Beyond Jung 2024 – Four Shillings and Sixpence: Synchronicity and Poetry

Four Shillings and Sixpence: Synchronicity and Poetry

with Richard Berengarten.

Sunday, December 15, 2024
9am PST / 12pm EST / 5pm GMT / 6pm CET

Beyond Jung 2024, Session 6 of 6

As a working poet, Richard Berengarten is interested, both theoretically and practically, in how Jung’s theory of synchronicity—with all its connections of specificity in time and place—is entangled in our ideas and experiences of inspiration, imagination, discovery and creativity. This means that he’s interested in how Jung’s theory is intervolved in both the sciences and the arts, and as much in our day-to-day experiences and dream-life as in, say, religious and visionary experience. To explore his themes and ideas, and to broach some questions arising from them, he’ll read a small selection of his own poems connected with synchronicity, which he’ll open for discussion. He aims, too, to broach some conjectures about the fractal geometries and symbolic configurations of both four (as in the Christian cross and the quaternity favoured by Jung) and six (as in the hexagonal forms that often occur in nature, in the hexagrams of the I Ching, and in the Star of Solomon), and the ways in which configurations such as these connect with synchronistic experience.

Richard Berengarten (b. London, 1943) is a poet who lives in Cambridge UK. He has also lived in Italy, Greece, the USA, and former Yugoslavia. His poetry and poetics have been influenced by Jung for sixty years, especially vis-à-vis synchronicity and the imagination. His long poem, Changing (2016) is based on the I Ching and is a homage to this ancient classic. His ongoing series of chapbooks, Imagems (2013, 2019, 2025), presents succinct 12-point statements on poetics, and his monograph Keys to Transformation: Ceri Richards and Dylan Thomas (1980) engages with poetry and visual art in Jungian terms. He has published over 30 books and received many poetry awards, and his work has been translated into more than 100 languages. He is a Bye-Fellow at Downing College, Cambridge, Academic Associate of Pembroke College, Cambridge, and Fellow of the English Association.