The latest issue of the Rivista di Psicologia Analitica, edited by Stefano Carta and Angelo Malinconico, is devoted entirely to synchronicity. Gathering contributors from across the disciplines of analytical psychology, physics, philosophy, and neuroscience, the issue approaches synchronicity as a living hypothesis, one that the editors describe in their editorial as perhaps the most audacious, profound, and compromising idea to emerge from the collaboration between Jung and Pauli. For the first time, the issue is also being published in an English-language edition.
The Editorial
Stefano Carta and Angelo Malinconico open with a wide-ranging editorial that frames the issue as something like a virtual séance, a gathering in which Jung and Pauli are invoked as the presiding giants, their ideas on synchronicity, the psychoid, and the unus mundus running as an invisible thread through every contribution. The editorial introduces the issue’s guiding concept of invisible complementarity, creating a web of correspondences and resonances. It gives particular attention to the concept of ambiguity, drawing on the psychoanalyst Paul Claude Racamier’s insight that ambivalence and ambiguity are gifts to the soul. Synchronicity, the editors suggest, is perhaps the idea that most fully embodies this creative, irreducible ambiguity.
Synchronicity, Complexity, and Epistemology
The issue’s theoretical core opens with Angelo Malinconico on synchronicity as clinical empiricism and the inevitability of the perhaps, a meditation on the concept’s irreducible uncertainty and its clinical implications. Joe Cambray follows with an introduction to synchronicity in contemporary Jungian thought, exploring its developmental history, epistemological stakes, and its relationship to singularity and fantasy. Harald Atmanspacher’s contribution on dual-aspect monism according to Pauli and Jung provides the essential epistemological context, situating synchronicity within the broader framework of the relationship between psyche and matter. Silvano Tagliagambe then offers a response to Atmanspacher, before contributing his own piece, Synchronicity: Jung Between Kant, Pauli, and Proust, exploring the connections between Kant, Pauli, and Jung through the fundamental Kantian distinction between actuality and reality.
The Clinical and the Psychoid
Caterina Vezzoli and Livia Di Stefano explore the clinical imagination of synchronicity as a space of the not-yet-known, where meaning has not yet fully crystallised. Anna Maria Montesanto writes on the psychoid quality of analytic entanglement, with particular attention to somatic countertransference in pregnancy. George Hogenson asks whether synchronicities are dragon kings, catastrophic events in complex systems, proposing that synchronicity corresponds to a phase transition from indicative to symbolic communication. Nicola Malorni ventures into borderland territory with a phenomenology of the numinous in near-death experiences, asking whether the Self reveals itself at the threshold between life and death, drawing on clinical material, autobiographical accounts, and the recurring figure of the Light.
Body, Matter, and the Subtle Body
Paolo Ferliga situates the body within its nature as corpus subtilis, the coniunctio between the realm of physis and that of the intelligible. He explores the fundamental role of affectivity, including its clinical implications for sandplay therapy. Antonio Nicolosi takes up the phenomenology and clinic of excess, placing the analyst’s work in parallel with reflections on time, and brings the theme of emotions as imagined psychic intensities into the space of the analytic relationship. Massimo Diana’s contribution intersects three themes: the clinic as a container reduced to reductive readings; Entelechy; and the definition of dynamis in the body-psyche relationship as an expression of the same reality.
Physics, Quantum Mechanics, and Psyche
Andrea Cadoni, Alessia Lo Turco, and Priscilla Martin Solis offer their piece Is the Psyche a Physical (Quantum) Question?, an invitation to immerse oneself in music while reading, composing the text as if it were a symphony. Antonio Nicolosi’s piece on permanence in dissipation explores coherence, excess, and analytic posture in the dialogue between physics and analytical psychology. Stefano Carta closes the main section with a conversation with Stuart Kauffman on synchronicity as a pervasive and universal principle.
Dialogues and Reviews
The Dialoghi section opens with Stefano Carrara’s reflections on Angelo Malinconico’s book Compagni di Viaggio, stories of schizophrenic patients and a psychiatrist-analyst, and Cristina Brunialti writes on paternal renunciation and the recognition of alterity in the father-child relationship.
The reviews section covers three books: Nicole Janigro’s An-alfa-beta o dei sentimenti, reviewed by Clementina Pavoni; Riccardo Bernardini’s The Art of the Self: The Blue Book of Eranos Founder Olga Fröbe-Kapteyn from the Zurich Lecture Series, reviewed by Gian Piero Quaglino; and Ivan Paterlini’s Luigi Ghirri dentro lo scatto di un analista, reviewed by Chiara Mirabelli.
The journal is available for free, but requires an account on the website. This issue is also available in English.