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Psychological astrology — the Greene–Sasportas clinical tradition

Psychological astrology — the Greene–Sasportas clinical tradition

The lineage of psychological astrology, as the term is used in English-speaking astrological psychology today, runs through the Liz Greene and Howard Sasportas collaboration of the 1980s and early 1990s. Greene came to the work from the Jungian analytical tradition (trained at the Society of Analytical Psychology, London); Sasportas came from psychosynthesis and humanistic psychology. Their founding of the Centre for Psychological Astrology in London (1983) gave the field its institutional home.

The tradition’s charter texts are the seminar volumes: The Development of Personality (1987), The Luminaries (1992), and subsequent volumes. Its method reads the natal chart as a depth-psychological map — planetary aspects register specific developmental tasks; houses register experiential domains; transits register the timing of archetypal constellations. The Jungian inheritance is explicit: puer/senex, anima/animus, shadow, the typology, complex theory, and the alchemical coniunctio are the primary analytical categories.

Tarnas’s Cosmos and Psyche (2006) supplied the theoretical frame the clinical tradition had been operating by feel. Rudhyar’s Astrology of Personality (1936) remains the prehistory. The tradition’s distinctness from predictive astrology matters: psychological astrology does not forecast events; it reads the chart as an instruction in the psyche’s own work of individuation, with astrology functioning as synchronistic correspondence (Jung’s foreword to the I Ching, applied to the horoscope) rather than as causal prediction.

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