On the Development of the Personality

I didn’t expect this book to be anywhere near as fascinating as it was. Liz Greene and Howard Sasportas have so much personality; the four sections are split evenly between them, and I can’t help feeling I’d love to sit in on their lectures. Sasportas is the more cerebral of the two, and his chapter on subpersonalities was particularly illuminating, while Greene is incredibly poetic and dives straight to the heart of the myths playing out in our modern lives. All the chapters deal with the archetypes represented in astrological charts — there’s a heavy dose of Uranus and Neptune, though no planet really goes missing — and Zeus and Hera, Hades and Persephone, Aphrodite and Hephaestus all have a part to play. One thing I knew nothing about beforehand was the archetype of the puer and its opposite, the senex: the eternal youth (Hermes, Icarus, Dionysus to some degree) and the old man looking back over a lifetime (Cronos, or Saturn). Astrology is a form of storytelling about our lives, and it’s intriguing to watch the interpretations emerge in these lectures and discussions. There’s a long stretch in Greene’s first chapter, on the parental marriage, where she and the people in attendance analyze one man’s natal chart, then expand to include his sister’s, paying close attention to how each experienced their relationship with their parents. Illuminating, to say the least.