In his concise and illuminating 1963 book, The Symbolic and the Real, Ira Progoff analyses the psychoanalytic movement as arising from the loss of stability occurring in western culture at the end of the nineteenth century. This is the collective loss of religious meaning (Nietzsche’s proclamation ‘God is dead’) and societal structure through the Industrial revolution that will culminate to the great wars of the twentieth century. Psychoanalysis is a genuine attempt to find a new kind of meaning to stabilize a new sense of identity in that changing world.

The importance of understanding the origins of depth psychology is clear when we recognize that almost all modern psychological or counselling based Astrology owes elements of its approach (whether people realize it or not) to the insights that originated with that movement and the multiplicity of developments that have occurred since pioneers such as Freud and Jung.

It is also not hard to observe that the loss of religious meaning and the stability of social contracts within society that began with the Industrial revolution has continued unabashed and that the collective milieu that produced the original movement of depth psychology is outdone by modern culture in which the pace of change is almost unimaginable: the curious reality that there was no real home internet usage prior to the 1990’s is illustrative in a world where I now have to routinely take question from my mother, a senior, on how to download photos or film.