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The Tao of Psychology: Synchronicity and the Self
- Type
- Book
- By
- Jean Shinoda Bolen
- Publisher
- Harper & Row
- Source
- Harper & Row
- Published
- 1979
Bolen's best-known book, linking Jung's synchronicity to the Tao — the sense that the inner and outer worlds move together.
Jean Shinoda Bolen's The Tao of Psychology (1979) is the book that made synchronicity feel like something you could live with rather than a puzzle for specialists. A psychiatrist and Jungian analyst, Bolen connected Jung's idea to the Tao — the sense that there is an underlying order to things, and that the inner and outer worlds move together.
The book's appeal is its accessibility. Bolen treats meaningful coincidence as a signal of the self at work, a doorway to the inner life, and writes with the warmth of a clinician rather than the caution of a researcher. The trade-off is the usual one: the Tao is poetry, not mechanism, and the book's resonance is emotional and literary rather than evidential. It remains the best-known popular statement of the idea.
The meaning
Bolen treats synchronicity as evidence that you are aligned with a larger pattern, and as a practical signal of the self at work.
The skeptic
The Tao is poetry, not mechanism. The book's resonance is emotional and literary rather than evidential.
About the author
Psychiatrist and Jungian analyst who connected synchronicity to the Tao.
Key takeaways
- Links Jung's synchronicity to the Taoist idea of an underlying order.
- Bolen's most widely read work, and a key popularizer of the concept.
- Treats meaningful coincidence as a signal of the self, not a puzzle to prove.