This essay was developed for a 2009 retreat at Landsort Island, Sweden, hosted by Claes Hultling, Richard Levi, and the Karolinska Institute. A complete version was originally read at the Annual General Meeting of the British Society for Philosophy in Practice, in London, at Red Lion Square, in 2009.

It was originally published as Lou Marinoff, “Synchronicities, Serpents, and Something Else-ness,” Philosophical Practice 4, no. 3 (Nov. 2009): 519–34.

It was subsequently republished in The Challenge of Dialogue, Volume 12, Series on Socratic Philosophizing, ed. Jens Peter Brune, Horst Gronke, and Dieter Krohn (Münster/London: LIT, 2010), 133–56.

It was subsequently republished in C.G. Jung, Vereniging van Tegenstellingen (C.G. Jung Vereniging Nederland, Interdsciplinaire Vereniging vppr Analytische Psychologie), Amersfoot, Number 30, 2015, 38–63.

It has been translated into Chinese and possibly other languages.

It is republished here by permission of the American Philosophical Practitioners Association.

Synchronicity I

In the summer of 2006, I read several books by well-known existential psychiatrist and insightful novelist Irvin Yalom. They were all thought-provoking and mightily entertaining. Dr. Yalom sustains lively interests in philosophical aspects of psychiatry, as well as in psychiatric aspects of philosophy. Among other works, he has written two profoundly philosophical novels, namely The Schopenhauer Cure and When Nietzsche Wept, in which he has delved deeply and creatively into the psyches of these two outstanding thinkers via the refracting media of literary and historical fiction, and through lenses of eclectic existential psychiatry.

Yalom’s fictive excursions are not confined to philosophical realms—far from it. In a delightfully ironic novel entitled Lying on the Couch (he is an inveterate punster in love with double-entendre), Yalom takes to task some perennially unfinished business of psychoanalysis, namely analysts’ perpetual struggles with counter-transference issues. Even the most seasoned psychoanalysts, so Yalom artfully reveals, have not yet had their own egos sufficiently shrunk. In consequence, they are apt to experience all kinds of problems with patients, and not always of the patients’ making. To be sure, patients are wont to deceive their analysts at times, whether subconsciously, diffidently, or maliciously. And analysts themselves are prone to all the vanities cataloged by Ecclesiastes in antiquity, egoisms and egotisms alike that appear innately rooted in the human psyche, and which inevitably contribute to self-deception.