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The Self, the symbolic and synchronicity: Virtual

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Article in Journal of Analytical Psychology · July 2005

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Journal of Analytical Psychology, 2005, 50, 271–284

The Self, the symbolic and synchronicity:

virtual realities and the emergence of the
psyche
George B. Hogenson, Chicago

Abstract: Jung’s theory of synchronicity is seen as a step in the development of a

complete theory of the symbol. In so doing, a number of proposals are made for model-
ling the symbolic process along lines already in use for modelling a variety of other phe-
nomena, ranging from language to the behaviour of earthquakes. These modelling
techniques involve processes of self-organization, and raise issues of scaling in systems
including symbolic systems. The proposal is made that symbolic systems obey the same
rules of scaling that these other systems obey, and that symbolic systems can therefore
be understood as exhibiting the characteristics of a power law distribution—a concept
that is explained and developed in the paper. It is finally proposed that synchronicity is
an aspect of the symbolic that can be characterized as exhibiting a high degree of
‘symbolic density’.

Key words: Ramon Ferrer I Cancho and Richard Solé, symbolic systems, synchronic-
ity, the Self, Zipf’s law

Introduction
My objective in this paper is to present an outline of a way of thinking about
several of Jung’s signature concepts, including the complex, the archetype and
the theory of synchronicity. My objective is to suggest a way to unify these
elements of Jung’s system under a single dynamic principle.1
Let me begin with the following quotation from the theoretical physicists,
Ramon Ferrer I Cancho and Richard Solé, of the Universitat Pompeu Fabra in
Barcelona, and the Santa Fe Institute, respectively. In their recent examination
of the dynamics of the emergence of language, they conclude that ‘Our results
strongly suggest that Zipf’s law is required by symbolic systems’ (Ferrer I
Cancho & Solé 2003, p. 791). One objective in this paper will be to explain

1
I wish to acknowledge the influence on my thinking of Joseph Cambray whose paper on
synchronicity, published in American Imago (Cambray 2002), I consider to be a seminal moment
in our efforts to rethink the nature and meaning of synchronicity.

0021–8774/2005/5003/271 © 2005, The Society of Analytical Psychology

Published by Blackwell Publishing Ltd, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA.
272 George B. Hogenson

this conclusion within the context of the symbolic as conceived in analytical

psychology. My argument will be that if we grasp the significance of Zipf’s
law for the structure of symbolic systems we will have gone a considerable
distance towards understanding the relationship between the symbolic and
synchronicity. This argument rests on the proposition that fundamental
advances in our understanding of pattern formation in nature have provided
us with tools for reconceptualizing the structure of Jung’s entire system of
psychology. The operative concepts in this reconstruction include dynamic
self-organization, self-organizing criticality, fractals, and power laws. While
these concepts may, at first sight, seem remote from analytic discourse and
dauntingly obscure, I believe that they are no more so than the use of such
abstract concepts as quantum field theory and related notions from micro-
physics, the field Jung first thought would yield insight into synchronicity,
with which Jungians have been discussing the topic for some time now. Addi-
tionally, I maintain that the concepts I will be making use of in this paper
enjoy a degree of generality in relation to phenomena at all levels that exceeds
the utility of concepts from micro-physics, and therefore cast a more illuminat-
ing light on synchronicity. Thus I also believe it is possible to offer a unified
understanding of Jung’s system in which one can see a direct connection
between the observations of his early research on the word association test
that runs through his work to the theory of synchronicity. Put another way, I
hope to demonstrate that synchronicity, far from being a radically alien phe-
nomenon, which departs decisively from the natural order, is in fact continu-
ous with Jung’s earlier observations, and indeed, with the most commonplace
and familiar of human behaviours, language. The issue, I will argue, is one of
scale, and a more comprehensive understanding of the nature of the symbol
under conditions of scaling. I hope that this last, rather Delphic, formulation
will become clear by the end of the paper. With these comments in mind, let
me proceed to the argument of the paper.

Synchronicity: an outline
The distinguishing features of a synchronistic event can be found in Jung’s
account of the dream of the scarab beetle (Jung 1952, paras. 843–6). To
briefly review the event, an analysis Jung was conducting with a woman had
reached a point where they were both feeling stuck in the process. The woman
then had a dream that featured an Egyptian scarab beetle. As she was recount-
ing this dream, Jung heard a tapping at his window. Turning, he saw a small
beetle trying to get into the room. He opened the window, caught the beetle,
and presented it to the woman with the words, ‘Here is your beetle’. Following
this event, the analysis opened up, and progress was again possible.
Jung is at pains, in his discussions of synchronicity, to distinguish between
chance events and synchronistic events. All too often, however, we tend to
lose sight of this distinction and claim synchronicity when all we really have
The Self, the symbolic and synchronicity 273

is chance. Jung’s distinction between the two phenomena rests on the

creation of meaning, or the meaningfulness of the juxtaposed events. He also
remarks that synchronistic events are usually associated with archetypal
materials, that they have profound affective and symbolic characteristics,
and that they change the order of life, as in the breakthrough in the analysis
of the woman in his paradigmatic case. Unfortunately, Jung’s account of this
case is too brief to provide the degree of detail needed to fully understand the
nature of the analytic moment. From my own experience, however, and that
of other analysis, I believe we can say that synchronicity is associated with
very strongly constellated symbolic material and that it carries unusually
powerful meaning structures in its wake. It also has, as Jung made clear, a
transformative impact on those who feel themselves participating in the
synchronistic moment. If this is not a procrustean caricature of what is
loosely conceived of as a synchronistic experience, I believe that I will be
able to illuminate why we ought to take synchronicity seriously, and see it as
an organic and in fact perfectly reasonable element of a system of psychol-
ogy that takes the symbolic and the creation of meaning as its central and
guiding principles.

Avalanches, stock market crashes, and semantic networks

We are all familiar with the extraordinary ways in which words can be com-
bined. Indeed, our very livelihood often depends on the level of discernment
we are able to bring to the strange combinations our patients bring to us.
Jung’s early work on the word association test offered some of the first
insights into how these peculiar associative connections could be formed. In
his discussion of associative networks, Manfred Spitzer, Professor of Psychia-
try at the University of Ulm, highlights Jung’s contribution, which he considers
to have set the standard for rigorous research on word association until recent
technological advances finally surpassed his investigations (Spitzer 1999).
Spitzer gives a variety of examples of how semantic networks operate. For
example, a person concerned about a career in art may remark that ‘A career
in art has drawbacks’. We are all familiar with this sort of expression, a minor
parapraxis. Spitzer argues, however, that the development of semantic
networks, such as those Jung analysed, are best understood as self-organizing
networks.
Self-organization is a concept that was first introduced by the Nobel Laureate
in Chemistry, Ilya Prigogine. Prigogine’s proposal was that many phenomena
in nature had characteristics that did not exhibit straightforward causal rela-
tions, but rather came to be by virtue of the dynamics of the system in which
they were imbedded and which they helped form. Self-organized systems,
while made up of many elements—commonly referred to as a complex sys-
tem—nevertheless display high levels of organization regardless of the scale at
which they are examined.
274 George B. Hogenson

Let us turn to another system that displays self-organizing features, the

stock market. Anyone who has invested in the market will have had the
experience of getting a ‘tip’ from a friend regarding a particular stock or
the direction of the market. Investors also tend to follow the behaviour of
other investors. In a remarkable example of cross-disciplinary analysis, the
French geo-physicist, Didier Sornette, has analysed stock market bubbles
and crashes using the tools of dynamic systems analysis and the concept of
self-organization (Sornette 2003). What he found in his analysis is that in
large scale market behaviour the network of association among major trad-
ers lends itself to a process of self-organization. This means that there need
not be any particular cause for a major inflation of the market, a bubble.
Rather, as each investor watches the behaviour of their fellow traders the
self-organization of the system entrains the collective behaviour in such a
way that bidding behaviour escalates exponentially. This kind of exponential
expansion in behaviour defines a power law distribution, a concept that I
will explain more fully below. As Sornette analyses the process, the trading
behaviour within the market will progressively self-organize itself to the
point where all of the traders are behaving in a tightly defined—and tightly
coupled—pattern at all levels.
The problem with this process is that if the self-organizing dynamics of
the system go on long enough, they reach a point known as self-organizing
criticality or what Sornette refers to as a singularity, a felicitous term that I
believe we can apply to those moments when we are approaching a synchro-
nicity. Sornette argues it is this characteristic of intensely organized systems
that leads to stock market crashes. Briefly, what happens is that in a system
at the point of self-organized criticality, even a small deviation from the
organizational pattern can cause the entire system to reorganize itself in an
abrupt and unpredictable, even catastrophic, manner. In the case of the
market, if one investor suddenly changes his or her pattern of trading the
rest of the system will enter a state of cascading collapse that results in a
crash.
The classic analysis of this phenomenon was carried out by the physicist Per
Bak with his colleagues at the Brookhaven laboratory on Long Island, New
York (Bak 1996). Bak and his colleagues began with a simple child’s play
model in which they began to slowly pour grains of sand on a table to form a
pile. As the pile grew into its characteristic conical shape, the falling grains
would gently slide down the sides, enlarging the pile in what appears to be a
well-ordered manner. However, at some point, which cannot be predicted in
advance, the falling grains set off a much more dramatic ‘avalanche’ on the
side of the pile. The pile had reached a point of self-organizing criticality
where the introduction of one more grain set off a ‘catastrophic’ reorganiza-
tion of the pile. It is important to note here that in the controlled environment
of the sand pile experiment the rate at which grains of sand were piled upon
one another remained constant. There was no sudden alteration of the rate at
The Self, the symbolic and synchronicity 275

which sand was deposited. Also, there was no way of predicting which grain
of sand would set off the avalanche. The event emerged from the self-organizing
properties of the system. Once again, however, the distribution of small, grad-
ual cascades down the pile and the occasional, but catastrophic, avalanches
can be plotted on a power law distribution.2 What is this concept, and what
does it have to do with Jung and synchronicity?

From cities to language: the origin of power laws

By the mid-nineteenth century social observers were commenting on the rise
of large cities and their relationship to small towns . . . The first truly system-
atic analysis of this phenomenon, however, was carried out by a linguist at
Harvard University, George Kingsley Zipf. Zipf determined that the distribu-
tion of populations in relation to the frequency of different scales of popula-
tion organization could be graphed on what is called a double logarithmic
graph. What is displayed on such a graph is that there will be many villages
with few people in each, and few large cities with huge populations. Zipf
went on to apply the same analytic techniques to his own speciality, lan-
guage, demonstrating that in any given body of text the relative frequency of
word occurrences, from the most common—usually ‘the’ or ‘a’—to the least
common, would fall on the same graph line. Again, there will be many
instances of words with relatively little semantic content, and a few with a
large semantic content. This linguistic observation has come to be known as
‘Zipf’s Law’. What is interesting about a double logarithmic graph is that the
pattern of distribution does not form a normal distribution, or bell curve. In
fact, a bell curve would not capture the double registration of people and

2
Per Bak’s avalanche power law distribution

6
4
2
0
log2 (N(E))

–2
–4
–6
–8
–10
–12
0 2 4 6 8 10 12
log2 (E)
276 George B. Hogenson

organizational form. Rather, one would likely have to place very small
villages and very large cities at either end of the curve, and conclude that
they are statistical outliers of increasingly greater improbability. Thought of
in this way, one recognizes, I believe, that there is something oddly counter
intuitive about the notion that Mexico City or Shanghai are ‘statistically
improbable’ events. And, in fact, the work of Zipf initiated an approach to
understanding certain scale-related events as falling into a pattern known as
a power law.3
Power law distributions are important because, as analyses using these
equations have proliferated, it has become clear that a wide variety of
phenomena, from ion transfers in the brain to word frequencies in a text to
volcano eruptions and earthquakes, all can be shown to fall along a double
logarithmic distribution.
It should be clear by now that my argument to this point leads to the ques-
tion of what Jung would have done had he approached synchronicity from the
point of view of power laws rather than from the point of view of conven-
tional statistical analysis. If one reads the essays on synchronicity, one immedi-
ately confronts Jung’s determination to place the phenomena outside the range
of statistical probability. This even before he gets to synchronicity’s other
defining characteristics such as the deep sense of meaning that accompanies
these phenomena as opposed to the mere sense of interest that may accompany
less improbable coincidences and accidental happenings. Jung’s understanding
of synchronicity is critically dependent on a traditional statistical analysis.
This is one aspect of Jung’s approach that we will have to re-evaluate as we go
forward.
Returning, then, to power laws we must identify one more important
aspect of nature that they reveal in both mathematically rigorous and aes-
thetically beautiful fashion. This aspect of the power law was first developed
by the mathematical economist, Benoît Mandelbrot in the form of what we
know as the Mandelbrot set or fractal (Mandelbrot 1983, 1997).4 Working
from Zipf’s law between the late 1950s and the 1960s, Mandelbrot realized
that the exponent in a power law defined a pattern of self-similar structure
in the phenomenon under investigation that was ‘scale invariant’. What this
meant was that regardless of the scale at which one examined a phenome-
non, the same basic structure would be revealed. As Sornette summarizes
Mandelbrot’s insight,
Power laws describe the self-similar geometrical structures of fractals. Fractals are
geometrical objects with structures at all scales that describe many complex systems,

3
The term power law itself derives from the equations uses to establish the logarithmic graph in
which elements of the equation are raised to a common exponential power.
4
An example of the Mandelbrot Set may be found at: http://www.unix.oit.umass.edu/~dtillber/
images/TillbergMandJulia.exe
The Self, the symbolic and synchronicity 277

such as the delicately corrugated coast of Brittany or Norway, the irregular surface
of clouds, or the branched structure of river networks.

(p. 366)

Or, I will want to add, the symbolic and the synchronistic.

Phase transitions: the emergence of the symbolic5

In a paper delivered at a conference hosted by the Journal of Analytical
Psychology in Charleston, South Carolina, in April 2003, I suggested that the
symbolic world of the analytic encounter displayed characteristics of phase
transitions (Hogenson 2004). Phase transitions occur at the threshold of phe-
nomenal transformation. The phase transition that we are probably most
familiar with is when water freezes, changing abruptly from liquid to solid. All
of the phenomena that I have described in the context of power law distribu-
tions also display the features of a phase transition. In the case of the sand pile
the transition occurs when the gradual sliding of the accumulating grains of
sand suddenly gives way to an avalanche.
One of the more perplexing problems in the evolution of human beings
is the apparently unique capability known as language. The problem with
language is that unlike virtually every other characteristic—hands, food pref-
erences, grooming behaviour, infant care—language does not have any genu-
ine analogs in other species. Even the most sophisticated chimpanzees do not
naturally possess an analog of language. A variety of solutions to the problem
of how language could emerge in evolutionary time in the absence of any evo-
lutionary antecedents have been proposed, but by and large they have all
ended up being circular. In the paper to which I referred at the outset, however
Ramon Ferrer I Cancho and Ricardo V. Solé at the Universitat Pompeu Fabra
in Barcelona have proposed a novel solution (Ferrer I Cancho & Solé 2003).
Following the work of Zipf and the analytic approach of Mandelbrot among
others, Ferrer I Cancho and Solé argue that the emergence of language repre-
sents a phase transition within a scaling process governed by a power law.
That is to say, as the signalling capacity of the pre-linguistic organism
expands, a linguistic avalanche will eventually occur, which radically reorgan-
izes the entire system, including the brains of those who are engaged in the
process. Based on this analysis, they argue that language does not emerge

5
The discussion of phase transitions, as well as self-organizing systems, will be facilitated if some
time is spent observing the demonstration at the web site listed below. As the array of connections
increases, you will notice that the frame of the array enlarges abruptly. You will also notice that
the time taken to fill the frame gradually becomes longer. This is an example of a form of phase
transition as the self-organizing system enlarges. The pattern of time, frame size and complexity
could be graphed on a power law distribution. See: http://www-unix.oit.umass.edu/~dtillber/
images/TillbergDLA.exe
278 George B. Hogenson

gradually, but rather appears abruptly, as a phase transition.6 Furthermore, in

the phase transition from signalling, language immediately displays the char-
acteristics of Zipf’s law.

Symbolic density: from the complex to the archetype

With these background features in mind, I now want to argue that Jung’s
entire system, in so far as it is a system based on the nature and function of the
symbol, can be viewed as a continuum of self-similar, that is fractal, struc-
tures, distributed along a power law distribution. Furthermore, the variant
elements of the system, namely the association, the complex, the archetype, the
synchronistic event and the emergence of the Self, become evident as the sys-
tem transitions through a series of self-organized critical moments that result
in phase transitions within the symbolic system as a whole. In other words, all
of these phenomena are self-similar moments in a scaling distribution charac-
terized by what I will term symbolic density. To draw an analogy from the
geo-physicist Sornette who remarks that ‘there are no large earthquakes, only
small ones that don’t stop’ we could say that there are no big symbols, only
small ones that do not stop.
It is at this point that I believe the notion of symbolic density is useful. As
Spitzer (1999) makes clear in his study of semantic networks, associative struc-
tures can ramify over large semantic distances. But not all semantic networks
have this quality. Spitzer does not address the impact that Zipf’s law has on his
model. I believe, however, that its application is instructive, for we are all

6
The phase transition between coherent signalling and meaninglessness is diagrammed by Ferrer I
Concho and Solé in the following graph. What is also interesting here is that language—or sym-
bolic systems more generally—must remain within the phase transition rather than coming to rest
at either end of the transition. It is as though there were a state of water between solid and fluid
that had to be maintained.

Human language
1.0

0.8

Animal communication
Artificial languages
<In(S,R)>

0.6

0.4
No comm.
0.2
A
0.0
0.2 0.4 0.6 0.8 1
The Self, the symbolic and synchronicity 279

aware that for some patients single words or other symbols can have a range of
associative connectedness that far exceeds that of any other symbol in their
experience. Jung was aware of this, and in his work with psychotic patients we
can see evidence of his ability to discern the immense associative networks of
these patients as they elaborated their ‘fantasies’. The psychotic inhabits a sym-
bolically dense environment, but one with a structure that eludes us. The devel-
opment of the complex, on the other hand, can be conceived as the formation
of a structural pattern of associations in the individual psyche. It is not acciden-
tal then that Jung could see the complex in the patterns of the word association
test. What the test accomplishes is a simple display of the associative network
that shapes the psychic reality of the individual.
In their important paper in the Journal of Analytical Psychology, Saunders, a
mathematician, and Skar, a Jungian analyst, argue that the developmental forces
usually thought to originate from the archetype arise instead out of the com-
plexes, which are formed through self-organization in the brain/mind. On this
view, the ‘archetype’ is not something that forms the complexes; it is a class of
complexes which fall into the same general category (Saunders & Skar 2001). I
believe they see the archetype in a manner similar to what I am attempting here.
In both their paper and in some of my work of the same period, we all make the
claim that the archetype does not exist, in the sense of being a discrete ontolog-
ically definable entity with a place in the genome or the cognitive arrangement
of modules or schemas in the brain. Rather, taken from the point of view I am
now trying to develop, the archetype, like the complex, is an iterative moment in
the self-organization of the symbolic world. From this point of view, one would
encounter the archetypal at that point where the sand pile of the symbolic
achieves a state of self-organized criticality and radically reorganizes while main-
taining its fractal, self-similar structure—the complex and the archetype are fun-
damentally structured like the symbol, only the archetype exhibits itself at the
point where symbolic density transcends the carrying capacity of the complex
and moves into a more collective realm.

The autonomy of the symbol

This last point is of the utmost importance for understanding the argument in
this paper. While virtually everyone in the Jungian community explicitly rec-
ognizes the centrality of the symbol for the understanding of the psyche, it is
less clear that we have as yet taken the symbol as seriously as we need to if we
hope to fully ground and unify our theories. In this regard, I believe that
the neuroscientist and anthropologist Terrance Deacon, of the University of
California at Berkeley, provides important insight. Deacon remarks regarding
the nature of the symbol:
I believe that [the notion that symbolic reference is arbitrary as in Saussure] is
an unwarranted assumption based on the fallacy of generalizing from individual
280 George B. Hogenson

symbol-object relationships to systems of symbols. [T]here are indeed constraints that

are implicit in symbol use. The point I want to emphasize here, however, is that such
semiotic constraints as involve symbol systems are located neither in brains nor in soci-
ety, per se. They are a bit like the formal constraints that have shaped the development
of mathematics (and yield such curious universal phenomena as prime numbers).

(Deacon 2003, p. 98)

Deacon’s analogy to the system of primes allows me to suggest that the argu-
ment of Ferrer I Cancho and Solé reveals one of the most fundamental formal
constraints on the form and structure of symbolic systems in the apparent
necessity of a Zipf’s law. Deacon’s argument, which has a realist quality to it,
would hold that even if nobody ever calculated a prime number the system of
primes would nevertheless be said to exist, and the process of mathematical
investigation becomes one of discovery rather than construction, at least in
part. In the sense that Deacon uses the system of primes as an analogy to the
relative autonomy of the symbol when added to the argument of Ferrer I
Cancho and Solé, it becomes possible to conceive of the world of the symbolic
as a world that the psyche inhabits, realizes, or perhaps falls into, rather than
as a world that the human mind creates. I take it that this approach to the
symbolic has interesting, perhaps important implications for our understand-
ing of the ‘process of symbolization’, at both the infant and the adult level.
This approach to the symbolic serves to shift the centre of gravity for our
understanding of synchronicity. At this point in this paper I will quite self-
consciously turn to a more speculative discussion in hopes of opening up the
horizon of understanding regarding synchronicity within the context of the sym-
bolic, which is where Jung originally located it. Let us recall the most salient fea-
tures of Jung’s theory. For Jung, the synchronistic defined a juxtaposition of a
psychic state and a state in the material world that resulted in the emergence of
meaning and a transition in the individual’s state or understanding of the world.
Jung’s example is of the scarab-like beetle that flies through the window just as
his patient is recounting a dream of a scarab beetle. Joe Cambray has given us an
account of a severely disturbed patient who dreamed that Joe was lost in the
Black Forest while he was on vacation, and only after talking with her on the
telephone, at which point she recounted her dream, did Joe learn that a SCUBA
diving class he was attending was scheduled to dive in a coral formation known
as the ‘black forest’. A common element in both these instances, and in others
that can be recounted, is that the patient or other party to the experience was in
a heightened state of anxiety or, in Jung’s case, stuckness in the treatment. In the
case of Joe’s patient, her psychotic states had frequently required hospitalization
when Joe was away for any period of time. Seen from the standpoint of semantic
networks, as in Spitzer, one can say that these women inhabit intensely self-
organized symbolic spaces. From the point of view of the realist analogy to the
status of the symbol, those symbolic worlds would be capable of self-organiza-
tion without necessary reference to the person or to other states of affairs. These
The Self, the symbolic and synchronicity 281

factors would lead us to ask whether and where on a power law continuum of
symbolic density these women found themselves. The point of view I want to
propose regarding synchronicity, in these cases, is that the density of symbolic
activity, the steepness of the symbolic sand pile, if you will, for these individuals,
had reached such a pitch that a phase transition, a symbolic avalanche, was pre-
cipitated and radically reorganized their worlds.
The notion that I am advancing here is that if we see the symbolic as more
than simply a system of representations but rather a relatively autonomous self-
organizing domain in its own right, then we can investigate the degree to which
the symbolic conforms to the structuring dynamics of a double logarithmic
power law, and by extension displays self-similar or fractal structures on a scale
invariant basis, that is at ever greater levels of scale. In other words, the complex,
the archetype, the synchronicity and the Self all ‘exist’ as moments in a scale
invariant distribution governed by a power law. Like large cities, major volcanic
eruptions, and catastrophic stock market crashes, synchronistic phenomena are
extremely rare, as Jung himself argued, but they are not improbable in the sense
one would assume to be the case under more conventional probability theory.
They are rather the result of small symbolic developments that do not stop.

Clinical and historical considerations

What can be said regarding the most characteristic aspects of a Jungian ana-
lysis? Here, important advances in the neurosciences provide insights into our
work in ways that connect directly with the themes of this paper. The founda-
tion of Jung’s approach to the symbol rests on the dream. Neuropsychologist
Carl M. Anderson and his colleagues, at the Harvard Medical School, as well
as a number of other brain researchers have recently conducted a series of
experiments on the nature of REM sleep—the sleep pattern most associated
with dreaming—and concluded that the time patterns of REM sleep display
fractal organization, that is the patterns of brain activity are scale invariant
over time (Anderson & Mandell 1996). Regardless of the granularity of the
test of brain activity, the pattern displayed appears identical. Anderson et al.
have also investigated the impact of trauma on these patterns and are in the
process of developing new intervention strategies based on the stimulation of
oneiric—that is dream based or symbol based—functions in the brain.
Anderson remarks, in one of his papers, that what is important about the
fractal nature of the REM sleep brain patterns is that they follow a power law
distribution with precisely the same mathematical structure as ‘the flow of the
Nile, light from quasars, ion channel currents, neuronal firing patterns, earth-
quake distribution, electrical current fluctuations in man-made devices, inter-
car intervals in expressway traffic, and in variations in sound intensity in all
melodic music’(Anderson 1998, p.10). It seems to me that in research such as
this we can begin to see the outlines of an understanding of the dream, the
symbolic in general, and the interface of dream, symbol, and the material
282 George B. Hogenson

world that Jung intuited, but lacked the analytic tools to examine in depth. To
the extent that this state of affairs can be worked out in greater detail our
understanding of the relationship of dream and reality will necessarily become
deeper and analytically more powerful.
What of the even more overarching concepts in Jung’s system—the Self, and
the trans-historical collective? Looked at from the point of view developed in
this paper, the Self, defined by Jung as possessing the symbolic qualities of a
god image, should stand at the far end of the symbolic power law distribution.
And indeed, one would have to marvel at the degree to which the genuinely
massive symbolic moments in human history, the emergence of the great reli-
gions, seem to possess a power of social organization that transcends anything
that one would expect from a carpenter’s son, a displaced prince, or the son of
a minor merchant family, to acknowledge only the most recent instances of the
emergence of such powerful symbolic systems.

Conclusion
My purpose in this paper has been to argue that it is possible to unify Jung’s sys-
tem of psychology by bringing the elements of his system into a framework that
allows us to see the invariance of structure across different scales of experience.
The analytic method I propose is one that is already well understood and widely
applied in areas as diverse as geology, stock market behaviour, and neuro-
science. That it has only begun to be applied in a more thorough going manner
to the symbolic world, and there only to analyse the patterns and emergence of
natural languages, seems to me to be something of a scandal as well as an
unprecedented opportunity for further development in analytical psychology.
In the course of making this argument I have maintained that we should
view that most illusive of Jung’s theoretical constructs, synchronicity, as an
element in a continuum of symbolically structured moments in the psyche and
the psyche’s relationship to the world at large, rather than as a radical depar-
ture from the norms of nature and the otherwise ordered world of our experi-
ences. Synchronistic events are rare, genuine moments in which the Self is
present, perhaps even more rare. But they are not statistical outliers, or
impossibilities, in the classic sense of statistical analysis. On the contrary,
while they may be exceedingly rare, if the exponent of the power law govern-
ing the symbolic domain is sufficiently large, they will emerge almost out of
necessity.
At the other end of the scale we are dealing with phenomena that, while
smaller in their own right, are nevertheless self-similar to the great events of
the collective unconscious. At the risk of being unduly romantic about the day-
to-day work of analysis, one can see that this relationship does add a certain
dignity to the work of the individual. It is not so great a reach to suggest that
in the individual encounter in the consulting room one does encounter the god
image in every symbolically defined moment.
The Self, the symbolic and synchronicity 283

All of this must for now be seen as an hypothesis. It is offered here as a call
to think differently about the symbolic and our relationship to the symbolic. I
hope that the hypothesis—that the symbolic can be understood as a part of
nature, sharing the characteristics of other great processes in nature, from the
ion transfers in the brain to the destructive force of a great volcano—will stim-
ulate more thought and research, and lead us to new and important insights.

TRANSLATIONS OF ABSTRACT

La théorie de Jung sur la synchronicité est regardée comme partie intégrante d’une théorie
complète sur le symbole. Ce faisant, un certain nombre de propositions sont avancées dans
le but de fournir des modèles pour le processus symbolique suivant les lignes des modèles
déjà utilisés pour une variété d’autres phénomènes allant des structures du langage au
comportement des tremblements de terre. Ces techniques de définitions de modèles font
appel à des processus d’auto-organisaton et posent des questions de mesures des systèmes
incluant des systèmes symboliques. L’idée avancée est que les systèmes symboliques obéis-
sent aux mêmes règles de mesures que ces autres systèmes, et que par conséquent les systè-
mes symboliques peuvent être compris en tant qu’ils donnent à voir les caractéristiques
d’une distibution selon une loi de la puissance—un concept qui est expliqué et développé
dans cet article. Est finalement avancé que la synchronicité est un aspect du symbolique
qui peut être caractérisée par le haut degré de ‘densité symbolique’ qu’elle a.

Jungs Theorie der Synchronizität wird angesehen als ein Schritt in der Entwicklung einer
vollständigen Theorie des Symbols. Dabei wird eine Reihe von Vorschlägen gemacht,
wie Modelle dieser symbolischen Entwicklung entworfen werden können, anhand
bereits bestehender Modelle einiger anderer Phänomene, die von der Sprachentwicklung
bis zur Erdbebenforschung reichen. Diese Modelle beinhalten Prozesse der Selbstorgani-
sation und werfen Fragen der Rangordnung (Skalierung) in Systemen, auch in symbolis-
chen Systemen, auf. Es wird postuliert, dass symbolische Systeme den gleichen
Gesetzmäßigkeiten wie andere Systeme unterliegen. Daher können sie so verstanden
werden, dass sie die Eigenschaften einer Power-Law-Distribution (Potenzgesetzvertei-
lung) zeigen. Dieses Konzept wird in der vorliegenden Arbeit erläutert und entwickelt.
Schließlich wird vermutet, dass die Synchronizität ein Aspekt des Symbolischen ist, der
dadurch charakterisiert wird, dass er ein hohes Maß an symbolischer Dichte aufweist.

La teoria junghiana della sincronicità viene considerata come un gradino nello sviluppo di
una teoria completa del simbolo. In questo modo vengono proposti vari modelli per il pro-
cesso simbolico che seguono linee già utilizzate per costruire modelli per una varietà di
altri fenomeni, che variano dal linguaggio al comportamento dei terremoti. Tali tecniche di
costruzione di modelli implicano processi di auto-organizzazione e sollevano problemi di
equilibrio in sistemi che includono sistemi simbolici. Viene proposto che i sistemi simbolici
obbediscono alle stesse regole di equilibrio cui questi altri sistemi obbediscono, e che i
sistemi simbolici possono quindi essere compresi come esponenti caratteristiche di una
284 George B. Hogenson

distribuzione di una legge di potere– concetto che viene spiegato e sviluppato nello scritto.
Si propone infine di considerare la sincronicità come un aspetto del simbolico che può
essere caratterizzato dall’esibizione di un alto grado di ‘densità simbolica’.

La teoría de Jung de la sincronocidad es vista como un paso en el desarrollo de una teo-

ría completa del símbolo. En tal hacer, un número de proposiciones se hacen para
modelar el proceso simbólico junto con líneas que ya se usan para modelar la variedad
de otro fenómeno, extendiéndose desde el lenguaje hasta el comportamiento de terre-
motos. Estas técnicas de modelar involucran procesos de organización de uno mismo, y
plantean aplicaciones el escalamiento en sistemas incluyendo sistemas simbólicos. La
proposición se hace para que los sistemas simbólicos obedezcan las mismas reglas de
escalamiento que este otro sistema obedece, y que el sistema simbólico puede ser,
entonces, entendido como la exhibición de características de la distribución del poder
de la ley- un concepto que se explica y desarrollado en este ensayo. Finalmente, es pro-
puesto que la sincrinocidad es un aspecto de lo simbólico que puede ser caracterizado
como exhibir a alto grado la ‘densidad simbólica’.

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