Year: 2017
-
The Saturn impulse towards conservative reaction and repression
As we move into 2018-2019 we can see now the increase in anti-scientific bias on the part of the Trump administration evidenced in their recent censoring in the Center for Disease Control (CDC)of certain words like science- based, fetus, transgender, and diversity. One can see where this is going. Science- based evolution is a theory…
-
Frida Kahlo. Torn in Two.
The first thing that catches the eye in Mexican painter Frida Kahlo’s chart is the red band running through her core, much like the steel handrail that pierced her body in a bus accident at age 18. This injury would cause complications throughout her life. With Saturn – her physical ego – as her strongest…
-
Post materialistic psychology
David Lorimer’s (and others’) reviews in Paradigm Explorer (new name for the magazine of the Scientific and Medical Network) are always worth reading. You get an impression of far more current books than you could ever read. I was particularly struck by David’s review of The Oxford Handbook of Psychology and Spirituality, edited by Lisa…
-
Sylvia Plath. Mercury’s Child.
Sylvia Plath won the Pulitzer prize for her collection of confessional poems posthumously, after she committed suicide in 1963 at the age of 30. Throughout her life she was clinically depressed, always aware of death. Understanding her psyche is an undertaking for a psychiatrist, which I am not. But perhaps Astrological Psychology could throw some…
-
Roberto Assagioli
Wikipedia well describes the pedigree of Roberto Assagioli and his psychosynthesis. Psychosynthesis arose from the psychoanalytic tradition initiated by Freud, but was more akin to Jung’s revisionist approach, and indeed moved beyond it. “Psychosynthesis became the first approach born of psychoanalysis that also included the artistic, altruistic and heroic potentials of the human being.” Assagioli’s…
-
Gustav Holst and The Planets Suite
I recently visited the Holst Birthplace Museum in Cheltenham and was fascinated to learn about this British composer’s life. I’ve long been a fan of his Planets Suite and have occasionally wondered how he was inspired to write music about seven planets with their correct, traditional astrological characteristics. At the museum I discovered that he…
-
Opposites Maketh Mann.
The Nobel Prize winning Thomas Mann, who wrote many novellas, novels and essays, is considered the most influential and representative German author of his time. Although he supported the Weimar Republic as a young man, he later wrote against Nazism and Hitler. Consequently, Mann spent the rest of his life in Switzerland and the USA.…
-
Beyond the Robot
A Review of Beyond the Robot: The Life and Work of Colin Wilson, by Gary Lachman (New York: TarcherPerigee, 2016), with reflections on Wilson’s astrological chart and Sun in Cancer’s search for meaning and purpose Whether or not you are a fan of Colin Wilson (1931-2013), Gary Lachman’s biography of his life and thought is…
-
Why me?
Questioning why life can be so difficult and why we experience so many problems, crises and traumas is something we all face, especially at difficult times in our lives. Trying to understand this has troubled humanity since time began. Fear of the unknown, of upsetting gods or goddesses and the concept of divine punishment has…
-
Thomas de Quincey. The Chart of an English Opium Eater.
Best-known for his novel Confessions of an English Opium Eater, Thomas de Quincey was one of the most prolific English writers of his time. Almost two centuries ago, he also started the tradition of addiction literature in the West, resulting in the drug-induced writing of the seventies. Neptune or Jupiter? There is no birth…
-
Dreams and Self Actualisation
Sigmund Freud as the father of the theory of the unconscious wrote the first description of dreaming and dreamwork in his series of lectures to the University of Vienna from 1915-1917, A General Introduction to Psycho-analysis. In it he explained that dreams are the “means of removing, by hallucinatory satisfaction, mental stimuli that disturb sleep”…
-
Oscar Wilde. A Smooth Diamond Turned Rough.
The chart looks like a rough-cut diamond with many facets – an apt symbol for Oscar Wilde the brilliant dandy who entertained society with his plays, shocked the Victorian world with his homosexuality, invented today’s celebrity cult and left posterity many witty epigrams such as “We are all in the gutter, but some of…
The Astrological Psychology of Bruno & Louise Huber 