Chance happenings in life and psychotherapy.

This paper will focus on chance happenings and man's struggles to make sense of those random events that occur in everyday life. There is a readiness to deny chance happenings as powerful mediators in our life course and to transfer the guidance of the world to divine providence, to anthropomorphize fate, to search for blame, and to create conspiratorial theories out of natural disasters. Emphasis will be placed on understanding chance happenings from an exploration of coincidences, experiences perceived beyond coincidences, scientific predictors of causality, and developmental perspectives, as well as the individual's psychological strategies for coping with a fateful event, an acute traumatic moment in which there is sudden awareness of a perceived threat of injury and to life itself. The role of chance and environmental happenings in psychotherapy will be discussed with clinical vignettes.