Horoscope charts can do much, much more than offer the fun, puzzling or vague predictions we’ve come to expect from newspaper columns. Read with care, compassion and precision, horoscope charts are, in fact, profound tools for self-discovery and self-actualization.
Like depth psychology, depth astrology begins with the assumption that there are things each of us does not know about ourselves — not because of ignorance or stupidity but because our psyches repress some things in order to help us function better in the world. Unfortunately, that healthy function of the psyche can turn on us over time and block us from moving forward with life when we’re otherwise ready.
Also unfortunately, it is often difficult to see, accept and change these obstacles without some objectivity, distance or perspective. When you’re standing in the middle of your own life, your own mind and your own frustration, it can be almost impossible to get that perspective. That’s why psychotherapy can be so helpful.
Depth astrology works on the same principle but has one more, very powerful, tool at its disposal: the horoscope chart. The chart arranges universal “archetypes” (basic human ways of being in the world) into an individual pattern for each person who is born. The chart is, in effect, a map of your psyche: a map of both the conscious and unconscious contents of your internal life. It does not tell what will happen to you but it can tell what choices, tendencies and challenges lay before you from one phase of life to the next. It can home in on the specific inner dynamics that underlie an obstacle in your life. It can point the way toward the most effective and deep-seated solutions to the challenges you face.
But depth astrology requires the astrologer and client to work together. In depth astrology, the astrologer is not there to inform and advise the client, nor to predict the client’s future, nor even to give an opinion on the best course of action. Instead, the astrologer moves with the client into the space of the chart — the mandala-like symbol of the client’s inner world — and, in doing so, helps the client enter into a transformative understanding of her own internal landscape, a firmer grasp of how each part of life fits into the whole of herself, a deeper sense of how she is affecting her own life, a fuller relationship with the energies that block her way or let her blossom. The horoscope chart is the doorway for entering that space.
Through this work, then — which takes more than a single session but not as many as traditional psychotherapy — the client becomes clearer, more centered, more powerful to affect her own life path. What was unconscious becomes conscious, and what is conscious becomes more functional, effective, powerful and lightening. The client’s life becomes more and more her own.
[...] See the rest here: What is Depth Astrology? [...]
This school of astrology which has flourished during the last decades, due to the Freudian theories and the in-depth analysis of the soul, is psychological astrology. Nevertheless, an astrologer looking at the Moon of a natal chart and asking his client “your mother ?” is imitating the psychoanalyst. Maybe this well established practice is due to the fear of a wrong anticipation, may be it’s a token of responsibility towards the art, but professionals (doctors) do it better.
Yes – readers, please understand that I’m trying to explain here why I call my site “depth astrology,” not to assert that I’m doing an entirely new kind of astrology.
That said, Orion, you mostly had me until your last sentence, particularly the assertion that “professionals (doctors) do it better.” First, do what better? Second, “better” is highly subjective.
Maybe Jung was the pioneer in this field as he once wrote to Freud that his evenings were largely taken up with drawing horoscopes of his clients, and that astrology seemed to provide a system which contained all of the symbols that he found to be inherent in the human psyche. Liz Greene seems to be the nearest thing we have to a modern-day Jung with her school of psychological astrology in London.
Keep up the Great Work, Kathy!