Archetypal Astrology

Excerpt from Archetypal Astrology and Nonordinary State Experience by Jay Dufrechou:

Trained as a medical doctor in the 1950s, and conducting research with LSD in psychiatric research centers in the 1960s and 1970s, Stanislav Grof was perplexed that there seemed to be no way of predicting the types of experiences people would have during psychedelic sessions. The variability of individual LSD sessions was in contrast to the expectation that pharmacological substances were useful in medicine, including psychiatry, based on their predictable effect on patients.

At the Psychiatric Research Institute in his home country of Czechoslovakia, and later at the Maryland Psychiatric Research Center, Grof and his research teams used standardized assessments and common psychological tools with patients and research subjects in the effort to understand what experiences people with particular conditions or tendencies might have during psychedelics sessions. Grof understood that psychedelics functioned as “relatively unspecific amplifiers” of the contents of the deep unconscious, but was looking for ways to predict what unconscious contents would manifest for particular people. Consistent with the reports in the literature from others conducting similar inquiries, Grof concluded: “the results of the tests developed and commonly used by Western psychology were essentially useless in this regard.”

Grof continues the story:

"Ironically, when after years of frustrating effort I finally found a tool that made such predictions possible, it was more controversial than psychedelics themselves. It was astrology, a discipline that, even after years of studying transpersonal phenomena, I myself tended to dismiss as a ridiculous pseudoscience. I came to realize, however, that astrology could be an invaluable tool in the work with both psychedelics and with other forms of non-ordinary (or “holotropic”) states of consciousness such as those induced by powerful experiential techniques of psychotherapy (primal therapy, rebirthing, and holotropic breathwork) or occurring spontaneously during psychospiritual crises.

"The radical change in my attitude toward astrology has been the result of collaboration with psychologist and philosopher Richard Tarnas, my close friend and colleague. For over three decades, beginning in 1976, we have been jointly exploring the astrological correlates of mystical experiences, psychospiritual crises, psychotic episodes, psychedelic states, and holotropic breathwork sessions. This work has shown that astrology, particularly the study of planetary transits, can predict and illuminate both the archetypal content of non-ordinary states of consciousness and the timing of when particular states are most likely to occur. Our systematic study of the correlations between the nature and content of holotropic states and planetary transits convinced me that a combination of deep experiential therapy with archetypal psychology and transit astrology is the most promising strategy for the future development of psychiatry and depth psychology. (Grof, 2009/2011). 

Grof, Stanislav (2009/2011). Holotropic research and archetypal astrology. Archai: The Journal of Archetypal Cosmology, 1, 65-85.