Synchronicity and Trauma, January 24, 2023, #WUJ

“True reality actually consists of the sum of individual exceptions.” 

Marie-Louise von Franz

Good evening, we are from Ukraine!

I hope that for everyone who has joined this meeting, there is a bit of synchronicity about the fact that you are here today, it should imply some meaning because the essence of synchronicity is to guide us in our search for meaning.

My existence today is filled with the meaning of freedom, as the modern Ukrainian poet and writer Yury Andruhovych put it: “Of all the religions of this dubious world, only freedom remains unquestionable and to this day retains its exclusive meaning against the background of the relentlessly advancing conformism, technological relativism, and falsification of reality. I am lucky: I am writing in the language of this freedom. In the Ukrainian language!” (Speech on receiving the Heinrich Heine Award  in Düsseldorf, December 10, 2022). 

Can you reflect on your meanings together with me? Why are you here today? What is your sense? What was the accident or coincidence that has brought you here?  What is the value of your being here today? And where does this path take you?

As  C.G. Jung wrote:  “Without the reflective consciousness of an individual, the world is a giant meaningless machine, because based on our experience a human being is the only being capable of finding at least some meaning” (von Franz, 2013, p. 263).

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

In his Synchronicity: An Acausal Connecting Principle,  C.G. Jung offers two definitions. The narrower definition is “simultaneous occurrence of a certain psychological state with one or more external events that appear as significant parallels to the given subjective state”, and the broader definition is “psychologically determined relativity of time and space… acausal ordering” (Jung, 1997).

Under the “narrow definition”, synchronicity refers to significant coincidences between internal psychic events, such as dreams, thoughts, fantasies, and events in the external, material world, thus synchronicity can be defined as simultaneity plus meaningful connection. Synchronicity is a creative principle constantly operating in nature and ordering events in a “non-physical” (non-causal) way. Based solely on their meaning. Jung suggested that synchronicity is a separate case of general acausal ordering.

With detailed analysis we can discover several important emphases in 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 are logically derived from each other. 2) The meaning. Synchronicity is about events that are necessarily meaningfully linked. The meaning of a synchronistic event is revealed only provided we understand it symbolically, not just intellectually.   Awareness of the meaning is a “quantum leap” in the Psyche. 3) Physicist Bohr referred to the phenomena that establish the connection between the psychic and material worlds and testify to their integral basis as “indivisibility of the whole”. He describes experimentally how  particles that were initially connected and then disconnected behave as if they “know” the state of other particles, even at a great distance that excludes any chance of interaction. Jung also observed that and referred to this dimension as the Objective Psyche or Unus mundus.  The Jungian concept of the united energy that manifests as matter at low frequencies and as Psyche at higher frequencies is broadly reminiscent of the Chinese concept of Qi (von Franz, 2013, p. 253). Everything that exists is a flow of energy.  Von Franz writes that the synchronistic way of thinking is the Chinese way of thinking. And she offers the example where a Chinese emperor suggested the choice between a bowl of rice and the Book of Changes (I-Ching), … “It is very characteristic of the Chinese that even a bowl of rice – and they experienced hunger very acutely – was less important to them than the opportunity to recover their favorite Book of Changes, i.e. recover spiritual landmarks” (von Franz, 2016, p. 10).

I would like to try and carefully touch upon the vibrant, still pulsating experience of every Ukrainian – the onset of the full-scale war on February 24. In the process of writing this text, I experienced powerful resistance, which manifested itself in a high level of tension. My imagination brought me to the image of a volcano erupting, I am very close to the crater, the threat of the cataclysm is very close to me, and my imagination and psyche are being powerfully impacted by the trauma.

I would like to cite several dreams that came on the eve of the war. I should mention that I will use various symbolic material that I have collected when working with clients, students, from the community of colleagues, from support groups during these 11 months of the war, I got the permission to use them under the terms and conditions of confidentiality and anonymity.

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V. : I remember that my mind seemed to be suspended in vacuum and my thoughts were spinning in circles: It can’t be true? How it is possible that there is a war with tanks and missiles in the 21st century!?? No! It cannot be true, well, it can be an information, biological [war], but not like that, not “grandfatherly”.

Yu.:  “The beginning of the year was tense and passive.  Such ambivalence was perceived throughout. On the one hand, I didn’t want to do anything, because everything seemed useless, I thought – why all that if all of us were going to die. It was as if my body was saving energy for something that would become vital later. On the other hand, the tension was growing and I wanted to run somewhere to vent it off a little. 

A week before the start of the war, I had the dream: “It’s as if I’m looking at the sky, and it’s all covered with black clouds like before a major thunderstorm. There, in my dream, I understand that something will inevitably happen, and I feel huge pain with the impossibility of changing it.” 

When I woke up, I realized – the imminent was somewhere very close. For that reason during the entire week I felt as if I had lost something, said farewell something. Although back then I still did not understand what that something was…

L.: “During that period, I had a very vivid dream, I remember it very well.  It still gives me the feeling of surprise and lack of understanding.

 The dream: “I remember going outside and seeing the sun and the moon in the dark, and how darkness of the night supersedes the light.  And it’s as if I’m standing right on the strip of this border between darkness and light.  And I hear that there are lots of people outside, no one can understand how this can be possible.  And the deep inner feeling that “it is impossible, unbelievable” to see both day and night at the same time, and to be located exactly on the dividing line between the two.  As well as admiration and fear, the magical beauty and the firm realization that I see something not mundane but awesome.” 

 K.: A couple of weeks before February 24, I had a very strange dream.

 The dream: “Some people tie me up and take me away, they say it’s for my own benefit.  At this moment I feel hopeless and terrified.  I know that people in the city turn into crustaceans (that’s what it sounds like in the dream), it’s something like a virus, a mutation.  I find myself free and running through the city, and suddenly I see Kyiv plunging into darkness, I only see faint lights at a distance.  I’m looking for my mother, but they tell me – don’t look for her, she’s not at home.  And I don’t know where she lives now.  My kids and I look for some food in shops that are still open.

 Such a dream.

 In fact, my mother’s house was damaged with a shell, and she had to go and work abroad, there they found her a place to live.  This dream still gives me shivers.

I.: The dream:  “I cannot draw the terrible dream, because it will be a caricature, but let me describe it verbally. It was my recurrent dream even before the war: as if we are young children hiding on a furnace from the fascists who came in 1941, and they enter the house and point their machine guns at us, and there is nowhere to run…”

I have listed the several dreams that reflect, I believe, the characteristic images, states, and symbols that appeared in dreams in the last months prior to the war. Having analyzed a large scope of symbolic content, I have selected the dreams that are characteristic of various clusters of unconscious material to suggest a preliminary classification – sure, this is nothing more than my vision of the empiric material.

 

The first example of that of the obsessive thought: “No! It cannot be true, with tanks and missiles in the 21st century, only not a “grandfatherly” war.”

Terrible awareness of the war was already in one’s mind, if we disregard the particle “No”. This very narrative was almost omnipresent, the human mind could not allow for, perceive this “barbaric cyclicality”, that it is so close and so obviously becoming our reality. We are only the third generation, we thought that stories of our grandparents about WWII were in the past and could not accept/believe that it could be our future.  Our “no” is so humane and understandable, it is such a naive desire to cover our eyes with our hands and say that this does not exist, it should not be. It seems to me that this is how we preserve our own tiny and fragile inner world of goodness in the face of the external onslaught. This is the grain that we will preserve throughout the war as the faith that the world will come to its senses and recall peace on earth, and the wheel of time will lead us to the “eternal earthly order.”

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

 

Next, I would consider together the two dreams about “anticipation of a great loss and looking into the stormy sky” and the dream about the “unbelievable”, with the line of intersection/meeting of the sun and the moon.” These vivid dreams belong to the category of dreams that can be described as “talking to nature without words.” This is the motif of connection with the Cosmos/Universe, the ability to hold a conversation with eternity, which we often observe in fairy tales, myths, indigenous ethnic legends. Jung wrote that the dreams that carry the meaning of “unbelievable” indicate at synchronicity and have a very powerful impact on the dreamer. A personality meets energy of “absolute, a priori knowledge.” We can observe through these dreams the work of the acausal principle, where knowledge does not come from cyclic, eternal time, as Chinese wisdom would put it. Our psyche becomes a mirror that momentarily reflects eternity. C.G.  Jung in his Synchronicity reflects on the nature of such mysterious phenomena.  He writes that the world of nature and the world of the human psyche are two parallel dimensions and, like two mirrors, they mutually reflect each other.  At certain moments – most important for an individual – the outside world sends us sort of of hints, warnings.  But in order to understand the true meaning of these “signals”, one should not look for rational explanations of them, but treat them as symbols that can be understood primarily by feeling and intuition, not by reason (Jung, 1997).

The dream “where people are transformed into crustacean creatures, mutation, virus” may combine the motives of the loss of humanity, where human features disappear, instead we face primitive levels of consciousness, where everything human is lost, the thin layer of civilization disappears, mutation of ethical, moral principles inevitably devours human souls. The motive is that of terrible transformation into primitive creatures: crustaceans, disembodied outlines of assassins, invisible figures in KGB uniforms, monsters with blood-covered hands, a lot of robotic, metallic images – this is just a short list of images from dreams of autumn/winter 2022. Presence of these werewolves in dreams of Ukrainian people mirrors the broader collective processes of Shadow infection and the mutation that all of us had to face shortly. I would also attribute these motifs to representation of the trauma, precisely the kind of psychological trauma that one individual inflicts on another, where faith in humanistic principles – on which the European culture and ethics are based – is lost. One can see how the unconscious prepares, warns, makes it possible to experience the first shock of encountering something inhuman, non-subjective in advance.

And the last short dream about fascists covers a very large cluster of dreams that literally repeat the events of 1941-1945. Ukrainians perceived the first parallels between the fascist and russian attacks at dawn on February 24. This pathetic mimicking of waking people up with bombs and missiles at dawn, at 5 am, only confirms the reality of the dark forces that capture masses and set in motion patterns of the evil, violence, heartlessness. It scares me personally how detailed the repetition of pictures and imagery of the World War II is, it is hard to believe that this is possible (but often in dreams people already see not only fascists, but also russian soldiers). The psyche does not make a big difference, because the common archetypal basis of war is taking lives, encroaching on what belongs to someone else, it is an attack on freedom of will, on development, and the future. Everything becomes dehumanized, unworthy, we see a bloody feast of power, force, and aggression.  To some extent, many of these dreams came true as actual events, their exact copies. People said that those dreams were prophetic in details, for example, there was a dream on the eve of the war about one’s grandmother’s house and that barrels of tanks were aimed at it, but there was a Chinese protective symbol in the garden. A month later, in the first days of the war, when the entire family was hiding in the grandmother’s house, russian tanks entered the village, they were in full occupation, most of the houses were destroyed, while that house survived, the occupiers did not even enter the yard. The feeling was that there was an invisible protective line circling the house.  The second example – a dream: “In the dream, my native town is burning in explosions of the war, in the glow people are taken to the forest to be shot, those are all my people, familiar faces, I know them since childhood. I look into their eyes and say goodbye.” Reality:  after six months of the town’s occupation, the forest became a cemetery with 440 graves of local citizens. The whole of Ukraine mourned them and said goodbye to them.” I will stop there so as not to open Pandora’s box with all the grieves and memories of these tumultuous 11 months.

I would also like to show you some drawings. These are drawings of dreams in the first two weeks of the war, all these people were under constant artillery and missile attacks in the cities where active hostilities took place.  You can see and feel this hellish fear, this descent into hell, torment, pain, and powerlessness. When I worked in real time with the drawings, dreams, I constantly had the feeling that a tank’s barrel was pointed at me. I was at a safe distance from the explosions, but when I would go to bed, instead of sleeping I experienced the active imagination: “I am in the epicenter of an explosion, in front of me – as if in slow motion – gray dust, mud, soil with debris of everything rise and swallow me.” I experienced this terrible vision with my entire body, every part of me, every night. I was unable to opt out, unable to stop this experience of a witness. The unconscious demanded that I went “through,” shared this reality, let the trauma (as the explosion) into the psyche, recognized and contemplated its destructive force, in order to eventually plant a “seed” in this bare land, but that will come later.  The statement by Clarissa Pinkola Estes fills me with hope: “I know that those who somehow and for a while were cut off from the very belief in life are those who have the inner knowledge that the Garden of Eden is hidden behind every empty field, that new seeds are initially planted in empty, devastated soil, as in the open Self, even when the heart aches, the mind is tired, or the spirit is desolate” (Estes, 2005, p. 28).

These dreams and drawings are connected by the central image and feeling – “point-blank”, “too close”, “the barrel of a tank is aimed at me”, “piercing through.” Perhaps this is one of central representations of war. This is how the psyche experiences an encounter with the trauma of war. As with something much larger than you, like a Tank, an iron-clad, indifferent monster that will erase you – as defined by Ann Ulanov, “erasure” is what is taking place. Also, I think, this “point-blank” proximity reflects the tragedy of the neighboring nations that lived so long so close.   In one of her dreams, a woman faced a tank, it was right in front of her, pointing its barrel at her heart. The woman saw death point-blank, and at that moment she felt that she would be saved by her vyshyvanka (an embroidered shirt, the Ukrainian national clothing), she opened her coat under which she wore the vyshyvanka, and the tank stopped. As she said: “The Ukrainian identity stopped it!” A vyshyvanka bears the sacred meaning of the Ukrainian genus, the code of the nation, the power of ancestors who embroidered the symbols of the land, protection, and freedom with a needle and thread. I feel that my country, Ukraine, like the woman, countered this shameful attack with something much stronger than iron weapons, she contested it with something symbolic: values, identity, truth itself, love, and resilience.

Jung: “The world into which we were born is rough and cruel, and at the same time filled with Divine beauty.  Which will prevail – meaninglessness or sense – is a matter of individual temperament.  If the absurd prevailed absolutely, the consciousness of life would have diminished at each step of our development.  But it’s not like that, at least so it seems to me.  Apparently, as with all metaphysical questions, the both are true: life is meaning or has meaning, as well as meaninglessness.  I have the anxious hope that sense will trump senselessness and win the battle.” (von Franz, 2013, p. 286).

My attempt was to show how Ukrainians felt the “Spirit of Time” through synchronistic phenomena. Each period of history has its specific “zeitgeist”, in which constellation of the archetype takes place.  Archetypes as active points of the objective Psyche have the quality of “transgressiveness”, through synchronistic phenomena they show the process of embodiment, entry of the eternal archetypal order into the material reality. True symbols are not invented by the mind but spontaneously discovered by the unconscious, as we have observed with the dreams presented.

An individual comes in contact with the unconscious at the borderline of questions of the “impossible”, von Fanz offers an analogy: “the Chinese Book of Changes can be compared with an all-pervading electrical circuit, it will not light up until an individual asks a question.  When asking a question, an individual presses an electric switch, after which a certain part of the circuit is illuminated and electric current is supplied for a short moment to illuminate an immeasurable situation, awareness occurs” (von Franz, 2016, p. 60).

Ukrainians, as well as the rest of the world, had one question: “Will there be a war?” Will the humanity allow this to happen again?” .

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

Each of us is a bearer of a part of the consciousness that the epoch requires in order to achieve a better understanding of the unfolding historical leitmotifs.

I would like to conclude my talk with a metaphor by Maria-Louise von Franz: “Absolute knowledge is like flame of a candle that burns – if one turns on electric light, the candle flame becomes invisible” (von Franz, 2016, p. 40).

I hope that we will be able to notice the “flame of the candle” as a priori knowledge that this world was created for humanity.

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

(May 17, 2022, Donbas region)

References:

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2. Стайн М. Юнговская карта души: Введение в аналитическую психологию/ Пер. с англ. – М.: «Когито-Центр», 2010. – 256 с.

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