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, as well as a regular contributor to Astrodientst.com. She is the author of Astrology for Lovers and Relating: An Astrological Guide to Living with Others on a Small Planet. Greene currently resides in Zurich, Switzerland

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...