Psychology of Astrology

People believe in astrology just the way they believe in superstition. The astrology offers a lot of things which many people find very desirable. Some of them are the information and the assurance about the future and the possible way to be absolved of their current situation and future decisions.

Psychology of Astrology

"Astrology represents the summation of the psychological knowledge of antiquity"

- Carl Gustav Jung

People believe in astrology just the way they believe in superstition. The astrology offers a lot of things which many people find very desirable. Some of them are the information and the assurance about the future and the possible way to be absolved of their current situation and future decisions.

The astrology with ancient history appears to be closely tied with the psychology. Both the disciplines work in parallel dealing with the psyche aspect of the individuals. They have different branches and schools with various approaches. Some use scientific approaches and others use holistic concepts.

It is believed that everything which happens, even the smallest or seemingly most insignificant event, happens for some particular reason. The astrology is said to provide at least some of the answers as to why they happen, and perhaps even a way to predict them in advance. The psychology has many theories about how the personalities are formed. The advent of humanistic psychology has made the astrologers to think seriously about the chart in terms of growth and transformation.

According to the traditional astrology, the description of character was generally limited to superficial traits with moral judgments and advice. There were many assumptions which appeared naive from the perspective of modern psychology.

It is recognized that changing one's inborn character is extraordinarily difficult and requires lot of courage, persistence, and hard work.

The Swiss psychoanalyst, Carl Jung of Analytical Psychology has recognized the vast potential of astrology as a tool for exploring the depths of the human psyche. He has profound respect for astrology and asserts that it has a great deal to contribute to psychology. In certain difficult psychological diagnosis, he used the horoscope to have a further point of view from an entirely different angle.

As per Jung, the signs and planets of astrology are the symbols of archetypal processes that originated in the collective unconscious. The archetypes of the collective unconscious form the universal organizing principles which motivate all psychological life, both individual and collective.

The astrology utilizes archetypes as a language for understanding the basic psychological drives of human beings. It also has unique and unparalleled ability to disclose correlations between planetary motions and human experience. The correlations between the psychological phenomena and the astrological data have contributed to the formulation of theory of synchronicity.
Jung defines synchronicity as "the simultaneous occurrence of a certain psychic state with one or more external events which appear as meaningful parallels to the momentary subjective state". He says that astrology works precisely because of synchronicity.  His theory of analytical psychology was heavily influenced by astrology.

The two attitude types such as the extrovert and the introvert are recognizable by the astrologers as the bi-polar division of the zodiac into two polarities which are the positive or the masculine (extrovert) and the negative or the feminine (introvert) signs. Similarly, the four function types of intuition, sensation, thinking, and feeling are paralleled in astrology by the four elements of fire, earth, air, and water.

Some other similarities observed include ego/Sun, persona/Ascendant, shadow/Pluto, anima/Venus, animus/Mars, and collective unconscious/Neptune. Difficult astrological configurations observed by astrologers to represent the trouble spots in the personality are similar to the psychic complexes such as unconscious, emotionally charged memories, images, and thoughts clustered around a central core.

Dane Rudhyar reformulated astrology which received new impetus from the humanistic movement in psychology. The humanistic psychology conceived the personality as the effect of causes such as the genetics, the parents, and the environmental conditions which are external to the person himself.

Rudhyar recognized the way astrology and humanistic psychology complemented one another. Rudhyar developed Person-Centered Astrology where he was less concerned with whether astrology works than on how it could be utilized to assist the process of self-actualization.

The International Committee for Humanistic Astrology was founded by Rudhyar. It proclaimed that the astrology was the primarily a technique for understanding the human nature. The planets were seen as the symbolic of human functions. Events were interpreted as the purposeful and the phase-specific manifestations of developmental cycles.

The humanistic astrology represented a genuine advancement in the theory of the humanistic psychology.  But it lacks precision in describing the inner nature of the human being.

There are vague and speculative references to archetypes, faculties, functions, and impulses. Humanistic psychology is based on a set of attitudes toward the person than a precise and useful theory of personality and human growth.

But astrology provides objective predictable which correlates for the structure and dynamics of the psyche and indicates the directions that growth might occur.