The flock of birds occasioned a vague fear
Structure and Dynamics of the Psyche CW 8
Here I would like to call attention to a possible misunderstanding which may be occasioned by the term “synchronicity.”
I chose this term because the simultaneous occurrence of two meaningfully but not causally connected events seemed to me an essential criterion.
I am therefore using the general concept of synchronicity in the special sense of a coincidence in time of two or more causally unrelated events which have the same or a similar meaning, in contrast to “synchronism,” which simply means the simultaneous occurrence of two events.
Synchronicity therefore means the simultaneous occurrence of a certain psychic state with one or more external events which appear as meaningful parallels to the momentary subjective state—and, in certain cases, vice versa.
My two examples illustrate this in different ways.
In the case of the scarab the simultaneity is immediately obvious, but not in the second example.
It is true that the flock of birds occasioned a vague fear, but that can be explained causally.
The wife of my patient was certainly not conscious beforehand of any fear that could be compared with my own apprehensions, for the symptoms
(pains in the throat) were not of a kind to make the layman suspect anything bad.
The unconscious, however, often knows more than the conscious, and it seems to me possible that the woman’s unconscious had already got wind of the danger.
If, therefore, we rule out a conscious psychic content such as the idea of deadly danger, there is an obvious simultaneity between the flock of birds, in its traditional meaning, and the death of the husband.
The psychic state, if we disregard the possible but still not demonstrable excitation of the unconscious, appears to be dependent on the external event.
The woman’s psyche is nevertheless involved in so far as the birds settled on her house and were observed by her.
For this reason it seems to me probable that her unconscious was in fact constellated.
The flock of birds has, as such, a traditional mantic significance.
This is also apparent in the woman’s own interpretation, and it therefore looks as if the birds represented an unconscious premonition of death.
The physicians of the Romantic Age would probably have talked of “sympathy” or “magnetism.”
But, as I have said, such phenomena cannot be explained causally unless one permits oneself the most fantastic ad hoc hypotheses. ~Carl Jung, CW 8, Para 849-850
Carl Jung and Bird Anthology
Carl Jung Depth Psychology Facebook Group
The daimon of sexuality approaches our soul as a serpent. She is half human soul and is called thought-desire. The daimon of spirituality descends into our soul as the white bird. He is half human soul and is called desire-thought. ~Carl Jung, Liber Novus, Page 354.
If I am not conjoined through the uniting of the Below and the Above, I break down into three parts: the serpent, and in that or some other animal form I roam, living nature daimonically, arousing fear and longing. The human soul, living forever within you. The celestial soul, as such dwelling with the Gods, far from you and unknown to you, appearing in the form of a bird. ~Carl Jung’s Soul to him, Black Books, Appendix C., Page 370.
The anima also has affinities with animals, which symbolize her characteristics. Thus she can appear as a snake or a tiger or a bird. ~ Carl Jung, CW 9i, para. 358
The second part of it, the secretary-bird and the snake, has been correctly interpreted, in spite of the fact that the snake is not exactly Kundalini because the Kundalini serpent actually dissolves into light. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. 1, Pages 95-97.
Mary is represented as a sea flower in one hymn and Christ as the sea bird that rests in her. This is exactly the eastern motif of the lotus. ~Carl Jung, ETH, Page 118.
Christ is spoken of as being born or hidden in a rose, or as a sea bird resting in a flower of the sea. This is a direct analogy to Buddha appearing in the Lotus in the Amitabha Land with geese and swans about him. Pages 100-101.
The daimon of sexuality approaches our soul as a serpent. She is half human soul and is called thought-desire. The daimon of spirituality descends into our soul as the white bird. He is half human soul and is called desire-thought. ~Carl Jung, Liber Novus, Page 354.
An ethical fraternity, with its mythical Nothing, not infused by any archaic-infantile driving force, is a pure vacuum and can never evoke in man the slightest trace of that age-old animal power which drives the migrating bird across the sea. . . .~Carl Jung, Freud/Jung Letters, Page 294.
God is an immediate experience of a very primordial nature, one of the most natural products of our mental life, as the birds sing, as the wind whistles, like the thunder of the surf. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 252-253.
Why should the psyche be the only living thing that is outside laws of determination? We follow archetypal patterns as the weaver-bird does. This assumption is far more probable than the mystical idea of absolute freedom. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 450-451
The bird signifies the aerial, volatile spirit (in the chemical sense “spirit” is volatile, but it also designates the Spiritus Sanctus), whose physical and spiritual meanings are united in the alchemical spiritus Mercurialis. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 476-477
He [Elijah] said I treated thoughts as if I generated them myself, but, according to his views, thoughts were like animals in a forest, or people in a room, or birds in the air. ~Carl Jung, 1925 Seminar, Page 103
Even the Holy Ghost has to turn into a bird of prey in order to snatch the germ of life. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 140
So doing, our efforts will follow nature’s own striving to bring life to the fullest possible fruition in each individual, for only in the individual can life fulfil its meaning—not in the bird that sits in a gilded cage. ~Carl Jung, CW 16, Para 229.
In his [Jung] mother’s room were cages, like bird cages, only they were houses, and they were for the ghosts (that is, the flitting ideas in the mind) to lodge in. ~E.A. Bennet, Meetings with Jung, Page 307
Talent, on the other hand, can either be hampered, crippled, and perverted, or fostered, developed, and improved. The genius is as rare a bird as the phoenix, an apparition not to be counted upon. Consciously or unconsciously, genius is something that by God’s grace is there from the start, in full strength. ut talent is a statistical regularity and does not always have a dynamism to match. ~Carl Jung, CW 17, Para 248
