Reciprocal rescues and Jung’s scarab are rare coincidences.
Key Points
Could rare synchronicities represent examples of categories rather than being one of a kind?
Reciprocal rescue represents a dramatic synchronicity.
AI could find no stories resembling Jung’s scarab and one for reciprocal rescue, suggesting these are unusual.
Common coincidences are composed of everyday events, while rare ones are composed of infrequent events.
Many synchronicities seem unique to the person experiencing them. Is their unique-seeming coincidence also rare among the broad range of meaningful coincidences? Or are some of them like black swans in that one rare synchronicity points toward many of the same type?
Black swans are native to Australia and were first documented by Europeans in the 17th century. Their discovery challenged the long-standing European belief that all swans were white. This discovery led to the metaphor of the “black swan” to describe an unexpected event that can signal a large number of the same type.
Are certain improbable coincidences, like black swans, harbingers of much larger numbers? Or do some of them represent a very small number of reported synchronicities? I selected two seemingly rare types of coincidences and asked the AI bots ChatGPT and You.com to find similar stories. If AI could not find many more, then these coincidence types would likely be rare.
Reciprocal Life-Saving Events
Reciprocal life-saving events are among the more compelling forms of coincidence: One person saves another’s life, only to have their life saved by the rescued person later on.
One Good Tourniquet Deserves Another: Allen Falby was a highway patrolman in Texas. One night on duty, he crashed his motorcycle and lay bleeding to death, having ruptured a major artery in his leg. Alfred Smith arrived, quickly put a tourniquet on his leg and saved his life.
Five years later, Falby was again on duty and received a call to go to the scene of an auto accident. There, he found a man who was bleeding to death from a severed artery in his leg. He applied a tourniquet and saved the man’s life. It was Alfred Smith. (1)
The Policeman and the Paramedic: A police officer saved a man’s life by applying a tourniquet during a severe accident. Years later, that same man, now trained as a paramedic, responded to an emergency where the police officer was critically injured. The paramedic’s swift action saved the officer’s life, bringing their connection full circle.
ChatGPT and You.com found only The Policeman and the Paramedic. They did not find One Good Tourniquet, which I had previously read about. Although there are many rescue stories with the participants that have united years later, there is no other example of reciprocal life-saving that the AI bots could find. This suggests that this coincidence form rarely occurs.
Jungian-Scarab-Like Synchronicities in Psychotherapy
In psychotherapy, synchronicities often manifest in ways that seem deeply meaningful to both therapist and patient. These experiences can provide insight, validation, or breakthroughs in therapy. Jung’s scarab is a paradigmatic story. Here are three similar stories
Jung’s Scarab: One of Carl Jung’s most famous examples of synchronicity involves a patient who was at a critical impasse in her therapy. The patient recounted a dream in which she was given a golden scarab. As she was telling Jung about the dream, a beetle resembling the scarab (a rose chafer) struck the window and flew into the room. Jung caught the beetle and presented it to the patient, which led to a breakthrough in her therapy. (2)
Marlo’s Bird: Jungian analyst Helen Marlo described a patient who wanted to be a bird. This wish reflected his desire for a strong mother (bird) to nourish him. The following week, the patient walked to the window and, for the first time, noticed a baby bird inside a nest that had been perched in an adjacent window for several weeks. At that moment, the mother bird flew to the nest to feed her baby a worm. The event helped decrease the patient’s inhibitions about discussing these needs. (3)
Hotel California: A patient was discussing an internal conflict between his musician identity and intellectual pursuits during a session. While expressing this, the therapist accidentally triggered the song “Hotel California” on the computer, which played aloud. The song, symbolizing the darker side of the music industry and the struggle between staying in the familiar or evolving, reflected the patient’s conflict, creating a moment of insight.
The Book Synchronicity: Counselor Rolf Gordhamer described another client-counselor experiential mirror: “During the Iran-Iraq war in the mid-1980s, I was counseling an Iranian college student who was very worried about his family. They had to leave their home, which was in the war zone. Thinking I could bring some spiritual flavor into the sessions, I showed him the book Autobiography of a Yogi. He reached into his satchel and pulled out the same book. We were both practically on the same page. This synchronicity seemed to bring a calm to the student.” (4)
The AI bots did not locate any stories similar to Jung’s Scarab. Each of the others came from my own research. Marlo’s Bird and Hotel California were reported by Jungian therapist Helen Marlo.
Rare vs. Common Coincidences
Common coincidences like “thinking of someone and they contact you” or “thinking of a song and hearing it on the radio” are composed of common, everyday events—phone calls, text messages, radios, and songs. Rare coincidences involve highly specific and unusual events that don’t align with everyday experiences.
Common coincidences can be explained in several different ways, including the person’s tendency to find matching events in their environment. Rare coincidences are unlikely to be based on prior expectations and needs. This difference suggests that rare synchronicities require different explanations.
Comment
Differentiating rare from common coincidences will help in the development of a science of synchronicity. By characterizing the differences, we can improve our understanding of the statistical and other explanations for their occurrences.
It is likely that many rare coincidences have not been reported. This use of AI is limited to those synchronicities that are accessible on the web.
The stories of reciprocal life-saving events and the synchronicities in psychotherapy seem to point toward a form of connectivity or meaningful alignment between events. One could argue that these events might reflect a deeper, perhaps unconscious, interconnectedness between people—a connection that becomes visible through such coincidences.
Further research, possibly involving larger datasets and more rigorous methodologies, would be needed to explore these phenomena more deeply. Until then, these rare coincidences remain powerful reminders of the mysteries that continue to elude our full understanding, inviting us to ponder the complex and often surprising ways in which our lives intersect with the world around us and with each other.
References
1) Combs, A. and M. Holland. Synchronicity: Through the Eyes of Science, Myth and the Trickster. New York: Marlow and Company, 1996.
2) Jung, CG. (1963) Synchronicity. Princeton, NJ: Princeton Press.
3) Marlo, Helen, and Jeffrey Kline, “Synchronicity and Psychotherapy: Unconscious Communication in the Psychotherapeutic Relationship.” Psychotherapy 35, no. 1 (Spring 1998): 16–22.)
4) Coincidence or Destiny? Stories of Synchronicity that Illuminate Our Lives by Phil Cousineau and Robert A. Johnson (1997), pages 203-204
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