astrology and psychology:

[Guest guest]

>There is not " one " astro-psychology. There are many ways in which it can

>be practiced, many approaches to it, there are " schools " and sometimes

>conflicting paradigms, there are good astro-psychologists and bad ones. As

>with everything, the good ones are a minority.

 

There are as many ways of practicing astrology as there are astrologers...

there are also many ways of practicing psychology, and of course, of doing

psychological astrology. I would like to briefly describe one. This is only

a sketch because there is a wide variety of variations and choices the must

be faced in each specific case.

 

In psychological astrology, it is the person, the client or " patient " who

comes for consultation, the main concern, never the astrological chart.

Then the critical issue is to be able to offer something that is

therapeutic, to offer something that can have a healing, beneficent effect

for him or her. This has little to do with astrology per se, and a lot to

do with how we use it.

 

What makes my work different from a psychologist, is the tools I use:

astrological charts (birth charts, horary charts), dynamical techniques

(transits, solar arcs, progressions...), analytical techniques (how to

interpret the charts), etc. But these are only tools, they don't really

matter, what matters is how I use them, or how and when I should *not* use

them.

 

Rulerships are a convenient device that is useful when interpretation is

based on the houses or in a " horizontal " view of charts, or when one wants

to weight planets according to their " essential dignities " , but in this

technique rulerships are never used. It is very similar to a technique

developed by Marc Edmund Jones, who called it " vertifical " , based on focal

determinators.

 

My other influence is the Fagan sidereal school, which very seldom or never

uses rulerships. I always use the sidereal reference frame by means of

precession-corrected tropical positions, but the signs of the zodiac,

whether tropical or sidereal, have very little importance.

 

My approach during a session is to see the chart hierarchically, or

vertically. There are parts of the chart that are important, others are

not. Some parts are critical, so I concentrate on the critical parts, the

" focal determinators " , the axis and foci of a life shown by the axis and

foci of a chart. I concentrate intensively --and extensively-- on these

critical parts and discard the rest.

 

The hierarchy is established above everything else by the planets. The Sun

and the Moon stand apart from all the rest. They are the 2 fundamental

principles that encompass the whole of life, the 2 fundamental foci,

wherever they are in a chart.

 

I look for very tight, very strong, conjunctions, oppositions, or squares

to the Sun and the Moon. The aspects are established natally, by transits,

progression, or by synastry, i.e., through other people (or events) whose

charts bring the natal planet to a critical focus, giving it prominence

(tight aspects of the 4th harmonic).

 

There are always solar (and lunar) critical points when one leaves the

chains of the natal chart (what I call birth-chartism) and complements the

reading with transits, progressions, and synastries. The less one uses the

better, and the more critical the focus found will be, i.e, I can restrict

myself to 1-degree conjunctions and oppositions only, to the Sun and the

Moon only, to transits by slow-moving planets only, etc.

 

Other factors are included only if the ones you have already are of no help.

 

I proceed through a strict application of Occam's Razor: if you don't need

something, it is excluded. The comes the dialogue with the client/patient.

When I have reached " the heart " of a life-history, conflict of personality,

experience, biography, or event, everything else is peripheral and unimportant.

 

At this point the tool has served its purpose and is no longer needed;

astrology is no longer useful, it becomes trivial and silly in comparison,

and a hindrance in the therapeutic effort.

 

The technique can be applied to specific aspects of life or of a chart. For

example, I may apply the Razor to a study of Venus in someone's life; I

then choose what I think are the more critical transits possible (mainly by

the slow-moving planets, signifying deeper processes that take more time),

look for their time of occurrence, and if they are in the past, present, or

near future, discuss them at length with the client.

 

When this is done with the Sun or the Moon, concentrating on their

universal meaning, and if we identify the real-life experiences that

accompanied these critical astrological moments, then everything else that

we can talk about becomes unnecessary or trivial. The glory of the Sun and

the nurturing of the Moon encompassed what was really important, and the

rest is entertainment.

 

Juan