Synchronicity and holism

Carl Gustav Jung’s (1875-1961) concept of synchronicity – designating the experience of meaningful coincidence and the implied principle of acausal connection through meaning – has been extensively discussed and deployed within the field of analytical psychology. However, there has been little success in integrating the concept into frameworks of thought beyond that of analytical psychology or operationalising it within non-Jungian programmes of research. In this article I explore the relationship of synchronicity to holistic thought as one of the more promising directions in which synchronicity could gain greater purchase within wider academic and intellectual culture. The article takes its starting point from the view that Jung’s psychological model is itself a richly articulated form of holistic thought, which would repay study in relation to its core holistic ideas, its affinities with contemporaneous currents of holism, and its influence on subsequent holism. For such a project, clarification of the relationship between synchronicity and holism, which is the principal focus of this article, could be particularly valuable. For synchronicity is, I argue, itself a deeply holistic concept, and one that, far from being a late adjunct to Jung’s psychology, may have been implicit in his thinking about the holistic dynamics of the psyche from the beginning, and in an important sense arguably underpins them.