Jungian psychotherapy, spirituality, and synchronicity: Theory, applications, and evidence base

The aim of this article is to give an introduction to the theoretical model of Jungian psychotherapy (JP) and the role of spirituality in it, with a special focus on the concept of synchronicity (meaningful coincidences), by which the application of a spiritual viewpoint in JP will be exemplified. The paper gives an overview of the empirical studies of the effectiveness of JP and then focuses on the results of an empirical study on the occurrence of synchronistic events in psychotherapy and how they are integrated in the therapeutic process. JP can be called the prototype of a spiritually integrated psychotherapy, since Jung was the first in the development of psychotherapy who put a strong emphasis on a spiritual perspective and who succeeded to integrate spirituality into his psychotherapy approach with a coherent theoretical model in the background. Moreover, Jung's psychology became a major reference point for many other spiritual psychotherapy approaches which developed in the twentieth century. Regarding the studies on the effectiveness of JP it can be said that there is some empirical support pointing to the effectiveness of JP, but there is a strong need for further research, especially with randomized controlled trial designs. The paper presents the results of a study investigating how psychotherapists integrate synchronistic experiences and make use of these to support the therapeutic process. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).