Week 5 Reflections

Before getting into the article that we read for class, I wanted to do some reflecting on the speaker, Joan Blades, who we had the chance to hear from on Wednesday night. Without getting too political, one thing that I didn't appreciate about the "living room discussion" is that it seemed to me like all of the members of the discussion were from a liberal standpoint. That's fine, but it kind of contradicted what she was getting at--to have discussions with friends with different views. I thought overall the discussion was interesting and I appreciated the professors' willingness to note other points of view, but I wish I could have actually heard from someone with those opposing views and see what these "living room conversations" would truly look like.

Anyway, the article by Guindon & Hanna (2002) provided insight and application into the idea of synchronicity, which for me wasn't easily understood. This very psychoanalytic phenomenon in counseling was introduced by Carl Jung in the 1930s and used techniques such as meditation, guided imagery, active imagination, and dream analysis (Guindon & Hanna, 2002). Guindon & Hanna (2002) note that the phenomenon is underrepresented in career literature, which doesn’t surprise me, because of the dwindling of the use of psychoanalytic techniques overall in the field of counseling. After reading the case studies I began to understand more what Jung defines as synchronicity. To me, synchronicity is the hand of God, not coincidence or happenstance. The stories that these clients told almost seemed unreal to me. Although, I agree that these things happen in life and I’ve heard it first hand, I don’t necessarily think that these happenings are “normal and expected” as Krumboltz and Mitchell et al. (1998) described them. I feel like it would be giving clients unrealistic expectations to teach them that these coincidences are normal. I’m very skeptical about if the techniques described are actually true and I don’t really see how the “dreams” presented relate to the client finding the right job for them.

Furthermore, I think that the clients described all had a new found sense of self-identity and new goals were set to find meaning in their lives, which in turn led to them finding ways to reach those goals. I think that the traditional approaches are more applicable than synchronicity because they are more applicable to the general population, not just a select few “miracle” people. At the end of the article Guindon & Hanna (2002) even note that “limited case studies do not justify any sweeping conclusions” (p. 205), which is why I have a hard time straying from more traditional trait-factor and developmental approaches. 

Guindon, M., & Hanna, F. (2002). Coincidence, happenstance, serendipity, fate, or the hand of god: Case studies in synchronicity. The Career Development Quarterly, 50, 195-208.

Krumblotz, J.R. (1998). Serendipity is not serendipitous. Journal of Counseling Psychology, 45, 390-392.