R. D. Laing

Fire, air and water take three of his ten planets each and a single one sits in earth, with four of the ten cardinal. This chart holds no closed figure of any kind. The record says Laing was a Scottish psychiatrist who challenged the treatment of schizophrenia.

The Sun sits in mild friction with Neptune at twelve hundredths of a degree, close enough to call exact, and the name this reading goes by is the self obscured: confusion about direction, a tendency to idealise people who do not deserve it, and vitality that comes and goes for no clear reason. In a psychiatrist whose profession was what happens to a self under pressure, the tightest contact in the chart being the one about an obscured self is a coincidence of vocabulary worth printing. It is a reading about his own direction and not about anybody he treated, and that distinction matters more here than in most of these entries.

Mars sits in hard contact with Pluto at under half a degree, force against force: power struggles, a rage that frightens the person having it, and situations where winning matters more than the thing being won. Mars also sits in mild friction with Saturn at a degree and a third, drive meeting refusal: blocked energy, anger with nowhere to go, and effort that meets obstruction repeatedly until it becomes either resentment or real competence. For a psychiatrist the record describes by what he challenged rather than by what he built, two separate contacts about force meeting an immovable object are the part of this chart closest to the shape of the record, and neither of them says who was right.

One planet in earth, with three each in fire, air and water, is the balance here, and Mercury sits in quiet contact with Saturn at over a degree and a half, structured thinking without strain. His Moon sits on the twenty sixth degree of Aquarius at noon with Pisces still possible, so it is left out. Jupiter and Uranus were the two retrograde planets. He died at Saint-Tropez on 23 August 1989, at sixty one. Mercury stood in direct opposition to his natal Jupiter at a fifth of a degree that day and Neptune in easy contact with his natal Venus at four tenths. The Moon was disseminating and fifty four per cent lit, a phase that passes on what was worked out and needs it to land.