Coincidence: Lucy McKeon

In Synchronicity, Jung defines the title word as “the simultaneous occurrence of a psychic state with one or more external events which appear as meaningful parallels to the momentary subjective state—and, in certain cases, vice versa.”

Jung has his own illustrative story, one that he recounts in Synchronicity. It occurred during a session with a patient who was describing a recurring dream she’d been having about a golden scarab. Suddenly, a tapping on the window disturbed them, and Jung turned to discover “the nearest analogy to the golden scarab that one finds in our latitudes, a scarabaeid beetle, the common rose-chafer (Cetoaia urata).” The improbability of such acausal connectivity can feel like magic, or like a wish never explicitly made, but still come true.

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