Astrology and Depth Psychology

One might say that astrology belongs to neither social science nor to natural science but, on the other hand, may be the object of a science: a science of symbolic forms, of religion or of the psyche. Today, an individual who looks into his astrological chart or solicits its interpretation commits a psychological act. For his part, Freud cast aside astrology and other "occult" disciplines, banishing them to what he called "the black sludge of occultism". Jung, on the other hand, believed that no element of human invention may be scorned, for everything has a meaning in the overall schema of things. Today, what was once seen as originating in the stars is now understood as a projection of the unconscious, and astrology may be interpreted only from this psychological perspective. Jung affirmed that the greater part of things considered psychic resided in the animated matter of the universe: "Since the stars have fallen from heaven and our highest symbols have paled, a secret life holds sway in the unconscious. That is why we have a psychology today, and why we speak of the unconscious. All this would be quite superfluous in an age or culture that possessed symbols."

Jung awarded a distinct and separate reality to this interior world which he saw as having been projected onto the outside world. He deserves credit for having empirically rediscovered the soul of the world, comprised of the multiple gods of nature which he called the collective unconscious or the objective psyche. For delving into astrology and other "ghosts of centuries of imagination", Jung was suspected of mysticism and even magic. However, he acted as a true scientist, describing his methodology in the following manner: "I observe, I classify, I establish relationships and sequential organization between observed events, and I even show that prediction is possible. When I speak of the collective unconscious, I do not present it as a principle, but rather give a name to the totality of observable events, that is to say, archetypes."

As Michel Cazenave explains , the clearest definition of the archetype is not that of an original image nor of the condensation of archaic residues of some unconscious substance. Instead, it is an empty form, an a priori form of perception, a structure of the unconscious which emerges in the world of the senses and remains hidden while taking form in archetypal images or symbols. Cazenave mentions the objective kinship between archetypes and the forms of Lacan's collective field as well as the empty but formative unconscious of Lévi-Strauss and contemporary anthropology's works on kinship.

Like Freud, Jung solicited the empirical method while rejecting an exclusively causal interpretation of psychic phenomena. The latter are even more clearly oriented towards an end or path to be followed which Jung called individuation or the fulfillment of the "Self ": the archetype of human totality. With his bold hypothesis of Synchronicity, Jung suggested that certain aspects of reality which remain outside the causal description of nature may be understood as synchronistic phenomena without regressing towards archaic forms of magical causal thought.

Thus, by the light of Jung's work, the planets and the zodiac signs are not archetypes, but rather archetypal images or symbols. In astrology, Mars, Mercury, and Venus represent the potentials of aggression, of initiative (Mars), of communication (Mercury), and of love (Venus), inherent in us and which we project onto those planets which seem to best incarnate these qualities. And the feeling of psychic coincidence that we may have in relation to the universe of our birth is not due to the physical influence of the planets, but instead to the fact that we are born in synchronicity with the universe of our birth. As Jung contended, "we are born at a given moment, in a given place, and we have, like celebrated vintages the same qualities of the year and of the season which saw our birth."

Author: Alain Negre