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The Astrology of the Self is Volume 7 in a series of astrological essays from some of astrology's leading lights. In this essay, astrologer John Green analyses the role and development of psychology in horoscope analysis, and asks whether psychology and astrology are good bedfellows.
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Contents
THE ASTROLOGY OF THE SELF
John Green
Psychological astrology has been a big part of the astrological world since the latter part of the 20th century, not just as a separate study but inveigling itself into many more traditional areas. Is psychology a good bedfellow for astrology? Is all astrology actually psychological astrology? Has this movement improved astrology or made it worse, and what is the future for psychological astrology? This essay will attempt to answer all of these questions and more.
Introduction
The times, as the song goes, they are a-changin’. As we stare, a little bleary-eyed, into the second decade of the twenty-first century, with all the outer planets having recently changed signs, it seems that the world is not going to remain the same. Astrology is not going to remain the same. The art, or science if you prefer, of astrology has been with us for so long it is natural that it should evolve, change and mutate over time, and I would argue that it is inevitable that astrology would fit the times we are living in. We get the astrology we deserve – but what will that astrology be?
Over the course of the last century psychological astrology emerged as one of the major players of the various types of astrology open to us. What I want to examine here is whether psychology is a good match for astrology and whether it has made our astrology better or worse. In the course of looking at this I want to see what the future may hold for it as a discipline. Has psychological astrology had its day?
I should start by saying that I am a psychological astrologer, so obviously the subject has held enough interest for me to study, teach and work with it. However, that doesn’t mean that I don’t sometimes have doubts about the course it is taking or question how the subject is taught or practised.
What is Psychological Astrology?
I was originally going to start by asking what psychological astrology is but soon realized that I have to take it back a stage and ask first what psychology itself is. While the dictionary definition today tends to refer to it as ‘the scientific study of the human mind and its functions, especially those affecting behaviour in a given context’,1 the original meaning is somewhat different. ‘Psychology’ literally means the study of the soul, and comes from the Greek psyche meaning ‘spirit’, ‘breath’ or ‘soul’ and logia meaning ‘study of’ or ‘research’. The earliest known reference to the word ‘psychology’ in English was by Steven Blankaart in 1694 in The Physical Dictionary which refers to ‘Anatomy, which treats of the Body, and Psychology, which treats of the Soul’.2
If we use that original premise it might be pertinent to ask: What do we actually think of as soul? To me it suggests something spiritual, perhaps something intangible – an idea more linked to philosophy than science. This seems to have been one of the changing processes in psychology and perhaps the original word no longer really fits what science calls psychology today. From these philosophical beginnings we have moved forward to a psychology practised in the twenty-first century with branches in development, cognition, evolution, neurological, clinical, forensic and social psychology alongside the analytical approach.
I would say that what many people think of as mind or soul is different from many of the more modern psychological definitions. We tend to associate ourselves with our mind and see it as the essential ‘me-ness’ of ourselves. We don’t see it as having neurological processes, or evolutionary ones. Although we can understand the logic to these, we glimpse ourselves as being something unique and special that exists outside of that. The popular, though mistaken, idea that the human body weighs 21 grams less after death appeals to our idea of a ‘soul’ as something uniquely us which is not part of the physiological makeup of the body.
Over the years there has been a split in some circles of psychology – one that has seen the branches that focus on the idea of the unique self, such as analytical psychology, being dismissed as pseudoscience. Much like astrology, I might add, where it is no longer seen as the founding father of astronomy but rather the grubby illegitimate cousin no one wants to discuss. The scientific world we live in only wants to deal with statistics: that which can be replicated over and over again in tests. Psychiatry would rather deal with cheaper fixes such as Cognitive Behaviour Therapy and drugs than the long-winded processes of psychoanalysis and the like, even though all these have been proven in the 1977 paper Meta-Analysis of Psychotherapy Outcome Studies3 to be no more or less effective in clinical practice. In fact this paper summarises that the typical therapy client is better off than 75% of untreated individuals, a result that seems to have been ignored in more modern scientific journals. The scientific process really seems to have no time for the concept of ‘soul’ anymore.
So what about psychological astrology, then? Looking for a definite starting point may be fruitless; astrology, like psychology and the rest of our knowledge, is built upon the past. Freud did not wake up one day and say ‘I have a dream’ and thus change the world. In the same way, no one person started psychological astrology, though there have been many claims as to when it began and who started it. In Angela Voss’s book Marsilio Ficino4 she talks about how Ficino, an Italian astrologer and priest born in 1433, saw astrology as helping us understand our spiritual nature with the planets represented within the soul or psyche. It was much later that the term ‘psychological astrology’ would be coined. Patrick Curry in Astrology, Science and Culture: Pulling Down the Moon5 sees the strand of astrology termed ‘psychological’ as rising at the beginning of the twentieth century from the astrology system of Alan Leo. Leo’s work rejected the idea of astrology being about predetermination and our fate, and instead stated that it was more concerned with character analysis, with the planets not deciding our destiny but showing how our personality would react to situations – in effect, giving us some free will over our fate. This is a key idea in psychological astrology.
