Beyond Jung 2024 – An Arc of Synchronicities

Across the span of my career as an analyst and academic, experiences with synchronistic qualities have challenged the world view of my first, scientific education. In this lecture I will detail a series of events, personal and professional, spanning my career that have led me to critically explore Jung’s synchronicity hypothesis on an on-going basis. Consequently, I have found it useful to reformulate the concept in terms of complexity theory with a focus on complex adaptive systems, which can spontaneously reorganize, exhibiting emergent properties. The reframing of several categories of synchronicities in this manner has facilitated examination of the implicit interconnectedness underlying these phenomena. As a result, a variety of cultural, historical, and environmental processes have been identified as having meaningful coincidence at multiple levels, including individual, collective and global dimensions, often overlapping. Numerous examples will be offered to ground theory in observation.