Prefer to listen? I’ve recorded an audio version here:
On several occasions, the famous Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung recounted a story about what happened one day in his consulting room. He was sitting with a young woman he described as highly intellectualized in her worldview, a patient whose analytical mind seemed to function as a sealed container around her. Jung described being at a true loss as to how to help the woman loosen the grip of her hyper-rationality, which he saw as directly connected to her suffering.
On this day, the woman began telling Jung about the dream that she’d had the night before in which someone had given her a golden scarab, likely in the form of a piece of jewelry. The dream had been surprisingly striking for the woman, and just as she was finishing telling her doctor, Jung heard a tapping behind him on the windowpane. As he recalls it, he turned to see a large scarabaeid beetle trying to get into the room, the golden-green insect as close to a scarab as one could find in Switzerland. He walked over and caught it and then gently (though as I imagine it, with a flourish) presented it to his patient. “Here is your scarab,” he said.
According to Jung, this was the moment when everything changed. He described the experience as “puncturing the desired hole in her rationalism,” which he believed let the therapy finally make headway. Jung told this story a few different times in his life, using it to demonstrate a phenomenon that became vitally important to him and his work: synchronicity.
Synchronicity is one of the concepts that feels surprisingly difficult to define, especially given that we all have some sense of what it is. Synchronicity is when an inner experience and an outer circumstance seem to meaningfully align and there appears to be no direct causal connection. It’s a feeling of coincidence that just won’t settle in us as being random. That could be because the odds make it so striking, or simply because there is such a felt sense that the alignment means more.
We can feel a synchronicity when we are thinking about a friend we haven’t heard from in ages and a text pops up from them at just that moment. Or when we are feeling paralyzed in our house-hunting indecision when we realize one of our options shares the same address as our childhood home. Nearly all of us have at least a few go-to examples of synchronicities in our own lives – experiences that touch us in such a way that we can’t fully turn them over to randomness.
How we each make sense of these kinds of experiences has always been particularly fascinating to me. Our relationship to them seems to say a lot about how we organize our worlds. Some of us won’t or can’t see even the strangest co-occurrence of events as anything other than statistical anomalies, weird but essentially meaningless. Aliens could show up at their door and they’d brush it off. On the other end of the spectrum we have those who won’t or can’t see anything as unconnected, people who make meaning out of even the simplest oddity. These are the ones who see long-lost relatives in every chip they eat.
Most of us, of course, exist somewhere along this broad spectrum. And where we fall on that spectrum may in fact relate to aspects of our mental health, at least in theory. Seeing everything as interconnected – especially when you layer on a sense of causality and having the power to control outcomes – can overlap with the kind of thinking in the experience of psychosis. Seeing nothing as interconnected – especially with a sense of total powerlessness or meaninglessness – can make someone vulnerable to existential collapse and depression.
Could this suggest that holding some sense of the possibility of magic, at least in healthy doses, is important for our mental health? Perhaps. What I think is true, at the very least, is that our psychological health benefits when we have a sense of something at work that is larger than ourselves. That could be God or nature or magic or a universal order or love or the mysterious power of randomness. It could be Science with a capital “S.”
Perhaps more precisely, I think our psychological health benefits when we have a sense of something that we acknowledge we cannot fully understand. There’s a humility that evolves from that, and that humility can offer some protection from the despair of depression. It says, “There are things so far beyond my understanding, I can’t possibly know how this will all turn out.” That perspective gives us enough uncertainty to challenge our sense that things will be negative, unchanging, and all-encompassing – the hallmarks of depressive thinking.
One of the paradoxes of the human experience, in my view, is that we feel desperate to feel in control, but once we are, we’re desperate to relinquish it.
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I’ve found myself wondering lately if this urge to relinquish control is what’s driving a cultural shift toward magic. I’ve found myself in a number of conversations lately about this, and so while it’s not a fully formed hypothesis, it’s coalesced enough in my mind that I wanted to offer it here.
My take is essentially this: we are in a particular cultural moment that looks a lot like the woman in Jung’s consulting room. Particularly in the West, we have adopted a hyper-rationalist worldview that has essentially functioned like a shield around us for many generations. The intense intellectualism kept us safe and successful… until the costs of it started becoming impossible to ignore.
I’m not saying the gods got angry with us. What I’m saying is that the neglect of our emotional and intuitive selves, the degradation of nature and our climate,, and the breakdown of power-based social structures all started to make themselves known in our era. The cracks deepened.
And so a lot of people, even if they don’t know that this is what they are doing exactly, are finding themselves more drawn to that which cannot be so readily explained. People are returning to nature. They are consulting the stars. They are exploring modalities for healing they would have never considered. They are ready for some magic.
I want to name clearly that there is a genuine risk in this pull. Like any pendulum swing, it can (and already is, as I’ve observed in some places) lead to an eschewing of discernment and a proliferation of exploitation. When people feel desperate to relinquish their control – to surrender to something – they are at their most vulnerable.
But in safe containers, might leaning into the unexplainable – to a little bit of “magic” – offer something important? What role might therapy play in this paradigm shift?
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If I’m completely honest with you, I’ve come to believe that there’s an inherent magic in psychotherapy. I don’t personally think of it as God or another specific force, but rather something that is fundamental to the experience of two people coming together in this particular way – truthful, open, and in the service of transformation. That’s magic enough right there.
I’ve come to understand what happens in the psychotherapy process as a function of that magic. Perhaps I’ll walk that back just a touch and call it a function of the synchronicities at play – the way that the external circumstances will align with someone’s internal experiences, and the way we make meaning out of them. It never ceases to amaze me.
We’ll be working on a relationship to a particular emotion and that week someone will have the perfect opportunity to practice a new way of relating to it. We’ll be exploring dynamics with another person and I’ll inadvertently replicate those dynamics in the therapy room, giving us a chance to work them through. We could call this the unconscious at work. We could call it coincidence. We could call it almost anything.
We don’t have to call it magic to recognize the power of it. Psychotherapy research, even many decades on, has never been able to fully capture or explain its effect. There is something profoundly potent about the experience. And while we’d love to bear it out in the research (Would insurance start reimbursing better? Would AI start replicating it?), perhaps there’s something important in being unable to fully pin it down.
It requires trust. Humility. Reverence. A way of relating to another and ourselves that can’t by its very nature be overly formulaic or hyper-rational.
Perhaps that’s the invitation, then. Not to abandon reason, but to leave a little room around its edges. Perhaps psychological health means developing a greater tolerance for the middle. We can let things feel meaningful even when we don’t know what exactly they mean. We can be moved by our experience without having to justify or explain. We can trust science without asking it to answer questions it simply cannot.
There’s a paradoxical freedom in leaving room for the unexplainable. There’s a wisdom in letting things be just a little bit magical. No one, even he, could say exactly why a scarab appeared at Jung’s window. But he stood up to let it in anyway.
