformative impact produced in both analyst and patient were equally
intense. The patient, named Veronica, was a woman in her forties, and had a
history of childhood trauma and multiple episodes of physical and
psychological abuse at the hands of her mother. During a session in which she

Bridging the reductive and the synthetic

173

was once again puzzling over the reasons for her mothers hatred, quite suddenly
I began to have the sensation of being unable to breathe, that I was choking, and
I began to cough violently for a few seconds. Veronica at once became aware of
my distress and as soon as I had recovered asked me if I was alright in a very
anxious tone. Given that nothing like this had ever happened to me before,
either with Veronica or with other analysands, I had the distinct feeling that
the episode of choking came not from myself but from Veronica, a kind of
somatic countertransference. At that point, I began to reect on the possible
signicance of choking for Veronica and for what was taking place in the
analytical relationship. I suddenly asked Veronica whether her mother had had
a child previous to her own birth; she had told me that she had only a younger
brother who was loved by her mother. In a broken tone of voice she
remembered that her mother had indeed had a child several years before
Veronica was born, but that this much-loved boy had suffered in early infancy
from heart disease and that he had choked to death. Veronica then told me
about an episode when she was very small when her mother had, in a t of
rage, violently hit her on the chest several times. This suggests that the
transference of a somatic content from the patient to the analyst can be seen as
a synchronistic event. The dissociated memory of the child who choked to
death was transferred to the analyst and led to the somatic
countertransference. But it was only the analytical embodied reverie that
allowed us to nd the meaning of this synchronistic episode and help Veronica
to begin to understand the reason for her mothers hatred, and to begin to feel
for the rst time that this hatred was not because she was bad or unlovable. In
the case of Mary, the synchronistic event was linked to the state of relative
unconsciousness and dissociation between us, which led to a decrease of
reexive thinking and of observer distance on the part of both. However, in
the case of Veronica, I suggest that the synchronicity was linked not only to
the state of regression and dissociation with the loss of the capacity for
categorial distinctions on the part of the patient, but also to a particular kind
of analytical reverie. Cambray (2004, p. 241) has suggested that reverie may
be linked to the presence of a synchronistic eld. In this case, I believe that
what took place in the mind of the analyst was on the one hand a regression
towards what Petzold describes as associative, increasingly pictorial
experiences with a growing involvement of emotions and autonomous
physiological functions (Petzold 1993, p. 261), and on the other a movement
towards a kind of hyper-reexive fringe consciousness. We could describe this
as an acategorial consciousness in which the capacity for categorial
distinctions and for the maintenance of an observer position is maintained,
while at the same time the increase of the imaginative and intuitive capacity to
understand the total meaning of the event is increased. The sensation of
choking could be described as a kind of bodily-based pictorial image which
allowed me to access a traumatic experience of the patient that would have
otherwise remained unthinkable. This experience with Veronica is similar in

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Angela Connolly

some ways to the description of working as a double given by Botella, where, as

they put it, without the obstacle of the countertransference and the eld of
preconscious memory remaining as close as possible to the unknown of the
analysand that is a triggering cause of the state of quality of his thinking,
interpretations of a particularly intuitive nature can come to the analyst. These
interpretations which are formed along the direct path of regression give
access to unrepresentable areas of the analysands mind that would otherwise
remain unreachable (2004, p. 83). However, as I have said, it is my
hypothesis that, rather than a regression in the sense of a shift towards noncategorial states of consciousness, the type of reverie described here involves a
movement on the part of the analyst away from a state of mind in which there
is substantive consciousness of the ego complex towards a state of mind
characterized by a fringe consciousness which is acategoriala kind of lucid
waking dream thought that is created in the intersubjective space between the
two participants. As Jung wrote in a letter of the 29th of September 1934 to
James Kirsch, In the deepest sense, all of us do not dream out of ourselves but
out of that which exists between myself and the other (2011, p. 63).
Conclusion
More than 60 years have passed since Jung wrote his groundbreaking paper on
synchronicity and the psychoid unconscious, and while we are ever more aware
that there is something in the analytical relationship that predisposes to
synchronistic events, we are still unable to dene exactly what we mean when
we talk about synchronicity, just as we are still relatively uncertain as to the
exact states of mind in analyst and patient that predispose to these occurrences
and the meaning we should attribute to them. If, through our training and our
clinical practice we are expected to be thoroughly grounded in the models of
mind of either Freud or Jung, as Lloyd Mayer writes, To be thoroughly
grounded in bothsomething very few of us aremay suggest a route towards
engaging the question of how the individual boundaried mind and the radically
connected mind describe models of mind that can start to complement each
other in new and critically important ways. (2002, p. 94). In the same way, in
China on the Mind (2013), Christopher Bollas distinguishes between two
different states of mind: one dominated by the paternal order which is causal,
metonymic, diachronic, representational (privileging content over form) and
dependent on words; and one under the sway of the maternal order which is
metaphoric, synchronic, presentational (privileging form over content) and
dependent on image. If, as Bollas writes, the maternal order has been
subjected to an ongoing repression within the psychoanalytical movement (ibid,
p. 29), equally we could say that the repressed or shadow side of analytical
psychology is the paternal order. I think that the image of the neglected and
dying father in the rst episode I mention above speaks also to this and to the
need on the part of both psychoanalysis and analytical psychology to mediate

Bridging the reductive and the synthetic

175

and integrate these two opposite states of mind. By looking at the different states
of mind that are involved in synchronicities, the hope is that we can begin to create
bridges between the reductive and the synthetic approaches to the psyche.
TRANSLATIONS OF ABSTRACT
Lorsque Jung a fait connatre les concepts de synchronicit et dinconscient psychode, il a
largi le champ de la psychologie analytique dune faon vraiment extraordinaire. Bien
que Freud se soit intress trs tt aux phnomnes paranormaux comme la tlpathie,
ces derniers sont devenus un sujet tabou en psychanalyse. Toutefois, lheure actuelle,
lintrt pour la rexion sur le transfert et la synchronicit se dveloppe, ouvrant ainsi la
voie un change fcond, au sujet de leurs implications cliniques, entre les diffrentes
coles psychanalytiques.Dans cet article, je propose de considrer certaines des ambiguts
de la pense de Jung, pour donner une dnition claire de la synchronicit, de la relation
entre les synchronicits et les vnements parapsychologiques, ainsi que leur signication
clinique. lheure actuelle, nous ne sommes encore pas certains que de tels vnements
puissent tre considrs comme une voie normale facilitant lindividuation, ou bien
comme le signe dune psychopathologie sous-jacente chez le patient ou lanalyste, de
mme que nous navons pas de certitude sur les signes particuliers du champ intersubjectif
qui pourraient provoquer les synchronicits. Je vais mappuyer sur deux vignettes cliniques
pour illustrer les diffrents tats desprit qui peuvent provoquer des synchronicits chez
lanalyste et chez le patient, en utilisant la typologie des corrlations esprit-matire
prsente par Atmanspacher et Fach, et la distinction quils font entre les tats desprit
acatgoriels et non-catgoriels ainsi que leur lien avec les expriences extraordinaires. Je
soulignerai particulirement le lien entre rverie analytique et synchronicit.
Als Jung die Konzepte der Synchronizitt und des psychoiden Unbewuten einfhrte,
erweiterte er die Analytische Psychologie um ausgesprochen unheimliche Gebiete.
Ungeachtet des frh von Freud gezeigten Interesses waren anomale Phnomene, wie die
Telepathie, zum Tabuthema innerhalb der Psychoanalyse geworden. Heute jedoch gibt es
ein zunehmendes Interesse an Gedankenbertragung und Synchronizitt, was den Weg
ebnet zu einem fruchtbaren Austausch zwischen psychoanalytischen Schulen bezglich
ihrer klinischen Implikationen.Ich versuche, einigen der Ambiguitten in Jungs Denken
nachzugehen um zu klren, wie wir Synchronizitt denieren, wie die Beziehung
beschaffen ist zwischen Synchronizitten und parapsychologischen Ereignissen und worin
ihre klinische Bedeutung besteht. Gegenwrtig sind wir noch immer unsicher, ob solche
Ereignisse als normal und als Varianten bei der Entwicklung von Individuation gesehen
werden sollten, oder als Indikatoren fr eine Psychopathologie des Patienten oder des
Analytikers, so wie wir uns im Unklaren sind ber die einzelnen Charakteristika des
intersubjektiven Feldes, das Synchronizitten befrdern kann. Unter Hinzuziehung der
Typologie der Geist-Materiekorrelationen, wie sie von Atmanspacher und Fach vorgestellt
wurden, und der Unterscheidung die sie zwischen akategorialen und nichtkategorialen
Seelenzustnden eingefhrt haben, werde ich mit Hilfe zweier klinischer Vignetten die
unterschiedlichen Seelenzustnde des Analytikers und des Analysanden verdeutlichen,
deren Zusammentreffen zu Synchronizitten fhren kann. Im besonderen werde ich mich
auf die Beziehung zwischen analytischer Reverie und Synchronizitt beziehen.

176

Angela Connolly

Quando Jung introdusse i concetti di sincronicit e di inconscio psicoide egli spinse la

psicologia analitica in un territorio decisamente inquietante. Nonostante il primo
interesse mostrato da Freud, fenomeni anomali, quali la telepatia, per la psicoanalisi
divennero un soggetto tab. Oggi tuttavia vi un crescente interesse sia per il transfert
che per la sincronicit, cos da aprire la via per un fruttuoso scambio sulle loro
implicazioni cliniche tra differenti scuole psicoanalitiche.Propongo di esaminare alcune
delle ambiguit del pensiero di Jung, di chiarire come noi deniamo la sincronicit, la
relazione tra eventi sincronici e parapsicologici e la loro signicanza clinica. Attualmente
noi non siamo ancora sicuri se tali eventi debbano essere considerati come normali e
come un modo di facilitare lindividuazione, oppure come indicatori di una
psicopatologia nel paziente o nellanalista, cos come siamo incerti sulle particolari
caratteristiche del campo intersoggettivo che pu condurre alla sincronicit. Facendo uso
della tipologia delle correlazioni mente/materia presentate da Atmanspacher e Fach e
della distinzione da loro fatta tra stati della mente acategoriali e non-categoriali, user
due vignette cliniche per illustrare i differenti stati della mente nellanalista e
nellanalizzando che possono portare alla sincronicit. In particolare mi focalizzer sulla
relazione tra la reverie analitica e la sincronicit.

,
,
. , ,
(, ) .
,
,
.
, ,

, .
, , , ,
;
, .
-,
, , ,
,
. , ,
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Cuando Jung introdujo los conceptos de sincronicidad y de inconsciente psicoideo, impuls

a la psicologa analtica hacia un extrao territorio. A pesar de los intereses tempranos
mostrados por Freud, fenmenos anmalos como la telepata han permanecido como
tema tab en psicoanlisis. Sin embargo, en la actualidad, hay un inters creciente en
pensar la transferencia y la sincronicidad, abriendo de este modo, una va hacia un
posible intercambio fructfero entre diversas escuelas psicoanalticas respecto de sus

Bridging the reductive and the synthetic

177

implicancias clnicas. Propongo explorar algunas ambigedades del pensamiento de Jung,

para poder aclarar cmo denimos la sincronicidad, la relacin entre sincronicidades y
eventos parapsicolgicos, y su valor en la clnica. En la actualidad, estamos todava
inseguros si eventos semejantes deberan considerarse normales y como va de facilitar la
individuacin, o como una indicacin de psicopatologa en el paciente o en el analista; as
como tampoco hay seguridad respecto de la particular caracterstica del campo
intersubjetivo que puede conducir hacia las sincronicidades. Haciendo uso de las
correlaciones tipolgicas de mente-materia presentadas por Atmanspacher y Fach, y de la
diferenciacin que hacen entre estados de la mente categoriales y no-categoriales, utilizar
dos vietas clnicas para ilustrar los diferentes estados mentales en el analista y en el
analizando que pueden conducir a sincronicidades. Particularmente, me focalizar en la
relacin entre el estado de reverie analtico y la sincronicidad.

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