The Development of Personality

The inaugural volume of the Greene-Sasportas seminar series, transcribed from the Centre for Psychological Astrology in London. The book establishes psychological astrology as a clinical register distinct from predictive astrology: the chart is read as a developmental map, with planetary aspects registering the specific tasks a given psyche must work through. Its organization — introductory lecture, case material, student questions — preserves the seminar’s pedagogical texture.

Its most influential chapters work Sun-Saturn aspects and the puer/senex axis. Greene’s reading of Sun-Saturn places Freud’s superego at the Saturnian seat: “Freud used the term superego to describe the Saturnian voice of the great They, the parent who perpetually dictates from within the psyche what one must and mustn’t do in order to be acceptable to Them.” Sasportas threads the puer-eternal, reading Jupiter-dominated charts against the fire signs and against the mythic Zeus-Jupiter. The book thereby installs the Jungian typology (puer, senex, anima, shadow) into the natal chart as an operational grammar.

The work is the practical charter of psychological astrology as a Jungian-inflected clinical tradition. Its influence runs through the generation of psychological astrologers who followed Greene and Sasportas into the Centre for Psychological Astrology — the English-speaking astrological world’s closest institutional analogue to the Jung Institute.

Concepts introduced or developed

• senex-saturn
• puer-aeternus
• planetary-gods-as-archetypal-complexes
• person-centered-astrology

Cited by

• liz-greene
• howard-sasportas
• richard-tarnas