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Finally, and most importantly, even supposing astrology's legitimacy, what use is it for the art of psychotherapy, how can it be used in healing, and how can it be used for helping clients resolve deep, characterological issues? Although attempts have been made at synthesizing astrology with psychotherapy, very little has been written concerning its applicability to the client's need. Much has been written about astrology and the astrological birth chart as a "behind-the-scenes" tool to elucidate client issues and difficulties, but next to nothing has been acknowledged in the literature about how astrology can used effectively in the counseling session itself.
Astrology as psychotherapeutic tool
Given the important caveats, problems, and difficulties surrounding astrology, there is a small but vocal minority that believe that astrology is and will be a major and accepted instrument in the psychotherapist's toolbox in the years to come. Psychologist and cultural historian Richard Tarnas suggests that psychology textbooks of future generations will look back on modern psychologists working without the aid of astrology as being like medieval astronomers working without the aid of a telescope. (2) Similarly, scientists sympathetic to astrology believe that astrology will eventually become to be accepted as the qualitative grammar or language of the human condition. These are large and bold claims, particularly if one acknowledges the current status of astrology in the mind's of conventional wisdom as being a somewhat unsophisticated game of fortune-telling, praying on the worst of human potentials. However, astrology has benefited greatly from its synthesis with modern psychology. Combining forces with many modern psychological theories, astrology has reached a fuller maturity, growing from being an undeveloped prognostic game to becoming a very sophisticated map of the human psyche. The following are examples of some powerful unions between astrology and insights of psychology.
• A map of psychological complexes, subpersonalities, and COEX systems
Psychological theories with a more humanistic inclination have often seen the personality as a dynamic system that accounts for multiple inner voices, each asserting their own demands, behaviors, feelings, and desires on a core self, or ego. This "inner congress" has received multiple treatments, from Robert Assagioli's "subpersonalities," Carl Jung's complexes, and Stan Grof's COEX systems. The common denominator between all of these theories is that, at core, these divisions of the psyche are wedded to something "transpersonal"-to something beyond the "skin-encapsulated" ego. Astrologers such as Liz Greene suggest that the astrological birth chart is a map of these islands in the psyche. Thus, as astrology suggests that these complexes and subpersonalities are "psychoid"-bridging both matter and mind, external and internal experience-these building blocks of one's psychology has an external referent in the coordinates of the solar system.
• A tool for transference and countertransference issues
The birth chart and predictive astrology lays claim to be a map of the "total self," and not just the conscious or integrated aspects of the psyche. As such, astrology claims to enlighten one to possible disowned, split-off, or otherwise unidentified parts of one's self that have been put into the unconscious. Some psychologists and psychotherapists using the birth chart as a tool assume one of its great applications is to see what is possibly being transferred by a client or "countertransferred" from a therapist onto a client.
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