Relating: An Astrological Guide to Living with Others on a Small Planet - Softcover

Greene, Liz

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0877284180 ISBN 13: 9780877284185

Publisher: Red Wheel/Weiser, 1994

Synopsis

The author uses basic astrological concepts symbolically and practically in a framework of Jungian psychology to show how people relate to one another on both conscious and unconscious levels.

About this title

About the Author

Liz Greene is the cofounder of the Centre for Psychological Astrology in London and a contributor to the most respected astrology site on the web, www.astro.com. She holds a doctorate in psychology and is a qualified Jungian analyst. She also holds a diploma in counseling from the Centre for Transpersonal Psychology in London and a diploma from the Faculty of Astrological Studies, of which she is a lifetime patron. She is the author of many books on astrological, psychological, and mythological themes, which have been translated into a number of languages, including Saturn: A New Look at an Old Devil, Astrology for Lovers, The Astrology of Fate, The Mythic Tarot (with Juliet Sharman-Burke), and The Astrological Neptune.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

RELATING

An Astrological Guide to Living with Others on a Small Planet

By LIZ GREENE

Samuel Weiser, Inc.

Copyright © 1977 Liz Greene
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-0-87728-418-5

Contents

Introduction
I The Language of the Unconscious
II The Planetary Map of Individual Potential
III Air, Water, Earth, Fire — The Psychological Types
IV Beauty and the Beast
V The Inner Partner
VI The Sex Life of the Psyche
VII Honour Thy Father and Mother — with Reservations
VIII The Infallible Inner Clock
IX Relating in the Aquarian Age
Conclusion

CHAPTER 1

The Language of the Unconscious

The world and thought are only the spumes; of menacing cosmic images; bloodpulsates with their flight; thoughts are lit by their fires; and these imagesare — myths.

— Andrei Bely

All that passes is raised to the dignity of expression; all that happens israised to the dignity of meaning. Everything is either symbol or parable.

— Paul Claudel

Most of us who believe ourselves to be thinking individuals like to assume thatwe know a good deal about ourselves. We very probably do, from the standpointthat we can list our virtues and vices, catalogue our "good" and "bad" points,and assess our likes, dislikes and goals. But even a self-conception of thislimited scope is too great for many people, who appear to wander through lifedevoid of any sense of identity other than a name which they did not choose, abody over whose creation they exercised no control, and a place in life which isusually the result of material necessity, social conditioning, and apparentchance.

Yet even if we take an individual who has the perspicacity to "know" himself inbehavioural terms, a very curious phenomenon occurs. Ask him to describehimself, and, if he is honest with you and with himself — a rare enough premiseto start with — he may give you a very comprehensive picture of his personality.But ask his wife to describe him, and one might think she was speaking ofanother individual. Character traits appear of which the man himself appearstotally ignorant, goals are attributed to him which are the least important ofhis values, and qualities are often conferred upon him which are diametricallyopposed to those which he believes constitute his own identity. One begins towonder who is deluding whom. Ask his children what they think, and you will geta totally different picture; his fellow workers will contribute still furtherinformation, and his casual friends will portray yet another man. We can allattempt this simple investigation, and through it see that the most observant ofus, the most introspective, sees only what he chooses to see through the lens ofhis own psyche; and as our conceptions of reality, both about ourselves andabout others, are always seen through tinted lenses, it is inevitable that wewill know far less about ourselves than we suspect.

We must admit that what is closest to us is the very thing we know least about,although it seems to be what we know best of all.

Whatever anyone may have to say about Freud's theories on the unconscious, wecannot avoid the fact that man contains far more within his psyche than isaccessible to the limitations of his conscious awareness. Whether we are reallymotivated by biological needs, as Freud suggested, or by the will to power, asAdler suggested, or by the urge toward wholeness, as Jung suggested, one thingis clear, we are usually not aware of our deepest motivations, and, given thisdegree of blindness, are hardly in a position to be aware of anybody else's.

The concepts of conscious and unconscious are difficult terms to explain becausethey are living energies which, unlike the organs of the physical body, do notlend themselves to categorisation. Nevertheless the psyche of man contains avast field of hidden material which is usually communicable only throughchannels which are ordinarily rejected or overlooked. Most people do notunderstand their dreams, and frequently either make no effort to remember themor consider them meaningless; fantasies are considered to be childish unlessthey are erotic, in which case they are considered to be sinful; emotionaleruptions are felt to be embarrassing, and are cloaked with excuses ranging fromill health to business difficulties.

In terms of the subject of relating, perhaps the most important mechanism wepossess that enables us to see into the psyche is that of projection. We oftenuse the term in connection with the cinema, and its meaning in this context canhelp us to understand it in a psychological sense as well. When we see an imageprojected upon a screen, we look at the image and respond to it, rather thanexamining the film or transparency within the projector which is the real sourceof the image; nor do we look at the light within the projector which makes itpossible for us to see the image in the first place. When a person projects someunconscious quality existent within himself onto another person he reacts to theprojection as though it belonged to the other; it does not occur to him to lookwithin his own psyche for the source of it. He will treat the projection asthough it existed outside him, and its impact on him will usually trigger a highemotional charge because it is, in reality, his own unconscious self that he isfacing.

This very simple mechanism is at work whenever we have any highly coloured orirrational emotional reaction, positive or negative, to another person. It is alifetime's work to introject, to recognise and bring back into ourselves, theseunconscious qualities, so that we can begin to perceive the dim outlines of theother's identity. And we certainly do not come closer, but only move furtheraway, when we make or break relationships according to responses based on ourown projections.

Psychic projection is one of the commonest facts of psychology ... We merely giveit another name, and as a rule deny that we are guilty of it. Everything that isunconscious in ourselves we discover in our neighbour, and we treat himaccordingly.

Why should we attribute to others that which belongs to us? It is understandableif we consider "bad" qualities. If I do not like a particular trait in myself,if in fact it is so painful for me to acknowledge that it remains unconscious,this unrecognised piece of me will torment me in its impetus towards expressionby appearing to confront me from the outside. It is more difficult to understandwhy we should disown positive qualities. To do so, we must learn something aboutthe structure and laws of the psyche — always bearing in mind that anythingpsychology has to say about the psyche is really the psyche talking aboutitself, which renders "complete objectivity" impossible. We can then return toour subject of projection.

The ego is the centre of the field of everyday, rational consciousness; verysimply, it is what I know — or think I know — to be myself.

Consciousness consists primarily of what we know, and what we know we know.

For most of us, the ego is all we know of ourselves, and as we stand at thispoint and survey the world, the world appears to us coloured by the particularviewpoint of the ego. Anybody who sees something different we assume to bestubbornly narrow-minded, deliberately lying, or possibly abnormal or insane.

The ego appears to develop along particular lines from birth. If we were whollythe product of our heredity, conditioning and environment, children born intothe same circumstances would be exactly the same psychologically — which ofcourse they are not.

The individual disposition is already a factor in childhood; it is innate, andnot acquired in the course of life.

Astrology also suggests that the individual's temperament is inherent at birth,and an understanding of astrology may be of help in perceiving the nature ofthis seed which develops into the adult ego. It can not only tell us about theself we know, but also about the one we do not know. The symbolism of the birthchart also reflects the natural human tendency to experience and evaluate lifethrough the ego, for the horoscope is a mandala with the earth, rather than thesun, at its centre. It shows, in other words, how life appears and is likely tobe experienced by the individual consciousness rather than what life truly is.

As we grow into adulthood, there are many qualities in our natures which are notincorporated into the developing ego, although they belong to us nonetheless.These things must be allowed to live, but they may be unacceptable to parents,may contradict religious doctrines, may violate social standards, or, lastly andmost importantly, may simply conflict with what the ego values most. Some ofthese rejected qualities may be "negative" in the sense that they aredestructive; some may be "positive" and may be of far more value, individuallyand socially, than what the ego has made of itself. An individual may, in fact,value mediocrity — without realising that he is doing so — and may stifle theemerging seeds of individual uniqueness and creativity within himself; or hisself-image may be an overly modest one, and the more outstanding qualities arethen relegated to the unconcious. All of these things will be projected onto asuitable object.

The object of a projection is not limited to individuals. It may be anorganisation, a nation, an ideology or a racial type which becomes the focus forone's projection of the unrecognised dark side. A man who is violently andirrationally opposed to capitalism may be projecting as strongly as a man who isequally violent and irrational in his reaction to communism. The hallmark ofprojection is not the viewpoint, but the intensity and high charge of thereaction. One can stand in the middle of an argument between two people andlisten with astonishment as each accuses the other of what they are both doing.When one is not a participant, it is laughable and at the same time tragic, asmost marriage counsellors can attest. But when one is involved, in the spell ofone's own projection mechanism, with the unconscious aroused, one is absolutelyconvinced of one's rightness. To accept the painful and omnipresent possibilityof being mistaken is distasteful, because it means surrendering long-cherishedillusions about ourselves. To live life without these illusions requires courageand a moral sense which has no resemblance to the common societal conception ofblack-and-white morality. It is no wonder that we project, for only by doing socan we continue to blame others for our pain instead of recognising that thepsyche contains both dark and light and that our reality is the one we ourselveshave created. Yet in projection and its subsequent discovery lies an enormouslyimportant vehicle by which we can come to know what is hidden in ourselves, andwhat we do not see in others.

It is usual to focus projection on a screen which bears some slight resemblanceto the projected image, although it is common enough for the resemblance to bemisinterpreted as identity. A person must be a good "hook" on which to hang thething, if we are to get away with it; and we desire, moreover, some selectivityin our relationships. (Here also, as we shall see, astrology provides animportant key to what we are likely to project, and what kind of individual weare likely to honour or insult with the bestowal of our projections.) But inspite of the resemblance between the screen and the image, they are never thesame, and the projection is almost always a gross exaggeration of some qualitywhich, left alone, might be harmoniously integrated in the nature of the otherperson or of oneself.

There are certain unpleasant aspects of projection that enter intorelationships. If a person is perpetually the target for someone else'sunconscious qualities, and if he lacks the self-knowledge to discern what ishappening, he will, in time, begin to resemble the projection. We all know ofseemingly inexplicable situations in which, for example, a woman apparently hasthe misfortune to attract one painful match after another. Each of her loversmay beat her, even if he has had no history of such behaviour before; and weshake our heads sadly and say something about woman's lamentable plight, neverrecognising the unconscious collusion her situation has entailed. Through ourprojections, we have a knack of drawing from other people qualities which, leftalone, might have remained seeds which would never have sprouted; and there isnot one of us who can say that his own psyche does not contain the samepossibilities for both good and evil. None of us is in a position to judgeseeds. But with the careful watering and sunlight of our projections, we evokethese responses from each other in a manner which sometimes seems like demonicpossession.

The man who believes women to be devouring, manipulative and destructive,because there is some unconscious part of him which contains these qualities,may mask all this under a conscious attitude of attraction for the opposite sex;yet he may be horrified to discover that every woman with whom he becomesinvolved turns out in the end to attempt to devour, manipulate and destroy him.He may believe that he has perceived a general truth about womanhood, yet it ispossible that he has himself evoked these qualities in women who might otherwisenever have displayed them. In another relationship the same woman might behavecompletely differently; and since the collective opinion of the male sex is notunanimous in misogyny, we may safely adopt certain suspicions about our poordevoured gentleman.

But who is to blame here? Can we say that one is responsible for theunconscious? Is it not more realistic and more charitable to admit that wecannot control that of which we are ignorant? Even the courts will concede thata crime committed in a state of insanity merits psychiatric treatment ratherthan punishment. What, then, about our unconscious projections of hostility,anger, stupidity, destructiveness, possessiveness, jealousy, meanness,pettiness, brutality and the myriad other aspects of our own shadowy sides whichwe perpetually think we see in the people whom we feel have disappointed us?

Although we are not responsible for the unconscious — after all, the ego is onlya latter-day outgrowth of the matrix of the unconscious — we are responsible fortrying to learn a little about it, as much as is possible given the limitationsof consciousness. Perhaps this is a challenge which is part of our Zeitgeist.After so many thousands of years of history we are no longer children, and mustaccept the responsibilities of psychological adulthood. One of theseresponsibilities is to bring home our projections.

We do not know very much about the unconscious, and this is obvious since it is,after all, unconscious. We know that this limitless sea, out of which our smalllighthouse of awareness springs, appears to work in accordance with differentenergy patterns and different laws; it has a different mode of communication anda different language, and must be explored with a respect for these differences.If an Englishman travels in Germany, he cannot expect to be understood if hestubbornly persists in speaking only English; and the same applies to therelation between the ego and the unconscious. The ego unfortunately often hasthe same attitude as the Englishman, and is astonished that it should beexpected to make this sort of compromise. But if we seek to explore ourselvesand fulfil our real potential, we must first learn the language of theunconscious. And it is unquestionably alien, so alien that we laugh nervously orshy in fright from its face in dreams, fantasies, emotional eruptions, and allthose areas of life where a magical or strange quality permeates our perceptionsand blurs the edges of what we thought was a sharp and clear-cut reality.

We only believe that we are masters in our own house because we like to flatterourselves. Actually, however, we are dependent to a startling degree upon theproper functioning of the unconscious psyche, and must trust that it does notfail us.

One of the most important postulates that Jung established about the unconsciousis that it is compensatory to consciousness.

The psyche is a self-regulating system that maintains itself in equilibrium asthe body does. Every process that goes too far immediately and inevitably callsforth a compensatory activity.

Everything, in other words, which is not contained or expressed within the ego'slife is contained within the unconscious, in a nascent and inchoate form. One ofthe characteristics of man's conscious ego is that it specialises anddifferentiates; the unconscious, on the other hand, is a fluid, shifting,undifferentiated sea which flows around, under and above the clear shell of theego, eroding certain parts and depositing fresh ones, in the same way that thesea itself flows around a rocky promontory. The psyche as a whole contains allpossibilities; the ego can only work with one possibility at a time, as itsfunction is to order, structure and make manifest a particular fragment of thelimitless experiences of life. It is no wonder that in myth and fairy tales,this world of the unconscious is so often symbolised by the sea, and the hero'sjourney into the depths is the ego's journey to the depths of the psyche. Theunconscious is an underwater world, full of strange and magical creatures; andfor human lungs used to breathing air, total immersion is of course apsychological death. This death we call insanity.

(Continues...)

Excerpted from RELATING by LIZ GREENE. Copyright © 1977 Liz Greene. Excerpted by permission of Samuel Weiser, Inc..
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Edition details

• Publisher: Red Wheel/Weiser
• Publication date: 1994
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0877284180
• ISBN 13: 9780877284185
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 2
• Number of pages: 304