Emotion, Synchronicity and Surprise

Watch the recording

Emotion, Synchronicity and Surprise

with Beverley Zabriskie

Sunday June 13, 2021
9:00 PDT | 12:00 EDT | 17:00 BST  |  18:00 CEST

2-hour session

If you are unable to attend the live session, the recording will be available.

In Psyche and Matter, the Jungian analyst Marie Louise von Franz notes:

Like Wolfgang Paul’s “statistical laws with primary probabilities,” archetypes are also “a list of expectation values or ‘primary probability’ for certain psychological (including mental) reactions.” Referring to physicist David Bohm’s grid, “the archetypes can be understood as dynamic, unobservable structures, specimens of the implicate order. If, on the other hand, an archetype manifests as an archetypal dream image, it has unfolded and become more ‘explicated’.” (p. 252)

Jung spoke of synchronicity as an archetypal pattern. What allows an archetype to unfold, and a synchronous experiences to be explicated as a synchronicity?

In the post-Cartesian era, tough minded neuroscientists ignored the seemingly tenderminded themes of emotion and imagination. Since the  1990’s there has been  dedicated pursuit of the role of emotion in cognition and imagination, leading to an intersection with Carl Jung’s seminal concepts of the affective basis of the psyche, the psyche’s role in emotional equilibrium,  the notion of emotion as fuel for imagination, perceivable in archetypal images and narratives.. We have moved from what one researcher describes as a movement from  “I think therefore I am,”, to “I feel , therefore I think, I think.”

This discussion will engage the intrinsic role  of emotion and the agency of imagination as catalysts of unfolding, as  intensities in the imprinting  of mind and psyche, body and  brain. The necessity of surprise as a basic survival emotion, and a crucial component of psychic process will be highlighted.

We will hear implicit and explicit resonances between Jung’s tenets and four contemporary theorists’ relevance to our understanding of  inter-relatedness, on the continuum of emotion, synchronicity and surprise.:

• Jaak Panskepp’s affective neuroscience’s observation that “the evolutionary layering of the brain, the raw affective substrates of mind have a more ancient evolutionary history than our sense of cognitive awareness (Panksepp, 1998).
• Joseph Le Doux’s The Deep History of Ourselves: The Four-Billion-Year Story of How We Got Conscious Brains
• Antonio Damasio’s model of convergence and divergence.
• Rodolo Llinas notions of endogenous images, and the human brain as akin to a musical instrument with sympathetic chords.

Beverley Zabriskie, LCSW, is a Jungian analyst in New York City, and a founding faculty member and past president of the Jungian Psychoanalytic Association (JPA). Ms Zabriskie is a past vice president of the Philemon Foundation, dedicated to publishing the unpublished works of C.G. Jung, and a past president of the National Association for the Advancement of Psychoanalysis. She is on the Executive Committee of the Helix Center for Interdisciplinary Investigation, and on the editorial boards of the Journal of Analytical Psychology, London and the San Francisco Jung Journal: Psyche and Culture. She presented the 2007 Fay Lecture ‘Transformation Through Emotion: From Myth to Neuroscience.’ Her many lectures and publications include ‘A Meeting of Rare Minds,’ the Preface to Atom and Archetype: The Pauli-Jung Correspondence (2001); ‘When Psyche Meets Soma: The Question of Incarnation’ in About a Body (2006); ‘Time and Tao in Synchronicity’ in the Jung-Pauli Conjecture and Its Impact Today (2014); ‘Energy and Emotion: C.G. Jung’s Fordham Declaration’ in Jung in the Academy and Beyond: The Fordham Lectures 100 Years Later; and ‘Psychic Energy and Synchronicity’ Journal of Analytical Psychology (2014). A recent publication is ‘Spectrums of Emotion’ in Research in Analytical Psychology, Vol. l.

To see the full What is Consciousness Series and list of speakers click here