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Synchronicity: meaningful coincidences according to Jung

You think of someone, and they ring at that very moment. You dream of something, and the next day you see it. Carl Gustav Jung called such meaningful coincidences synchronicity.

Ezostylia Editorial Team · facts checked in sources · updated 31.10.2026

The golden scarab

Jung described a patient who, during a session, was recounting a dream about a golden scarab. At that very moment, a beetle tapped against the window of his consulting room — a rose chafer (*Cetonia aurata*), the closest European relative of the scarab. Jung caught it and handed it to her with the words: "Here is your scarab." That event became a turning point in the therapy.

Jung and Pauli

In 1952, Jung published an essay on synchronicity as a principle of "acausal connections", in a single volume alongside a work by physicist Wolfgang Pauli, Nobel Prize laureate. Both men wondered whether mind and matter might be connected at a deeper level than ordinary causality allows.

What psychology says

Psychologists draw attention to two phenomena. Apophenia is the tendency to perceive patterns and meanings in random events. The confirmation bias means that we remember the hits (they rang!) and forget the hundreds of times we thought of someone and nothing happened. On top of that, coincidences occur more frequently than we intuitively assume.

How to make use of synchronicity

Even if it is mere chance, a meaningful coincidence can serve as a good prompt for reflection: what was I just thinking about, what do I need, what do I want to change? In this sense, synchronicity works rather like a card of the day: it does not foretell, it simply encourages you to ask yourself a question.

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Sources

Synchronicity, Wikipedia

FAQ

Frequently asked questions

Who created the concept of synchronicity?

The Swiss psychiatrist Carl Gustav Jung; he described it most fully in an essay from 1952, published together with a work by physicist Wolfgang Pauli.