The astrology of the biography
Viktor Frankl, according to his astrological birth chart
Published in Spanish on Más Reino Unido newspaper, October 5th, 2017, London
The value of crisis
Venus, the planet associated to the symbol of the pentagram, a pattern that the star draws in the sky after eight years of transit, means, according to archetypal cosmology, the motivation for harmony, that being in the eight house in the birth chart of the existentialist psychotherapist Viktor Frankl, was going to manifest in the area of deep transformations related to survival.
Venus in the eight house indicates that de development of Frankl’s values and elections would be linked to themes like crisis, life and death, the human condition and truth, to find balances and develop personal resources through them.
This archetype or motivation, that constitutes the deep psychic nature, describes a dynamic process that he will mediate in a creative way to give expression in his life, because the birth chart doesn’t live the life for the person, does not indicate that Frankl would suffer the experience of living in a concentration camp or what attitude he would take in that circumstance, although what he lived resonates with the meaning of the pattern in his personality.
References
The planets
Sun: ☉; Moon: ☽; Mercury: ☿; Venus: ♀; Mars: ♂; Jupiter: ♃; Saturn: ♄; Uranus: ♅; Neptune: ♆; Pluto: ♇.
The meaning of survival
Jupiter, the symbol of the personal philosophy generated through one’s lived experience, is next to Venus in the eighth house, that indicates that the themes of this placement would inform the belief system, of this author that in his book, Man in the Search for meaning, wrote that only those who understood that the trauma experienced had a meaning managed to survive the concentration camps.
Viktor Frankl’s birth chart, with the Sun, the planet that represents the essence of the Self, authentic self-definition and purpose, and Mercury, that means the construction of meaning through the creation of an interpretation system, in the seventh house, of the significant others, indicate that these themes would be central to the development of his life story.
Frankl, that was a professor of neurology and psychiatry at the Faculty of Medicine in the University of Vienna, was the creator of the Third Viennese College of Psychotherapy, around logotherapy, a branch of existentialism, that he developed after his experience of three years in Auschwitz and other camps, during the second world war.
The election of the attitude
With Mars, the archetype associated with birth, the will, action and initiative, in the second house of resources and personal talents, in Scorpio, the sign that resumes the themes of the eighth house, Frankl wrote that when it is not possible to change the situation, one has the freedom to choose the attitude that one has towards it, even when it involves transforming the suffering of tragedy in a personal triumph, as he decided during his experience in the concentration camps.
For the philosopher psychiatrist, meaning is not in the psyche but is discovered in life through the tasks and projects that the person chooses, as well as the experiences lived, as the psychotherapist explained in his best seller about survival to the holocaust.
We could interpret that Frankl was not interested in the motivations that emerge from the psychic structure portrayed in the birth chart, but only in how the person lives the experience to give concrete shape to these energies through the tasks chosen that give meaning to life, a primordial motivation that he called the will to meaning. Existentialists and psychological astrologers coincide that in that space between personality and what one does with it, there is freedom.
The anxiety of freedom
With Uranus, the planet that symbolises the aspiration to free man from his chains, in the fourth house of origins, the value of freedom and the anxiety associated to the unexpected is a pattern that Frankl encountered first through his country of origin, his family inheritance from the father’s line and his father.
Frank elaborated his theory on the basis that not all problems that afflict man are the products of neurosis that arise from unconscious conflicts that require to introspectively and retrospectively dig into childhood experiences with the parents, according to Freud’s model, but he was interested in existential frustrations, that is, human problems that emerge from “existing” in the world and in how one gives meaning to experience with the future in mind.
The limits of identity
The birth chart, this Rosetta Stone of the structure and dynamics of the motivations of the personality, indicates that in Frankl’s case, that Saturn, the planet of the limits of mortality, obstacles and responsibilities in the fifth house of childhood, creativity and identity, would encourage the author to affirm that the finitud of life puts emphasis in responsibilities associated to elections, a space of freedom.
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