Psychology
As a final example of the archetypal shift from the 1960s to the 1990s, we may cite the transformation of psychology, which underwent two distinct developments during the latter period, both of which reflect characteristic themes of the Uranus-Neptune complex. The dominant psychiatric approach at the end of the twentieth century, impelled by advances in pharmacology and neuroscience, and also by pressures from the insurance industry, has been to regard and treat psychological illnesses as essentially biochemical conditions that can be rectified, or their symptoms suppressed, by the use of drugs. The subjective qualities of human experience are regarded as entirely a function of biochemical conditions of the brain. This biochemical orientation can be contrasted with the dominant emphasis in psychiatry in the 1960s on the liberation of the individual from traumatic childhood experiences and repressive familial and cultural influences.
Beyond the neurosciences, conventional psychiatry, and the medical-pharmaceutical-insurance complex, however, a collective shift in the culture’s psychological understanding and sensibility took place during the 1990s that reflected those deeper archetypal themes and impulses that we have observed throughout this exploration of the Uranus-Neptune cycle. Here, too, the contrast with the 1960s is readily apparent. The major innovative psychological theories and therapies that emerged during the Uranus-Pluto conjunction of the 1960s were especially concerned with the cathartic release of repressed instinctual and emotional material: The breakdown of somatic armoring, the discharge of aggression, and the achievement of orgasmic potency and erotic freedom were regarded as crucial for the attainment of psychological health. The spirit of the time, in psychology as in other areas of culture, was dominated by a synthesis of the Promethean and Dionysian impulses in mutual activation. The empowered autonomy of the individual was the overriding goal. In many writings and theories, psychological and somatic liberation was closely associated with social emancipation and political revolution. The ideas and philosophical orientation of Freud were central to these developments during the 1960s (as they had also been during the Uranus-Pluto square alignment of the 1930s), and the ideas of Nietzsche, Darwin, and Marx loomed in the background. The psychological milieu of the Sixties was pervaded by the concepts and practices of such figures as Wilhelm Reich, Fritz Perls, R. D. Laing, Norman O. Brown, Herbert Marcuse, Albert Ellis, Ida Rolf, Will Schutz, and Arthur Janov. The characteristic innovative modalities of the era were bioenergetic release, emotionally intensive encounter groups and gestalt therapy, physically intensive Rolfing and other forms of somatic intervention, the primal scream, nude marathons—all distinctly reflective of the Promethean-Dionysian archetypal complex.
In contrast to the more agonistic spirit of the 1960s, the psychological theories and therapies that emerged prominently during the later 1980s and 1990s were of a distinctly different tenor, having such key themes as the care of the soul, the awakening to the significance of the spiritual dimension of life, the integration of psychotherapy with meditation and spiritual practice, and the acknowledgment of the healing potential of numinous and religious experiences. New attention was given to the mythic and archetypal dimension of dreams, art, and religious experience. Jungian analysis, archetypal psychology, and transpersonal psychology became especially widespread and influential orientations. National newsmagazines of the 1990s noted the shift towards Jung and away from Freud as many individuals pursued psychological quests that had an emphatically spiritual character. Psychology and psychotherapy were increasingly regarded as paths of spiritual discovery and transformation that supported the task of “soul-making” (reviving John Keats’s phrase and perspective that was articulated in 1819 during the preceding Uranus-Neptune conjunction). Depth psychology was now seen as an authentic via regia to the sacred for the post-Enlightenment age. Its character and aspirations seemed especially relevant to an era that was simultaneously secular and spiritual, restlessly experimental, globally interrelated, and pervaded by a new religious pluralism. It also provided crucial support for an era that was discovering religious symbols that for many were not adequately expressed or honored in the inherited religious traditions.
Rather than the struggle for and achievement of a sharply differentiated autonomous self, as favored in the 1960s, the attainment of psychological health was increasingly seen as better served by the cultivation of a relational self with more permeable boundaries, one capable of intimacy and reciprocity as well as self-sovereignty. New value was given to the capacity for compassionate openness to the other and the cultivation of an increased sensitivity to one’s embeddedness in larger communities of being—local, ancestral, ecological, spiritual, planetary. New significance was given to the task of liberating the individual psyche from the narrow concerns and limitations of its illusory separateness, and opening awareness to the larger realities and claims of the collective psyche, the transpersonal domain, the ecological unconscious, the global community, the cosmos.
Connected to these orientations was a new recognition of the psychological importance of healing the split between inner and outer, reconnecting psyche and world, recovering the anima mundi, mediating “the return of the soul to the world.” This recognition was in turn closely allied with the impulse to recover and revalue the archetypal feminine, in both women and men, and in both the individual psyche and the collective—restoring it to its rightful place in the psychic cosmos, and moving ultimately towards a healing integration of feminine and masculine. To a remarkable degree, each of these many interrelated impulses specifically reflected the characteristic motifs and concerns of the Uranus-Neptune archetypal complex.
Similarly, instead of the models of the psyche that dominated the 1960s, which emphasized instinctual and emotional release and orgasmic liberation, a new appreciation of the complexly multidimensional character of the psyche emerged as dominant in the 1990s. This multidimensionality took many forms—archetypal, transpersonal, integral, multicultural, multiperspectival—all of which were characterized by a new awareness of the mysterious and limitless nature of the interior universe. The healing potential of nonordinary states of consciousness, the use of entheogens and sacred medicines from shamanic traditions, special breathing methods such as holotropic breathwork, wilderness vision quests, meditative disciplines and techniques, and the study of esoteric traditions such as alchemy and Hermeticism, the Kabbalah, and Gnosticism were characteristic themes of the emerging psychological theories and therapies.21 Many embraced the relevance of other cultures’ symbol systems and religious traditions for their individual journeys of psychological transformation. The nature of symbolism itself shifted, as the Freudian approach to symbols, interpreted reductively as straightforward substitute signs of instinctual desires or fears, increasingly gave way to the Jungian approach to symbols as multivalent living principles that mediate access to deeper realities and have spiritually transformative power.
The psychological goals and models favored by the 1960s did not, of course, simply disappear. Rather, they were transformed in the new archetypal context. Sexuality, for example, remained liberated, but increasing emphasis was placed on the cultivation of a capacity for reciprocal relationship and erotic merging rather than simply the achievement of powerful orgasmic release, personal empowerment, and individual autonomy. Religious traditions of sacred sexuality, Tantric and Taoist sexual practices, and Native American approaches to the spiritual dimension of sexual experience were widely studied, and there was greater focus on transcendence of the individual self, melted ecstasy, and sacralized interpersonal fusion. Similarly, the call for a psychological emancipation that empowers political engagement, social activism, and environmental awareness continued from the 1960s but became increasingly informed by spiritual themes and associated with movements such as socially engaged Buddhism, the interfaith commitment to social justice and freedom articulated by the Jewish Tikkun community, various politically focused prayer and meditation circles, and an ecological activism that exp
licitly drew upon spiritual resources and the experience of underlying oneness with the Earth community. A similar pattern can be seen in the development of feminism within depth psychology from the 1960s to the 1990s, which increasingly shifted towards integrating a range of feminine archetypes, acknowledging numinous experiences of female deities from various religious and mythological traditions, and deepening the understanding of the collective unconscious to encompass the anima mundi.
One final example of this dynamic continuity and transformation from one era to the next is the “participatory turn” in contemporary spirituality and psychology. Here the focus on freedom, empowerment, and erotic embodiment from the 1960s joined with the postmodern pluralism and mystical-spiritual impulses of the 1990s to bring forth a call for not only an awakening to the spiritual and archetypal dimensions of being but an awakening to a new relationship to those dimensions of being—radically participatory, co-creative, pluralistic, and dialogical. Such a perspective affirmed the validity of a multiplicity of spiritual liberations in which various spiritual traditions and practices cultivate and enact, through co-creative participation in a dynamic and indeterminate spiritual power, a plurality of authentic spiritual ultimates. The ideal invoked was at once unitive and pluralistic, emancipatory and relational, socially engaged and spiritually informed, embodied and ensouled.22
More generally, these diverse developments during the Uranus-Neptune conjunction of the late twentieth century and the turn of the millennium can be seen as representing the cyclical activation and creative renewal of cultural impulses that we have observed as having coincided again and again with the alignments of the Uranus-Neptune cycle over the centuries. The diachronic pattern of correlations involving the evolution of the archetypal perspective from Plato to Jung is especially vivid. The widespread interest in and development of Jungian ideas and the mythic perspective in the late twentieth century, particularly in the writings of Joseph Campbell and James Hillman, Robert Bly, Stanislav Grof, Edward Edinger, Marion Woodman, Clarissa Estes, and Thomas Moore, can of course be traced back to the period of the immediately preceding Uranus-Neptune opposition of the early twentieth century, when Jung’s psychology was forged. This was also when James Joyce and Thomas Mann—Campbell’s other heroes whom he so often invoked along with Jung—began to create their mythically informed work. So also Rilke, who played a similar role for Robert Bly.
The tradition of imagination that Hillman invoked as the cultural stream from which archetypal psychology emerged shows a similarly remarkable correlation with the Uranus-Neptune cycle: Again, first back to Jung and the others of the early twentieth century during the last opposition; then to Romanticism, Keats, and Coleridge during the immediately previous Uranus-Neptune conjunction of the early nineteenth century; then further back to the Renaissance, Ficino, and the Florentine Academy during the conjunction of the later fifteenth century; then to Petrarch, from the preceding conjunction of the early fourteenth century; and finally back to the Greeks and the Platonic tradition that emerged from the Uranus-Neptune conjunction at the turn of the fourth century BCE. The long diachronic sequence constitutes a kind of procession of ancestors and sources of inspiration for the evolution of the archetypal perspective, which has emerged during this most recent conjunction to bring forth another creative efflorescence in new historical circumstances and with new horizons opening before it.
As we have seen, many such cultural lineages that extend back through the centuries have unfolded with remarkable consistency and precision in correlation with the Uranus-Neptune cycle. To cite one final motif: the many instances of individuals who strive for and experience a sudden recognition of an underlying pattern of meaning, what might be called the archetypal “Rosetta Stone” experience. Here could be mentioned the original Rosetta Stone breakthrough itself by Champollion in deciphering Egyptian hieroglyphics; Kepler’s ecstatic discovery of the elegant mathematical laws that solved Plato’s ancient problem of the planets; the discovery of the double-helix structure of DNA by Watson and Crick; the Elizabethan magus-scientist John Dee and his Kabbalistic and Hermetic quest to unveil the sacred language and mysteries hidden in nature; Pythagoras’s discovery of the transcendent mathematical forms that structure the cosmos, from musical tones to the planetary motions; Newton’s scientific and alchemical passion to unriddle the mystic clues that hold the key to understanding the world and history; Einstein’s relativity breakthroughs—all emerging in individuals and eras correlated with alignments of the Uranus-Neptune cycle.
Here too could be cited Gregory Bateson’s lifelong focus on the “patterns which connect”: patterns that reveal an immanent mind pervading all of nature, and that disclose “a world in which personal identity merges into all the processes of relationship in some vast ecology or aesthetics of cosmic interaction.” (Bateson defined the aesthetic faculty as “responsiveness to patterns which connect.”) Especially suggestive of this motif is Jung’s concept of synchronicity itself with its focus on spontaneous coincidental patterns of events that suddenly reveal unexpected meanings and an underlying unity of the inner and outer worlds. And most recently, Stanislav Grof in many lectures during the 1990s referred to archetypal astrology as a Rosetta Stone for the understanding of the human psyche. In all these, a common archetypal theme is evident: the revelation of a long-hidden pattern of intelligibility, an intangible but encompassing principle of order—often with numinous and aesthetic overtones, even in the most scientific contexts—that unifies what previously had been separate and unintelligible, and evokes a sense of sudden liberation, awakening, and unexpected illumination.
In retrospect, these two great eras of radical cultural change and creativity which coincided with the two great conjunctions of the second half of the twentieth century, Uranus-Pluto and Uranus-Neptune, can perhaps best be understood in relation to the enormous epochal transformation that was set in motion during the most recent five-hundred-year-cycle Neptune-Pluto conjunction. As discussed in the preceding chapter, this alignment extended through the last decades of the nineteenth century into the beginning of the twentieth. Historically, the axial alignments of Uranus—first with Pluto, then with Neptune—that immediately follow the conjunctions of Neptune-Pluto have coincided with periods that bring to the surface, in the form of sudden creative breakthroughs and emancipatory surges, processes that were seeded during the Neptune-Pluto conjunction. More generally, the Uranus-Pluto and Uranus-Neptune cycles which have been the focus of so much of this book appear to be associated with historical phenomena in which the Promethean principle of creativity, emancipation, and unpredictable change has dynamically impelled the long unfolding dialectic between the archetypal principles associated with Pluto and Neptune—using the traditional terminology, the dialectic between “Nature and Spirit.”
The most recent Neptune-Pluto conjunction, which ended a century ago, coincided with a profound reconfiguration of the perceived relationship between nature and spirit in the Western sensibility that was visible in the ideas, movements, and figures that emerged or were born at that time—from Nietzsche to Teilhard, theosophy to depth psychology, the encounter with the unconscious to the world parliament of religions. In light of the great triple conjunction of Uranus, Neptune, and Pluto during the Axial Awakening period of the sixth century BCE, it is striking that many of the impulses established at that time more than 2500 years ago have been moving toward a climactic moment of transformation in the course of the past hundred years. Reflecting this epochal historical development, prophetic voices in the 1990s, such as the theologian Ewert Cousins, began to suggest the possible coming in our time of a second Axial awakening comparable to the first:
If we shift our gaze from the first millennium BCE to the eve of the twenty-first century, we can discern another transformation of consciousness. It is so profound and far-reaching that I call it the Second Axial Period.
In an era that has brought a global awareness to humanity for the first time, when the planet Ea
rth with all its inhabitants can be seen in its entirety in cosmic space as the single celestial body that it is, and when the universe has been revealed as a creative vastness expanding through millions of galaxies and billions of years of cosmic evolution from the big bang to the present, the collective consciousness now emerging recognizes as was never before possible that all participate in a single enormous history. At the same time, that history, for humanity and the Earth community, has reached a stage of rapidly deepening crisis and peril.
As countless thoughtful observers have asserted, the future depends on how humankind meets this unprecedented moment of challenge and choice: how it negotiates the tensions between unity and multiplicity in the world’s nations and religions, and how it resolves the polarity between spirit and nature in the evolving consciousness of a technologically empowered human species. The first Axial Age brought a decisive stage of differentiation and individuation to human spirituality—of the newly emergent individual self out of the collective, of the newly emergent historic religious traditions that developed their distinct orientations out of the primordial shamanic and archaic religions, and of the newly emergent reflexive human consciousness out of the primordial matrix of nature, the Earth, and the cosmos. Our time appears to represent a critical moment in which the evolutionary developments that were set in motion at that time, two and a half millennia ago, are moving to a climax, and perhaps to a new stage of cultural evolution that is more complexly dialogical and participatory in every one of these respects.
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