Synchronicity and trauma

Good evening, we are from Ukraine! I hope that for everyone who came to this meeting, there is a measure of synchronicity in you being here today; there must be meaning in this, because the essence of synchronicity is to guide us in our search for meaning.

My being today is filled with the meaning of freedom, as the contemporary Ukrainian poet and writer Yuriy Andrukhovych said: “Of all the religions of this dubious world, only freedom remains beyond doubt and to this day retains its exceptional meaning against the backdrop of relentlessly advancing opportunism, technological relativism, and the faking of reality. I was lucky: I write in the language of this freedom. The Ukrainian language!” (Speech on the occasion of receiving the Heinrich Heine Prize in Düsseldorf on December 10, 2022).

Perhaps you will reflect with me on your own meanings? Why are you here today? What is your meaning? What chance or coincidence brought you here? What is the value for you in being here today? And where does this path lead you?

As C. G. Jung writes: ”Without the reflective consciousness of man, – the world is a giant senseless machine, because from our experience, man is the only being capable of finding at least some meaning” (von Franz, 2013, p. 263).

Our consciousness is a mirror in which the cosmos can be reflected. And this is our special role in the Universe.

In the work “Synchronicity: An Acausal Connecting Principle,” C. G. Jung gives two definitions. The narrower definition is “ The simultaneous occurrence of a certain psychic state with one or more external events which appear as meaningful parallels to the subjective state” , and the broader definition is “a psychically conditioned relativity of time and space… an acausal orderedness” (Jung, 1997).

In the “narrow definition” of synchronicity, it refers to meaningful coincidences between internal psychic events, such as dreams, thoughts, fantasies, and events in the external, material world; therefore, synchronicity can be defined as simultaneity plus a meaningful connection. Synchronicity is a creative principle constantly at work in nature, ordering events in a “non-physical” (non-causal) way, based solely on their meaning. Jung suggested that synchronicity is a special case of a general acausal orderedness.

Upon detailed examination, we can notice several important emphases described in the works on synchronicity by C. G. Jung and Marie-Louise von Franz. Namely, 1) The Acausal Connecting Principle – this is the second connecting principle, opposite to the generally recognized causal one, where cause and effect logically follow from one another. 2) Meaning. Synchronicity involves events that are necessarily connected by meaning. The meaning of a synchronicity event is revealed only if we understand it symbolically, not just intellectually. Realization of meaning is a “quantum leap” into the Psyche. 3) Phenomena that establish a connection between the psychic and material worlds, indicating their unified foundation, which physicist Bohr called “the indivisibility of the whole.” He describes through an experiment that particles, initially connected and then separated, behave as if they “know” what state other particles are in, even at a vast distance which excludes the possibility of interaction. Jung also observed this and called this dimension the Objective Psyche or Unus mundus. The Jungian concept of a single energy, which at low frequencies manifests as matter and at higher frequencies as the Psyche, closely resembles the Chinese notion of Qi (von Franz, 2013, p. 253). All existence is a flow of energy. Von Franz writes that the synchronicity way of thinking is the Chinese way of thinking. She gives an example of how a Chinese emperor was given a choice between a bowl of rice and the ‘Book of Changes,’ the ‘I Ching’… It is very characteristic of the Chinese that even a bowl of rice (and they felt hunger very acutely) was less important to them than the opportunity to get back their beloved ‘Book of Changes,’ that is, to regain their spiritual orientation” (von Franz, 2016, p. 10).

Dreams on the Eve of the War

I would like to gently touch upon a living, still pulsating experience for every Ukrainian – the beginning of the full-scale war on February 24th. While writing this text, I felt strong resistance, which manifested as intense tension. My fantasy led me to the image of a volcanic eruption; I am very close to the crater, the threat of disaster is at a very close distance near me, and my imagination and psyche are under the powerful influence of trauma.

I would like to present several dreams that occurred on the eve of the war. I want to note that I will use various symbolic materials that I have gathered while working with clients, students, colleagues, and in support groups over these 11 months of war. Permission for use has been obtained, considering confidentiality and anonymity.

Dreams

I have presented several dreams that, in my opinion, reflect the characteristic images, states, and symbols that appeared in dreams in the last months before the war. Analyzing a large amount of symbolic material, I chose dreams that are characteristic of different clusters of unconscious material to propose a preliminary classification. Of course, this is only my understanding of the empirical material.

The first example is about the obsessive thought: “No! It can't be, with tanks and rockets in the 21st century, only an 'not old-school' war”.

The horrifying realization of war was already in consciousness, if we remove the “no/not” particle. Almost everywhere you could hear this very text; human consciousness could not allow or accept this “barbaric cyclicity”, that it is so close and so obviously becoming our reality. We are only the third generation that thought the stories of our ancestors, grandmothers and grandfathers, about World War II were the past, and could not agree/believe that this could become our future. Our “no” is so humane and understandable, such a naive desire to cover our eyes with our hands and say that this does not exist, shouldn't be. It seems to me, this is how we preserve our own tiny and fragile inner world of good against the external onslaught. It is that seed that we will preserve throughout the war as a belief that the world will come to its senses and remember peace on earth, and the wheel of time will lead us to an “eternal earthly order”.

I believe that the very horrors of war, which make us feel deep rage and hatred, paradoxically activate the desire to protect our “naive/innocent core” of the personality (according to D. Kalsched).

Next, I would combine two dreams: the one about the “premonition of great loss and a look into the stormy sky” and the dream about the “incredible”, where the line of intersection/meeting of the sun and moon appears. These vivid dreams encompass a class of dreams that can be characterized as “a conversation with nature without words”. This is the motif of unity with the Cosmos/Universe, the ability to converse with eternity, which we often observe in fairy tales, myths, and indigenous ethnic legends themselves. Jung wrote that dreams carrying meanings of the “incredible” point to synchronicity and have a very powerful impact on a person. The personality encounters the energy of “absolute, a priori knowledge”. Through these dreams, we can observe the action of the acausal principle, where knowledge comes not from cyclical time, but from eternal time, as Chinese wisdom might put it. Our psyche becomes a mirror that momentarily reflects eternity. C.G. Jung, in his book “Synchronicity”, contemplates the nature of such mysterious phenomena. He writes that the natural world and the world of the human psyche are two parallel dimensions, and they reflect each other like two mirrors. At certain moments – the most important for a person – the external world sends him or her a kind of hint or warning. But to understand the true meaning of these “signals”, one should not look for rational explanations for them, but treat them as symbols that can be understood primarily by feeling and intuition, not by intellect (Jung, 1997).

The dream, “where people transform into crustacean-like people, mutation, a virus”, may combine motifs of the loss of human likeness, where human traits disappear; instead, we encounter a primitive level of consciousness where the loss of everything human occurs, the thin layer of civilization disappears, the mutation of ethical and moral foundations inexorably consumes human souls. The motif of a horrific transformation into primitive creatures: crustaceans, bodiless contours of murderous men, invisible figures in KGB uniforms, monsters with bloody hands, many robot-like, metallic images – this is only a small list of images from dreams of autumn-winter 2022. The prevalence of these shapeshifters in the dreams of Ukrainians reflects broader collective processes of Shadow infection and the mutation that all of us would soon have to face. I would also attribute these motifs to the representation of trauma, specifically the psychic trauma inflicted by one person upon another, where faith in the humanistic foundations upon which European culture and ethics rested is lost. One can see how the unconscious prepares, warns, provides an advance experience of the first shock from encountering something inhuman, non-subjective.

And the last short dream about the fascists covers a very large cluster of dreams that literally repeat the events of 1941-1945. Ukrainians felt the first parallel between the Nazi and Russian attacks at dawn on February 24th. This pathetic tracing – waking people up with bombs and rockets at 5 a.m. – only confirms the reality of dark forces that seize the masses and trigger patterns of evil, violence, and soullessness. I am personally frightened by how detailed this repetition of the pictures and images of World War II is; it's hard to believe it's possible (but often in dreams people have already seen not only fascists but also Russian soldiers). The psyche makes little distinction because one archetypal basis of war is to take life, to encroach on what is not yours; it is an attack on free will, on development and the future. Everything becomes dehumanized, worthless; we see a bloody feast of power, force, and aggression. To some extent, many of these dreams were realized in real events in their exact copy. People reported that these dreams were prophetic in detail. For example, there was a dream on the eve of the war about a grandmother's house, and that tank barrels were aimed at it, but there was a Chinese protective symbol in the front yard. A month later, in the first days of the war, when the whole family was hiding in this grandmother's house, Russian tanks entered the village, they were under complete occupation, most houses were destroyed, but this hut survived; the occupiers didn't even enter the yard. It felt like there was an invisible protective line drawn around the house. A second example, a dream: “in the dream, my native town is burning in the explosions of war; in the glow of the fires, people are being led to the forest for execution; these are all my people, familiar faces, I have known them since childhood. I look into their eyes and say goodbye.” Reality: after six months of occupation of this town, that forest became a cemetery with 440 graves of local residents. All of Ukraine mourned them and said goodbye.” I will stop here so as not to open Pandora's box with all the troubles and memories of these turbulent 11 months.

Drawings of Dreams from the First Days of the War

I would also like to show some drawings. These are drawings of dreams from the first two weeks of the war; all these people were under constant artillery and rocket fire in cities where active hostilities were taking place. You can see and feel this hellish fear, this descent into hell, torment, pain, helplessness. When I worked in real-time with the drawings and dreams, I constantly had the feeling that the barrel of a tank was pointed directly at me. I was at a safe distance from the explosions, but when I went to sleep, instead of sleep, active imagination came: “I am at the epicenter of an explosion, before my eyes, like in slow motion, gray dust, mud, earth with fragments of everything rises and engulfs me.” I experienced this terrible vision with my whole body, every part of myself, every night. I was unable to refuse, unable to stop this experience of being a witness. The unconscious demanded to go “through, right through”, to share this reality, to let the trauma (like an explosion) into the psyche, to acknowledge and observe its destructive power, so that later, over time, into this empty land one could plant a “seed”, but that would come later. I am filled with hope by the words of Clarissa Pinkola Estés: “I know that those who have somehow, for some time, been cut off from the very belief in life – are those who have the inner knowledge that the Garden of Eden hides behind every empty field, that new seeds are planted first in the empty, devastated land, as in the open Self, even when the heart aches, the mind is tired, or the spirit is devastated” (Estés, 2005, p. 28).

These dreams and drawings are connected by the central image and feeling – “point-blank”, “too close”, “tank barrel aimed at me”, “pierces right through”. This is perhaps one of the central representations of war. This is how the psyche experiences the encounter with the trauma of war. As with something many times larger than you – like a Tank, an iron, indifferent monster that will wipe you out – as Anne Ulanov defines, “erasure” occurs. Furthermore, I think this closeness “point-blank” reflects the tragedy of neighboring peoples who lived so long and so close. In one woman's dream, she encountered a tank; it was directly opposite, aiming its barrel at her heart. The woman saw death point-blank and at that moment felt that her embroidered shirt (vyshyvanka – Ukrainian national clothing) would save her. She threw open her coat, under which was the vyshyvanka – the tank stopped. As she said: “Ukrainian identity stopped it!” The vyshyvanka carries the sacred meaning of the Ukrainian family, the code of the nation, the strength of ancestors who embroidered symbols of earth, protection, and freedom with a needle and thread. My feeling is that my country, Ukraine, like this woman, met this shameful attack with something much stronger than iron weapons; she opposed it with something symbolic: values, identity, truth itself, love, and resilience.

My attempt was to show how Ukrainians felt the “Spirit of the times” through synchronicistic phenomena. Every period of history has its own special “Spirit of the times” in which the constellation of an archetype occurs. Archetypes, as active points of the Objective Psyche, have the property of “transgressiveness”; through synchronicistic phenomena, they show the process of incarnation, the entry of the eternal archetypal order into material reality. True symbols are not invented by consciousness but spontaneously revealed by the unconscious, as we clearly saw through the presented dreams.

A person enters into contact with the unconscious at the boundary of questions of “impossibility”. Von Franz gives an analogy: “The Chinese ‘Book of Changes’ can be compared to an all-penetrating electricity grid; it does not light up until a person asks a question. By asking the question, the person presses an electrical switch, after which a certain part of the network lights up, and an electric current flows for a brief moment to illuminate the vast situation; awareness takes place” (von Franz, 2016, p. 60).

Ukrainians, like the whole world, had one question: “Will there be war? Will humanity allow this again?”

We received an answer, and now we must realize what this experience should teach us. What can we change for the better?

Each of us carries a particle of consciousness necessary for the era to achieve a better understanding of the historical leitmotifs that are unfolding.

I would like to conclude my report with a metaphor used by Marie-Louise von Franz: “Absolute knowledge is like the flame of a burning candle, but if you turn on an electric light, the candle's flame becomes invisible” (von Franz, 2016, p. 40).

I hope that we are able to notice the ‘flame of the candle’ as a priori knowledge, that this world is created for humanity.

This is a poem by Pavlo Vyshebaba, a warrior and Ukrainian poet

(May 17, 2022, Donetsk region)