Post by Wanda Smit
Carl Gustav Jung, a Swiss psychiatrist and psychoanalyst, founded Analytical Psychology. He was one of the most powerful influences in the fields of psychiatry, anthropology, archaeology, literature, philosophy and religious studies. His experience and in-depth study of these disciplines gave him a vast view of the psyche, making his Jupiter in the 9th house proud.
Jung worked as a research scientist at the famous Burghölzli sanatorium in Zurich. During this time, he came to the attention of Sigmund Freud, the founder of psychoanalysis. The two men conducted a lengthy correspondence and collaborated on a joint vision of human psychology. But they couldn’t agree and thus their relationship ended after six years.
Born on 26 July 1875 in Kesswil, Switzerland, at 19:20.
In Jung’s case, the chart is not only a blue print of his consciousness, but could also be a blue print of Analytical Psychology. Based on the ‘Model’ figure in Jung’s chart, almost everything the Hubers write in Aspect Pattern Astrology (p. 241, first edition) could be related to Analytical Psychology.
It is “a prototype that is produced to enable a better understanding” could be a summary of Analytical Psychology which aims at a better insight into aspects of the psyche, by putting soul first, rather than the sexual drive of Freud.
“A model can also be made of something that already exists”. Jung didn’t create anything new. He worked with what is already there, but mostly overlooked: the unconscious. His life focused on gaining insight into the collective and personal unconscious as it is revealed in his dreams and visions, as well as those of his many ‘insane’ patients at the Burghölzli sanatorium.
“This figure is an example of the old hermetic rule: “As in the great, so in the small, and vice versa.”” One of his major contributions to human consciousness was seeing the opposites as balancing each other out, for example light and dark, conscious and unconscious. A clear reflection of his Libran Jupiter who wants a balanced view of the psyche.
The Model for Analytical Psychology
At the angles of the Model Aspect Pattern in Jung’s chart are Saturn, Pluto, Jupiter and Mars, which could be the major psychological concepts in Jung’s Analytical Psychology.
The Rising Sign as the Persona
According to Jung, and Astrological Psychology, the persona is a mask that ‘pretends’ individuality, so that both self and others believe in that identity. It is “a compromise between the individual and society as to what a man should appear to be.” Capricorn was the mask for Jung. He certainly was an authority in psychology, standing out from the crowd for his new discoveries.
Jung has become enormously influential in management theory; in which managers and executives have to create an appropriate corporate mask and a persuasive identity. They also use some of his personality tests in order to manage their staff.
Saturn in the 1st house as Ego-Consciousness
The Great Teacher – his strongest ego planet – is in an Aquarian first house. Of his parents, his mother played the stronger role. He could relate to her, from early childhood, as she seemed to have two personalities just as he did. In his autobiography, Memories, Dreams and Reflections, he states: “By day she was a loving mother, but at night she seemed uncanny. Then she was like one of those seers who at the same time is a strange animal (…). At such moments she was the embodiment of what I have called “the natural mind.”” And “She seemed to think along similar lines as myself.” Because she couldn’t confide in her husband, she often confided in her son, thus making him aware of something underlying what appears to be reality. She spent considerable time in her bedroom where she said that spirits visited her at night. But then, the Occult is just one of the life philosophies of Aquarius.
With his father and several of his uncles as pastors, his early boyhood already made him aware of the church and Christianity, but this would only be the beginning of his vast knowledge of religious thought in the West and East, as well as Gnosticism, Mythology, Alchemy, Astrology, Philosophy and Psychology. He certainly asserted himself as a man of the Aquarian Age. Later in life, he was disappointed by his father’s ‘academic’ rather than personally experienced faith.
There is a surplus of fire in his temperament which is what gave him a stronger intuition than most people have. As a child already, he intuited a layer beneath consciousness, the unconscious. In his autobiography he writes: “As I worked with my fantasies, I became aware that the unconscious undergoes or produces change. Only after I had familiarized myself with alchemy, did I realize that the unconscious is a process, and that the psyche is transformed or developed by the relationship of the ego to the contents of the unconscious.” This transformation is created by seeing the dark side, the shadow in the human psyche.
Pluto near the IC as the Shadow
Jung defined the Shadow as the repressed and therefore unknown aspects of the personality including those often considered to be negative. With his Pluto stressing to get to the IC, the lowest point in a chart, Jung was driven into the unconscious. He focussed on dreams (his own and that of his patients) that made no sense to others and consequently were considered ‘nonsense.’ He called it the Collective Unconscious, that part of the psyche which contains aspects of unconsciousness experienced by all people in different cultures over the ages. Hence his studies of the much older belief systems such as that of the Gnostics, the Essenes and the Alchemists. In addition to Christianity, he also studied Hinduism, Buddhism and Taoism.
A number of childhood memories made lifelong impressions on him and underlay his discoveries in Psychology and the development of Analytical Psychology. It is noteworthy that he had his first dream which introduced him to the unconscious – between ages three and four – when his Age Point was on the low point in the 1st house and firing up Pluto. In his autobiography he states that he would spend decades trying to make sense of this dream in which a giant tree with an eye looking upwards (later understood to be a phallic symbol) was seated on a subterranean throne. Later, this dream also caused uneasiness with what his pastor father preached, but of course he couldn’t mention his personal experience of what could be underground.
Although there are no planets in the 12th house in his chart, he was a solitary and introverted child. It seems that Pluto was at the bottom of his introversion. Later in life, he came up with the concept of extra- and introversion still used in personality tests today.
His fainting spells at age 12 – because he didn’t want to go to school – he later recalled, “was when I learned what a neurosis is.” With an overdose of water in his temperament, he dived deep into the collective and personal unconscious, experiencing his own dark depths before he came up with the term “the shadow”. He firmly believed one has to experience one’s shadow and incorporate it into consciousness to get the bigger picture of the psyche.
In his chart, as well as in Analytical Psychology, Pluto is the projector operator with Jupiter at one side and Mars at the other side of the screen, which showed this man a clear picture of Individuation.
Jupiter in the 9th house as Individuation
Jupiter’s demand for experiencing something rather than just gathering facts on it, was certainly met by Jung. Throughout his life, he had dreams, visions and fantasies, but could only make sense of all these ‘weird’ experiences, once he understood them.
With his Jupiter in a Libran 9th house, Jung believed we have to balance the conscious with the unconscious to get to the third, the synthesis of the thesis and antithesis. Like the Alchemists, he could then achieve a new whole symbolised by circling the triangle. Add the fourth element – the development of the inferior function, be it thinking (air), feeling (water), intuition (fire) or sensation (earth) – and the circle can be squared to create the Philosopher’s Stone.
Only then can man individuate, that is reach his or her fulfilment “which negates neither the conscious or unconscious position but does justice to them both”. Individuation is thus a lifelong psychological process of differentiation of the self out of each individual’s conscious and unconscious elements. Jung considered it to be the main task of human development. It certainly was the most important achievement in his life.
Mars in the 11th house as the Animus
Jung defined the animus as the sexual aspect of a man as well as the contrasexual aspect of a woman’s psyche, her inner personal masculine side conceived both as a complex (the repressed organisation of images and experiences that governs perception and behaviour) and an archetypal image.
He borrowed the concept ‘archetype’ from Anthropology. It denotes universal and recurring mental images or themes. Jung’s definitions of archetypes were then taken further by James Hillman (see my previous article). Archetypes are universal symbols that can mediate opposites in the psyche, often found in religious art, mythology and fairy tales across cultures.
In Jung’s chart, Mars longs to relate to Venus conjunct Mercury as the quincuncx linking the two suggests. The Animus, the masculine, needs the Anima, the feminine in the human psyche. In his autobiography, Jung mentions the maid who looked after him as a child. “I can see, even now, her hairline, her throat, with its darkly pigmented skin…This type of girl later became a component of my anima. The feeling of strangeness which she conveyed, and yet of having known her always, was a characteristic of that figure which later came to symbolize for me the whole essence of womanhood.”
Venus in the 6th house as the Anima
The Anima is the contrasexual aspect of a man’s psyche, his inner personal feminine conceived both as a complex and an archetypal image. Men project the feminine in their subconscious onto a woman who fits the mould.
The man in Jung needed a Venus who was also an intellectual: in his chart, she has Mercury by her side. His wife, Emma Jung, whose education had been limited, had a great interest in her husband’s research and threw herself into studies, as well as acted as his assistant at Burghölzli. She eventually became a noted psychoanalyst in her own right and researched The Holy Grail Legend. She was the first in a long list of female collaborators.
Jung was the psychiatrist who restored the feminine to the human psyche and consequently to the world. Much like the Virgin Mary in Catholicism is the 4th element to the Trinity. One of his disagreements with Freud was that the latter was too patriarchal. When Jung’s Age Point was face-to-face with the Sun in 1912, he published Psychology of the Unconscious, which broke up their personal and professional relationship, with each stating that the other was unable to admit he could possibly be wrong.
The Self at the Centre: The Mandala
The Self, at the centre of a birth chart, is the central overarching concept governing the individuation process, as symbolised by mandalas, the union of male and female and of opposites. Jung viewed it as the psyche’s central archetype.
During World War I, he “felt the gulf between the external world and the interior world of images in its most painful form. I could not yet see that interaction of both worlds which I now understand.”
While he was engaged as a doctor in the war, he sketched a small mandala every morning. At the C2 in 1918, he could make sense of his psychic transformations in these mandalas. “Only gradually did I discover what the mandala really is and “that is the self, the wholeness of the personality…”
It certainly was the turning point in his thinking: “I began to understand that the goal of psychic development is the self. There is no linear evolution; there is only a circumambulation of the self. (…) I knew that in finding the mandalas as an expression of the self I had attained what was for me the ultimate.”
