Carl Jung And The Tarot
Jung and the Tarot ; The Father of Psychology
I love a Tarot conference, and at the last one I attended in Melbourne (which is quite a few years back now) I sat in on Evelyn Joffe’s presentation on the Kabbalah in which she spoke at some length about Carl Jung. I really enjoyed it so went on a bit of a discovery tour to find out more about this rather fascinating fellow, and so here I will share with you some of what I found out about him.
Carl Jung was born in Switzerland in 1875. He was a solitary boy who liked to wander the countryside with his thoughts. When university approached, he hesitated between studying medicine and studying archaeology. Ultimately, Jung decided to focus on the new field of psychoanalysis, which had been developed and popularized by Sigmund Freud a few decades before.
In 1906, Jung sent Freud his Studies in Word Association, and the two became respected colleagues and friends. But there were major differences between what each man believed. Freud thought that people are motivated by base desires that we usually keep hidden from the world, but which could be discovered through dream analysis. Suppressing these desires leads to psychological issues.
Jung, on the other hand, didn’t think that all acts and psychological conditions were caused by this. He felt that humans were complex individuals who shared, all the same, a collective unconscious: deeply ingrained concepts that would be recognized by all people. Jung identified many of these symbols in his theory of archetypes. Archetypes are embodiments of universal ideas. For example, most of us have some kind of idea or ideal of motherhood. This is an archetype, and in each of our minds, this concept might be embodied by the image of our own mother, or a maternal deity or fictional character. Jung identified a few main archetypes: mana (spiritual force), the shadow (our primitive instincts), the persona (the face we put on when dealing with the outside world), and the anima/animus (the former is the way men perceive women; the latter is the way women perceive men).
But there are many others Jung named, as well, including the father, the wise old man, the trickster, the maiden, the apocalypse. If you’re here because you’re interested in Tarot, you might be finding some strange echoes between these archetypes and images on the cards. In fact, Jung would have agreed with you!
He wasn’t just fascinated by the human mind, but also by what he saw as the mystical workings of the universe. He developed the concept of introvert and extrovert as a way to define an aspect of human personality, and the concept of synchronicity to explain an aspect of the world around us. Synchronicity is the idea that two seemingly random incidents that have a connection may in fact have come about deliberately, thanks to the workings of the universe. An example you’ll often hear is a case that Jung said inspired him: He was working with a patient who told him she had dreamt of a scarab beetle. Suddenly, there was a real scarab beetle at the window to the room. Jung felt that this was a sign. Using his theory of archetypes, he discovered that the patient was suffering from a fear of death (the scarab beetle is associated with death in many cultures).
These beliefs made Jung feel that certain methods of divination were legitimately connected, not only to synchronicity, but also to the psyche. The I Ching is one example of a system that Jung thought exemplified synchronicity. Although he knew less about it, he felt similarly about Tarot. In addition to seeing Tarot as a tool that worked with synchronicity, in the cards Jung recognized many of the archetypes he’d defined. Writer and Tarot reader Mary K. Greer cites a speech Jung gave in 1933. Among other very interesting things he had to say, there is this: “These cards are…psychological images, symbols with which one plays, as the unconscious seems to play with its contents.” Jung goes on to tie in Tarot with his theories of archetypes and synchronicity, saying that the images on the cards “are sort of archetypal ideas, of a differentiated nature, which mingle with the ordinary constituents of the flow of the unconscious, and therefore it is applicable for an intuitive method that has the purpose of understanding the flow of life, possibly even predicting future events, at all events lending itself to the reading of the conditions of the present moment.” If you’re interested in reading exactly what Jung thought about each major arcana card, Greer’s site also has a great list.
Jung’s theories made an important foundation for modern psychoanalysis. But some have been more applied than others. It’s only in the past few decades that some psychologists have thought about integrating Tarot into psychoanalysis sessions. Pioneers like Dr. Arthur Rosengarten have found that this type of therapy can be extremely effective. Tarot readers have often noticed the same thing: after all, a reading is about more than divination – it’s about connecting with a client and helping them through their journey. Will a new generation of psychologists take Tarot into account? It will be interesting to see how things develop.
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