Carl Jung

Carl Jung was a Swiss psychiatrist. He founded analytical psychology and mapped the archetypes, and he was born and died beside the lakes of Switzerland.

Born on 26 July 1875 in Kesswil, just after half past seven in the evening, he had Aquarius rising with Saturn sitting in the first house. That is the observer's arrangement. Aquarius looks at things from the outside, itself included, and Saturn in the first gives the looking its seriousness and its distance. It describes somebody who watches even while taking part, and who was almost certainly doing it at six years old.

His Sun is in Leo in the sixth house, with Mercury and Venus beside it in Cancer. Leo wants to be the author of something, and the sixth house is work and daily practice rather than glory, so the ambition comes out as a routine instead of a performance. He was a clinician long before he was a famous man, and three planets in the sixth are the consulting room itself: the same hours, the same chair, the same patient attention, year after year, which is the least glamorous way imaginable to build a body of thought.

The tightest aspect in the chart, exact to a quarter of a degree, is the Sun square Neptune: the self obscured, confusion about direction, difficulty making out your own outline. In most lives that is a complaint. In his it became the subject. A man with that aspect almost exact spent sixty years mapping the part of a person that cannot be seen directly, and handed the rest of us the words for it. Jupiter trine Saturn, also exact, is growth that holds and a career that accumulates rather than spikes, which is what his looks like from outside: no single breakthrough, just decades of steady building.

He died at Küsnacht on 6 June 1961, aged eighty five, on a last quarter Moon, which is the phase that reopens the question instead of tidying the answer. Transiting Uranus stood opposite his natal Saturn that afternoon, and those two are the modern and the old ruler of the sign that was rising when he was born, meeting across his own chart on the day he left it. His work outlasted him without difficulty, and words he invented are now used daily by people who have never read a line of him.