The Police Get Psychoanalytic on ‘Synchronicity II’

In the early ’80s, Sting was not at house in Britain.

He was at GoldenEye, house of James Bond writer Ian Fleming, on the northern coast of Jamaica. Other friends of GoldenEye through the years included Bono, Harrison Ford, Grace Jones, Princess Margaret and extra.

“Britain had gone to war with Argentina over the Falklands,” Sting wrote in his 2007 e-book, Lyrics. “Young men were dying in the freezing waters of the South Atlantic, while I was gazing at the sunspots on the clifftop overlooking the Caribbean.”

Here — actually sitting on the similar desk at which Fleming had conjured up Bond — Sting wrote not only one however a number of Police classics, together with “Synchronicity II,” a track in regards to the psychological idea first developed by Carl Jung.

Jung outlined his concept in barely alternative ways over the course of his profession, however in his personal phrases, he described synchronicity as “a meaningful coincidence of two or more events where something other than the probability of chance is involved.” For instance, you overhear some strangers in public talking about one thing that pertains to your individual life, otherwise you’re considering of a pal you have not spoken to shortly when abruptly they name.

READ MORE: The Police’s ‘Synchronicity’ at 40: The Story Behind Every Song

When Sting determined to place this idea right into a track, he did not go for a secular state of affairs like these.

“Jung believed there was a large pattern to life, that it wasn’t just chaos,” Sting defined to Time in 1983. “Our song ‘Synchronicity II’ is about two parallel events that aren’t connected logically or causally, but symbolically.”

Sting tried additional explaining it in The Police: A Visual Documentary: “There’s a domestic situation where there’s a man who’s on the edge of paranoia, and as his paranoia increases a monster takes shape in a Scottish lake, the monster being a symbol of the man’s anxiety. That’s a synchronistic situation.”

Watch the Police’s ‘Synchronicity II’ Video

How Sting Learned of Carl Jung

It was Police guitarist Andy Summers who launched Sting to Jung’s work, which ultimately turned the title of their fifth and closing album collectively.

“Nobody understood what ‘synchronicity’ meant. I mean, it was pretty daring to call an album Synchronicity at that point,” Summers informed UCR in 2023. “Yeah, we could have just called it, I don’t know, some obvious thing. But it was a bit of a high-flown title for the public [at] that time. But the song ‘Synchronicity II’ is a really, really well-structured pop song. I play it to this day, I enjoy it. It’s a fun one to play.”

Drummer Stewart Copeland wasn’t practically as impressed by the psychological facet of the track. “I went to college and learned all this Jungian shit. It’s just Psych 101. It had no mystique for me at all,” he informed Revolver in 2000. “If I wear a red tie and you happen to [be] wearing a red tie, it isn’t a coincidence, it’s because we have this bond that goes beneath the outer surface. Something we can’t even measure, but it’s there. And that’s Psych 101.”

‘Synchronicity II’ Gave the Police One of Their Final Hits

When launched because the third single from Synchronicity on Oct. 21, 1983, “Synchronicity II” went to No. 17 within the U.Ok and No. 16 within the U.S., marking one in every of their closing hits. Decades after its launch, Sting nonetheless thought-about psychological evaluation one thing of a deep calling.

“I don’t want to be a pop star all my life. I’d quite like to be a balding, rotund, Jungian analyst between 40 and 50,” he informed The Guardian in 2013. “But I’m happy. And anyway, I don’t think I’d get anything like as much money as a Jungian analyst.”