Tarot and psychology
Tarot and psychology meet around the notion of the archetype developed by Carl Gustav Jung: the figures of the tarot are seen as embodying universal patterns of the psyche (the Mother, the Sage, the Shadow). In this approach the reading works through projection: the images serve as a support for what the person places upon them, and the draw becomes a tool for self-exploration, a mirror, never a verdict.
Jung and the archetypes
Carl Gustav Jung never wrote a treatise on the tarot, but he saw in its images representations of archetypes, those patterns that every culture tells. Sallie Nichols unfolded that intuition card by card: the passage through the majors becomes a path of individuation, the movement by which you become, little by little, who you are.
Projection as raw material
When you look at a card, you never see in it exactly what someone else would see. What the image stirs in you is your own story telling itself. The psychological approach fully owns this mechanism: the card is a screen of images where your inner world projects itself, and that is precisely where the reading does its work.
The Forer effect, a useful story
In 1948 the psychologist Bertram Forer handed his students a supposedly individual personality sketch: everyone in fact received the same text, and almost all recognized themselves in it. The story reminds us that general statements always seem to describe us. Rather than disqualifying the tarot, it calls for precision: what matters is not that the card resembles you, but what you, in particular, recognize in it.
Sources
- , Jung and Tarot: An Archetypal Journey (1980)
- , Tarot for Your Self (1984)