"Quantum theory provides us with a striking illustration of the fact that we can fully understand a connection though we can only speak of it in images and parables."
— Werner Heisenberg




A rather striking and humorous anecdote from Jung regarding an experience he had with a patient. This was simply too good not to share:


"My example concerns a young woman patient who, in spite of efforts made on both sides, proved to be psychologically inaccessible. The difficulty lay in the fact that she always knew better about everything. Her excellent education had provided her with a weapon ideally suited to this purpose, namely a highly polished Cartesian rationalism with an impeccably "geometrical" idea of reality. After several fruitless attempts to sweeten her rationalism by a somewhat more human understanding, I had to confine myself to the hope that something unexpected and irrational would turn up, something that would burst the intellectual retort into which she had sealed herself... She had had an impressive dream the night before, in which someone had given her a golden scarab - a costly piece of jewelry. While she was still telling me this dream, I heard something behind me gently tapping on the window. I turned round and saw that it was a fairly large flying insect that was knocking against the windowpane from outside in the obvious effort to get into the dark room. This seemed to me very strange. I opened the window immediately and caught the insect in the air as it flew in. It was a scarabeid beetle, or common rose-chafer (Cetonia aurata), whose golden-green colour most nearly resembles that of a golden scarab. I handed this beetle to my patient with the words "Here is your scarab." This experience punctured the desired hole in her rationalism and broke the ice of her intellectual resistance. The treatment could now continue with satisfactory results."

"We see here appearing clearly the main characteristics of a synchronicity event: one must be able to establish a meaningful correlation between the objective outer event and the person’s inner psychological state, and the correlation must be acausal."

"The second essential feature is the lack of causal connection between the outer event and the subjective inner state... In this sense, neither the outer event (beetle) causes the inner (dream) nor vice-versa. Instead they are acausally related through meaning and not simply a chance coming together of outer events and inner psychological states."

— Carl Jung, Synchronicity: An Acausal Connecting Principle, p. 110