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Synchronicity: Jung recounts the story of the Golden scarab beetle

Opis: http://jungcurrents.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/07/golden-scarab-jung.jpg

scarabaeid beetle (Cetonia aurata)

Opis: http://jungcurrents.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/07/jung-dung-beetle1.jpg

scarab beetle/dung beetle



A young woman I was treating had, at a critical moment, a dream in which she was given a golden scarab. While she was telling me this dream, I sat with my back to the closed window. Suddenly I heard a noise behind me, like a gentle tapping. I turned round and saw a flying insect knocking against the window-pane from the outside. I opened the window and caught the creature in the air as it flew in. It was the nearest analogy to a golden scarab one finds in our latitudes, a scarabaeid beetle, the common rose-chafer (Cetonia aurata), which, contrary to its usual habits had evidently felt the urge to get into a dark room at this particular moment. I must admit that nothing like it ever happened to me before or since.

 

Jung's most famous case of synchronicity in psychotherapy was with the woman patient who recited a dream she had had in which she was given a costly piece of jewelry, a golden scarab (beetle). While she was relating the dream Jung heard something tapping at the window from outside. Jung opened the window and in flew a scarbaeid beetle which he caught in his hand, its gold-green color resembling that of the golden scarab in the woman's dream. He handed the beetle to his patient and said, "Here is your scarab."

The woman, who was highly educated and intelligent, had been resisting dealing with her feelings and emotions. She was very adept at rationalization and intellectualizing. After the scary scarab experience she was able to get to the root of her emotional problems and to make real progress in her growth toward wholeness.

The universe had somehow cooperated in her therapy by giving her a meaningful coincidence. The scarab that tapped on Jung's window was no ordinary bug. It was somewhat rare in those parts. It has, as one writer notes, "perennially symbolized transformation and metamorphosis, the very things that this woman's unconscious was calling out for. It was as if the struggle in her soul had been projected like a powerful movie image into the outer world" (SMALL MIRACLES, p. 20) and the universe responded accordingly.



One of this year's best selling books is called SMALL MIRACLES: EXTRAORDINARY COINCIDENCES FROM EVERYDAY LIFE by Yitta Halberstam and Judith Leventhal. The book is a collection of stories of extraordinary coincidences in the lives of ordinary people. "Coincidences," say the authors, quoting the writer Doris Lessing, "are God's way of remaining anonymous", or the universe's way of telling us that there is more to reality than meets the eye. Coincidences are small miracles that can awaken us "to the rich promise of a bounteous universe and the splendor lying dormant within your soul. Coincidences are everywhere and can happen any time. When your soul is ready, they will come. All that is required is that you open your heart." (p.xiii)

The Father of Meaningful Coincidences, which he called Synchronicity: An Acausal Connecting Principle, was the great Swiss psychiatrist, Carl G. Jung. Jung articulated his concept of synchronicity after many years of study and reflection based on experiences with patients in psychotherapy and conversations with astrophysicists Albert Einstein and Professor Wolfgang Pauli. By saying that coincidences were "acausal" Jung meant that they could not be accounted for or explained in purely physical or material cause and effect terms, but that nonetheless they had a meaningful connection or link to reality itself. In other words they are not just mere coincidence or happenstance. The universe participates in the human quest for meaning. Jung said that synchronicity indicates that coincidences are "more than chance, less than causality", a "confluence of events in a numinous or awesome atmosphere." Moreover, he became convinced that these synchronicities arose during points of crisis in people's lives and contained insights for future growth and development.

 

Opis: http://jungcurrents.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/07/jung-gold-scarab1.jpg

The Mythology of the Scarab Beetle:


Khepera is a form of the sun-god Re. Khepera was specifically the god of the rising sun. He was self-produced and usually depicted as a human with a beetle on his head, or sometimes with the beetle as his head. His name comes from the Egyptian word, kheprer or “to become”.
Khepera is the manifestation of the rising sun. Khepera would roll the sun along the sky, much as the dung beetle rolls a ball of dung in front of him (sometimes the Khepera was also shown pushing the moon through the sky). This ball of dung is what it lays its eggs in. The beetle larvae eat the ball of dung after they hatch. The Egyptians would see the beetle roll a ball of dung into a hole and leave. Later, when many dung beetles emerged from the hole, it would seem as though they created themselves. Khepera also had this attribute of self-generation and self-renewal.
The particular dung beetle the Egyptians identified with Khepera was the Scarabaeus sacer.

(Source)


Opis: http://jungcurrents.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/07/khepera.jpg

 


"The bird is an animal almost universally exalted and accepted as symbolically being associated with the soul, as a messenger of the gods, a carriers of souls, an oracle or seen to possess the spirit of loved ones whilst also being a symbol of good or evil. ..... Carl G. Jung, the psychiatrist, said that birds represented the inner spirit of a person and that birds were seen to be associated with angels, flights of fancy and the supernatural. The Egyptians associated birds with the soul or 'ba', and the hawk specifically with the soul of 'Horus' and the pharaoh. ......"
Jung identifies as being based on the synchronicity principle that we would place in this second category is the casting of the I Ching . In addition to this, we find in the principal essay a case history that is also of this second type. Describing the case, Jung writes:
The wife of one of my patients, a man in his fifties, once told me in conversation that, at the deaths of her mother and her grandmother, a number of birds gathered outside the windows of the death-chamber. I had heard similar stories from other people. When her husband's treatment was nearing its end ... he developed some apparently quite innocuous symptoms which seemed to me, however, to be those of heartdisease. I sent him along to a specialist, who afther examining him told me in writing that he could find no cause for anxiety. On the way back from this consultation (with the medical report in his pocket) my patient collapsed in the street. As he was brought home dying, his wife was already in a great state of anxiety because, soon after her husband had gone to the doctor, a whole flock of birds alighted on their house. She naturally remembered the similar incidents that had happened at the death of her own realtives, and feared the worst.
With this example, certainly no internal compensatory image provided the woman with information about her husband's serious condition. In fact prior to the arrival of the flock of birds, Jung notes, the woman was not at all concerned about her husband's health, "for they symptoms (pains in the throat) were not of a kind to make the layman suspect anything bad." When, however, the "birds alighted on their house", much as they had done at the time of the deaths of her mother and grandmother, the woman became very alarmed and concerned for her husband. Her worst fears, which arose solely on the basis of this external synchronistic manifestation, proved, of course, to be well founded.
C. G. Jung's Psychology of Religion and Synchronicity
Critique: Synchronicity and pseudoscience - Skeptics

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