The astrology of the biography

Carl Jung, according to his astrological birth chart

Carl Jung, the psychiatrist and astrologer

Carolina Sawney, Astrologer

La Tundra, Number 6, December 2013, London

The scientist-philosopher

The main motivation of the psychiatrist Carl Jung was to elaborate his theory of the archetypes that he described as primordial and autonomous patterns in the psyche, that structure human experience and are expressions of the collective unconscious, shared by everyone, but that are also part of a major matrix of meaning that also informs the material world. Thus, he turned up a notch in the history of philosophy, because with him, the archetypes were not only associated to the unfoldment of time in the cosmos via the planets, like in the Greek worldview, nor were they only a priori categories of cognition and perception as described by Kant, but there was a correspondence between them, the inner and outer world.

In Jung’s birth chart, Uranus, that means starry heavens in Greek and is the planet that is mythology is associated with the primordial idea before creation, governs his ascendant in Aquarius, that marks the way to reach his destiny, and is placed in the seventh house, that represents the restoration of balance and harmony in relation to the other. According to his birth chart, Jung’s motto was to delve into the ideas that “make you and complement me”. Uranus is placed in Leo, sign that means the creative and truthful expression of identity, an idea on which Jung developed his theory of individuation or integral development of the personality according to an intelligent pattern of growth that is creative and meaningful.

Carl Jung's astrological birth chart

The visionary

Going back to the source in the history of culture in Egypt, Babylon, Greece and Phoenicia, Jung rescued the universal symbols that have been captured in the artistic creations of men, to describe the content of the archetypes of the collective unconscious. In his birth chart, Neptune, the planet that represents water, that is associated with creation, origins, unity, the imagination, mythology, ancestors and everything that connects us with the source, is in a square or tense aspect with the Sun, or his identity.

One of Jung’s major conflicts was to reconcile science with the imagination, that the paradigm of modernity keeps apart. He was the creator of the technique of active imagination, that consists of concentrating in a traumatic emotion until an image emerges from the unconscious. The person then expresses it in a drawing, a sculpture, a dance, a text. The ego then reacts and a dialogue between the conscious and the unconscious begin. This movement of something that was previously static, is the beginning of the cure: “the therapeutic effect is almost magical”, said Jung.

The psychiatrist-astrologer

The images, dreams, fantasies and visions are symbols that contain psychic energy with meaning that are created by the unconscious as a way of communicating something. It’s the life force that with intention tries to transform itself intelligently towards a direction. In Jung’s birth chart, the moon, the planet of the emotional past, is next to Pluto, that represents deep transformations that demand authenticity. In a letter to Freud in 1911 he wrote: “I study astrology in the evenings, that is essential to understand mythology. I draw birth charts to understand the key to the psychological truth...the planetary placements in the birth chart are symbols of the libido in a particular moment”, that also relate us with collective events. With his book Symbols of Transformation his difference with Freud where marked and a new chapter in the history of depth psychology started.



References

The planets

Sun: ☉; Moon: ☽; Mercury: ☿; Venus: ♀; Mars: ♂; Jupiter: ♃; Saturn: ♄; Uranus: ♅; Neptune: ♆; Pluto: ♇.

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