Rebirth

O ne of the founding father's of 20th century psychology, Carl Gustav Jung wrote about his own Strange Coincidence in his dissertation "Synchronicity: An Acausal Connecting Principle," written in 1960.

A young woman I was treating had, at a critical moment, a dream in which she was given a golden scarab. While she was telling me this dram I sat with my back to the closed window. Suddenly I turned around and saw a flying insect knocking against the window pane form the outside. I opened the window and caught the creature in the air as it flew in. It was the nearest analogy to a golden scarab that one finds in our latitudes, a scarabaeid beetle, the common rose-chafer (cetonia aurata), which contrary to its usual habits had evidently felt an urge to get into a dark room at this particular moment....

There... seems to be an archetypal foundation to the...case. It was an extraordinarily difficult case to treat, and up to the time of the dream little or no progress had been made. I should explain that the main reason for this was my patient's animus, which...clung so rigidly to its own idea of reality that three doctors-I was the third-had not been able to weaken it. Evidently something quite irrational was needed which was beyond my powers to produce. The dream alone was enough to disturb ever so slightly the rationalistic attitude of my patient. But when the "scarab" came flying in through the window in actual fact, her natural being could burst through the armour of her animus possession and the process of transformation could at last begin to move. Any essential change of attitude signifies a psychic renewal, which is usually accompanied by symbols of rebirth in the patients' dreams and fantasies. The scarab is a classic example of a rebirth symbol.

Sources:(Mysteries of the Unexplained, p. 77)