Therapeutic use of tarot

The therapeutic use of tarot rests on a single foundational claim: the cards function as projection holders. Nichols states it plainly in Jung and Tarot — the Trumps "represent symbolically those instinctual forces operating autonomously in the depths of the human psyche which Jung has called the archetypes," and because they do, they catch what the psyche is already carrying. The reader does not import meaning into the cards; the cards provide a surface onto which meaning, already present but unrecognized, can land and become visible.

This is not a metaphor for Jung. He observed that true symbols — as distinct from signs — "flow naturally from the unconscious," emerging in dreams and myth rather than being consciously crafted. Place (2005) draws the connection directly: the Major Arcana were designed from the beginning as hieroglyphs in the Renaissance sense, images intended to communicate with the soul rather than convey fixed information. When a card is drawn and held, something in the psyche recognizes it, and that recognition is the therapeutic event.

The pictures on the Tarot Trumps tell a symbolic story. Like our dreams, they come to us from a level beyond the reach of consciousness and far removed from our intellectual understanding. It seems appropriate, therefore, to behave toward these Tarot characters pretty much as we would if they had appeared to us in a series of dreams picturing a distant unknown land inhabited by strange creatures.

Nichols's instruction here is precise: treat the cards as you would a dream series. This aligns the practice with Jung's own method of amplification — not free association, which stays personal, but analogical expansion through myth, fairy tale, and image, which opens the symbol toward its archetypal range without closing it down to a fixed meaning.

Hamaker-Zondag (1997) extends this into a sustained practice. She argues that the Major Arcana map the individuation process — the same developmental sequence Jung traced in alchemical symbolism and mandala imagery — while the Minor Arcana show how those deep patterns express themselves in daily life. The therapeutic implication is that a spread is not a prediction but a diagnostic image: it shows where in the individuation sequence a person is currently located, what forces are active, and what the psyche is trying to work through. Crucially, she insists that no card carries a judgment. The Devil, she notes, is neither good nor bad; it represents a confrontation with drives that is necessary at certain developmental moments and pathological at others. The card's meaning is always contextual, always relational to the life in which it appears.

This is where the therapeutic use of tarot diverges most sharply from its divinatory use. Divination asks what will happen. Therapeutic work asks what is happening in the soul that speaks. Greer (1984) made this structural by designing a workbook practice explicitly for self-reading — dismantling the longstanding prohibition against reading for oneself — and introducing numerological calculations (Personality Card, Soul Card, Hidden Factor or Shadow Card) that generate a personalized archetypal map from the querent's birth date. The Shadow Card in particular is a direct translation of Jungian shadow theory into a practical instrument: it identifies the constellation of qualities the ego has disowned and is therefore most likely to project onto others.

Pollack (1980) anchors the therapeutic logic in synchronicity. The cards work not because they predict but because, as she argues following Jung, everything is connected — the pattern that falls in a reading corresponds to the pattern active in the psyche at the moment of the reading. This is not magic in the occultist sense; it is the same principle that makes a dream meaningful, the same principle that makes a slip of the tongue diagnostic. The randomness is apparent, not real.

The purpose of the Major Arcana is twofold. First of all, by isolating the elements of our lives into archetypes it enables us to see them in their pure forms, as aspects of psychological truth. Secondly, it helps us to truly resolve these different elements, to take us step by step through the different stages of life until it brings us to unity.

Jodorowsky (2004) adds a dimension that the Jungian literature tends to underplay: the cards must remain fluid. Fixed interpretive schemas — the kind memorized from a book — ossify the living image. The therapeutic encounter requires that each reading reconstitute meaning through direct encounter with the specific image in the specific moment. This is why Hamaker-Zondag insists that readers attend to the actual pictures rather than reaching for memorized meanings: the image activates the unconscious; the memorized formula does not.

What the therapeutic use of tarot cannot do — and this matters — is promise resolution. The cards show what is active. They do not guarantee that what is active will be integrated, transformed, or healed. The soul's speech in the image is the beginning of the work, not its completion. A card drawn at a moment of crisis names the crisis; it does not dissolve it. The therapeutic value lies precisely in that naming — in making visible what was operating below the threshold of consciousness, where it could not be engaged.

  • Sallie Nichols — portrait of the author of Jung and Tarot, the foundational depth-psychological reading of the Trumps
  • active imagination — Jung's method of dialoguing with unconscious contents, the closest clinical analogue to therapeutic tarot work
  • projection — the mechanism by which the cards function as mirrors; understanding projection is prerequisite to understanding why tarot works therapeutically
  • individuation — the developmental process the Major Arcana are understood to map

Sources Cited

  • Nichols, Sallie, 1980, Jung and Tarot: An Archetypal Journey
  • Hamaker-Zondag, Karen, 1997, Tarot as a Way of Life: A Jungian Approach to the Tarot
  • Pollack, Rachel, 1980, Seventy-Eight Degrees of Wisdom: A Tarot Journey to Self-Awareness
  • Greer, Mary K., 1984, Tarot for Your Self: A Workbook for the Inward Journey
  • Place, Robert M., 2005, The Tarot: History, Symbolism, and Divination
  • Jodorowsky, Alejandro, 2004, The Way of Tarot: The Spiritual Teacher in the Cards