Carl Jung

Definition

Carl Gustav Jung (1875-1961) was a Swiss psychiatrist and the founder of analytical psychology. He was not an astrologer, yet he is the single most important figure in the intellectual history of 20th-century psychological astrology: his ideas of individuation, the archetypes, the collective unconscious, psychological types, the Self, and synchronicity were taken up by astrologers — Dane Rudhyar first — to recast the birth chart as a map of the psyche. Jung also studied astrological data himself, treating the horoscope as a place to test his principle of synchronicity.

In Tradition

In psychological and humanistic Western astrology, Jung is treated as the conceptual founder of the modern psychological approach to the chart, though he wrote no astrology textbook. Dane Rudhyar names Jung's depth-psychology as a catalyst, with Smuts's Holism, for his 1936 reworking of astrology. Most agree the Jungian vocabulary — archetype, individuation, collective unconscious, synchronicity — became the shared language of the psychological school. They differ on how firmly astrology can claim Jung's endorsement, his remarks on it being exploratory.

In Practice

For the historian or working psychological astrologer, Jung supplies the frame that sets the psychological school apart from both traditional condition-based astrology and predictive astrology. Read through Jung, the chart becomes a portrait of the psyche: planets carry archetypal energies, the unconscious is symbolised by the Moon and outer planets, and the aim is to support a person's individuation rather than to forecast events. Rudhyar drew directly on Jung's Modern Man in Search of a Soul, Two Essays on Analytical Psychology, Psychological Types, and the commentary on The Secret of the Golden Flower, taking in synchronicity, the collective unconscious, archetypes as primordial images, dream-analysis as assimilation, and the mandala as the symbol of individuation. The later psychological astrologers — Liz Greene, Stephen Arroyo, Howard Sasportas, Clare Martin — build on this Jungian foundation; Greene reads chart factors as complexes gathering around archetypal cores. Jung's synchronicity principle is also the most-cited modern reason a chart could match a life with no causal mechanism.

Historical Origin

Carl Gustav Jung (1875-1961), Swiss psychiatrist, began as a collaborator of Sigmund Freud before founding the Zurich school of analytical psychology. His relevant works include Psychological Types (1921), Modern Man in Search of a Soul, Psychology and Alchemy (1944), Aion (1951), and Mysterium Coniunctionis (1955-56). He entered astrological discourse through Dane Rudhyar's The Astrology of Personality (1936), which quotes him at length, and his concepts became foundational for the psychological-astrology lineage. Jung's own "astrological experiment" on marriage data, published with his work on synchronicity, is the most-cited case of his direct engagement.

Etymology

Origin: Proper name. Meaning: Carl Gustav Jung — Swiss psychiatrist, founder of analytical psychology.

Further Reading

• Dane Rudhyar, The Astrology of Personality
• Liz Greene, The Astrology of Fate
• Clare Martin, Mapping the Psyche