A Dangerous Method: Freud, Jung and astrology

The film “A Dangerous Method” by David Cronenberg opened in cinemas in 2011 and tells of the early years of psychoanalysis. Michael Fassbender plays C. G. Jung, Viggo Mortensen Sigmund Freud, Keira Knightley the patient Sabina Spielrein, who later became a psychoanalyst herself. There is something remarkable about this configuration that a feature film has no time for: of the two men, one engaged seriously with horoscopes, and the other regarded anything of the kind as a step back from everything he wanted to achieve.

Jung and his patients’ birth charts

Jung is the reason why his name turns up sooner or later in almost every astrology book. He reported that in difficult cases he would look at a patient’s birth chart — not in order to predict anything, but in order to have a second description of the same person alongside his own. The signs and planets interested him as a stock of images: as figures that people have brought forth over thousands of years, akin to fairy tales and myths. His term for such recurring figures is the archetype.

That is less than is claimed in his name, and more than sceptics concede. Jung was no astrologer and never held that any influence proceeds from the planets. What he found revealing was the handed-down material — and revealing about the people who brought it forth.

Synchronicity and the word that gets skipped

In 1952 Jung published an essay on what he called synchronicity: the meaningful coincidence of two things between which no cause mediates. The volume appeared together with a contribution by the physicist Wolfgang Pauli, with whom Jung had corresponded at length on questions of this kind.

It is this term that astrological texts still appeal to most readily. Yet it contains a word that is easily skipped over: meaningful. Whether two events coincide meaningfully or merely happen at the same time is decided by no measuring instrument, but by whoever is looking. Jung was aware of this and expressly built the observer into the concept. Anyone who cites him today usually leaves that part out and treats synchronicity as though it were a property of the world and not an achievement of the person who notices it.

The experiment with married couples

This is where the most frequently cited astrological study of all belongs, and it comes from Jung himself. He compared the birth charts of several hundred married couples and checked whether the links that tradition counts as marriage aspects occur there more often — conjunctions between the two partners’ Sun, Moon and ascendant.

The first analysis looked astonishing. With further groups the finding dissolved again, and Jung himself recorded that the result stayed within the bounds of chance. He published it all the same, and he read the course of things as an example of his own concept: the expectation of the person carrying out the investigation, he held, is itself part of what coincides.

That conclusion need not be shared. What can be held on to, though, is what is seldom quoted along with it: the man astrology most likes to appeal to tested it, found nothing, and wrote that down.

Freud wanted nothing to do with it

Freud fought to have psychoanalysis taken as a science, and any proximity to the occult stood in his way there. He warned Jung away from this terrain, in plain words. That the two later fell out had several reasons, of which this was only one; the break cannot be exhaustively explained by it.

What can be taken from this

A name is not an argument. Wherever it says that “even C. G. Jung” took astrology seriously, that is correct — and it proves nothing, neither about astrology nor about the text the sentence stands in. More useful than appealing to him is the way of working he demonstrated: looking closely at the material, putting the question in such a form that it can go wrong, and writing down the result even when it does not fit the picture. What a reading works with in detail is shown by the planets and the zodiac signs.