The gifts of objectivity and civilised behaviour

You possess the gift of a clear, strong and objective mind, and you are a lover of truth and integrity in all your dealings. You will always favour reason over chaos, and principles over personal reactions. But there is considerable conflict within you - a dilemma between your rational, detached spirit and your intense and sometimes overpowering feeling. Another way of describing your nature might be to say that you tend to live in your head - because it seems safer, more civilised, and more "decent" - yet your heart often contradicts what your mind tells you you "ought" to feel, leaving you confused and vaguely guilty about "bad" or "selfish" reactions. Although you may not be an intellectual in the conventional sense of the word, you are naturally quick and articulate, and possess an impressive capacity to assess, weigh and analyse diverse facts and ideas objectively and fairly. This has probably earned you the reputation of being broad-minded, reflective, ethical and considerate of others' points of view. You are also an excellent planner and can transform chaos into order with the penetrating power of your mind. What you do not wish others to know about you, and what you often try to hide from yourself, is that your real feelings give you a completely different and much more subjective picture of life and of others - and these neglected feelings are often more genuinely perceptive than your usually reliable mind.

Interest in people and need for social involvement dominate other motivations

You thrive on being where all the interesting people are, where ideas are being born and new trends started, and where you can be seen, heard, and part of what in American slang is called "where it's all happening". Whether your interests are more cerebral (political or philosophical), or concerned with cultural events and trends (the latest best- selling novel, the new play, the innovative opera production), or an expression of more extraverted activities (sport, fashion), you are always one of the first to take up new things and people, and one of the last to leave the party. You genuinely like people - provided they are not too depressing and refrain from smearing their emotional problems all over the happy atmosphere - and you are interested in what others have to say; and generally people like you too, for you possess a happy spirit that generates its own excitement and is open-hearted and tolerant of others' eccentricities. Beneath the surface of your apparently light-hearted and optimistic approach to life you are not a shallow person, and you know the value and strength of friendships and social bonds.

Humanitarian concerns deepen your sociable nature

You are not merely sociable; you are socially concerned, and people matter to you not only because they provide you with pleasure (a convivial evening with friends can always relax you and make you happy). They also matter from a broader, more humanitarian point of view. You believe in the rights of others, and your vision of human nature is a positive one, full of potential. You are interested in fostering growth or progress in society in some way, whether in the educational, cultural or spiritual realm, and you combine a facility for working cooperatively with an ideology or personal philosophy that aims to help others on some level. You are a diplomatic person, and have managed to master the art of being able to put forth original and innovative ideas while appearing to be completely nonaggressive. You make full and excellent use of the royal "we", although for you "we" means the group. Thus the group usually believe that they, rather than you, came up with the idea first. Because you are neither arrogant nor self-seeking, you can permit this without feeling demeaned, as long as the objective is reached; and therefore you are a formidable person when it comes

A hidden need for solitude causes feelings of loneliness and isolation

In contrast to the sociable, articulate and outgoing qualities of your personality, there is another protagonist in your inner psychic drama. This hidden side of you comprises all those qualities which you have had to exclude from your conscious values and behaviour in order to pursue your fulfilling personal and professional involvements with others. Your shadow-side is not the humanitarian and humanist that you are, for this part of you actively dislikes people, preferring solitude and quiet, and finding a group of more than three rather strenuous, irritating and even boring. It is hard for you to express this antisocial shadow, for this might mean offending others by withdrawing too harshly from them; and it would also mean questioning your belief that the welfare of others is more important than your own.

Generally you suppress your shadow-side in the name of ideals such as selflessness and obligations to others. But if you cannot make friends with this withdrawn and deeply intraverted dimension of your personality, you will lose a valuable part of yourself - the part that recognises limits, and validates your need for privacy, and supports your pursuit of hobbies and interests that nourish you rather than serving others, and provides you with the time and space to experience your own feelings and your own identity. You tend to be frightened by solitude, yet the darker side of you craves it. Ultimately you need more balance in your life - for you tend to exhaust yourself for others without acknowledging that you too are a part of that humanity to which you are so attached. Perhaps you need to learn that one should love one's neighbour as oneself - not instead of oneself.

Hurts in early life leave scars and feelings of mistrust

Some secret loneliness or unhappiness springing from your childhood has made you a good deal more suspicious about other people's motives than you appear. Probably one or both of your parents was unable to express genuine affection and warmth, and made love conditional upon good behaviour; and your shadow-side does not trust others, believing them to be out for what they can get. This dark side of your personality always looks for the strings and conditions attached to any offering from another person, and is determined to defend your more vulnerable feelings lest you be hurt or used as you felt you were early in life.

A powerful urge for self-expression lies in the shadow

In contrast to this amiable and gregarious personality, there is a hidden dimension of your personality which you have excluded or repressed from your conscious values and behaviour in order to preserve your network of friendships and your feeling of security within your peer group. The unconscious shadow-side of you is fiercely individualistic, independent and aloof, and not in the least concerned with preserving good relations with anybody. It is extremely difficult for you to reconcile the natural arrogance, superiority and self-centredness of this inner figure with those socially attuned values that embed you so firmly in the collective. If you remain unconscious of this hidden aspect of yourself, it is likely to surface as a kind of angry restlessness, a sudden feeling of being alone and misunderstood and frustrated in the midst of the very people you need so much; you may also have to face the problem of envy of those who are more brazen than you and are unafraid to show off their differentness and independence of spirit. You are a party kind of person in both senses of the word - inclined to like jovial social gatherings, and also inclined to join a group which espouses a particular political and social philosophy. Your shadow-side is apolitical, antisocial and self- willed, to which nothing is as important as your own development and your own achievement, and to which the approval of the mass means nothing at all.

The image of the father in a woman's chart

Father is not only a real person. He is the symbol of an inner pattern or perspective through which you relate to life. The image of the father portrayed in your birth horoscope therefore describes three things.
Firstly, it is a subjective picture of the qualities you experienced as most dominant in your relationship with your father - or whoever played the role of father in your early life.
Secondly, it is a symbol of what the masculine represents to you, for your father was the first man in your life. He is therefore a powerful unconscious influence not only on what you seek in male partners and on how you relate to men in general, but also on how you express the masculine or goal-orientated side of your own personality.
Thirdly, it is a picture of your own inner father-qualities: how you order and structure your life, how you envisage and pursue your goals, how you express and direct your will, and how you formulate your ethical codes and ideals.

A restrained and unresponsive figure

The subjective image of your father portrayed in your birth horoscope is a highly ambivalent one. He seems to have been a rather conservative and withdrawn person, rooted in traditional values, and preoccupied with the responsibilities of mundane life. These are positive attributes, although you may not think so, and you have inherited from him a capacity to approach worldly challenges realistically and to actualise your potentials. But you have also experienced your father as restricting and disinterested in you, and you may have felt unloved or neglected by him. He might have been overly involved with his work, or been an undemonstrative or autocratic personality; and he was possibly also caught in the dilemma of a difficult marital relationship which made it hard for him to relate to you with overt warmth and sympathy. On some level you have been deeply hurt by your father's apparent disinterest, and you need to be careful not to repudiate all that he stands for because of your sense of inner injury. Otherwise, the "baby goes out with the bath-water", and the positive dimension of this solitary and withdrawn father-figure will be lost to you - resulting in a kind of eternal adolescence and a problem with authority in the world outside.

Dealing with an authority problem

Because of the experience of hurt in your relationship with your father, you may seek "good" fathers in the form of authority figures or traditional institutions which can provide you with the security you needed - but failed to obtain - from your own father. Alternatively and probably at the same time, you may carry within you great unconscious anger toward your father which is projected upon these same authority figures in the world. Thus you carry considerable conflict in you, and the patterns of your dealings in work will reflect this. Perhaps you need to look more honestly at this parent, trying to see his complex personality beyond the circle of your own sense of injury. Insight can help you to express more creatively your own potential for realism, discipline and authority; for although you have felt rejected and unwanted, the disappointment of your childhood can foster the development of great inner self-sufficiency and strength - if you can find the delicate balance between self-reliance and the capacity to express need of and trust in others.

In addition to this dominant image, there is another figure portrayed by your birth horoscope which adds further complexity to your experience of your father.

A wielder of emotional power

You experienced your father as possessing considerable emotional power over you. This power and capacity to dominate sprang from an ability to manipulate emotional atmospheres, and was probably subtle and difficult to fight; but this image in your horoscope suggests that your father was a much stronger influence on you than he seemed.

The image of the mother in a woman's chart

Mother, like father, is not only a person. She is also the symbol of an essential principle in life, and of an inner dynamic or perspective through which we relate to life. The image of the mother which is portrayed in your birth horoscope therefore describes three things. Firstly, it is a subjective description of the qualities most dominant in your relationship with your mother. Many of these will be known to you, but some might be surprising, because they reflect not only her outer behaviour, but her inner life - that side of her which was unexpressed and therefore of great power in terms of its effects on you. Secondly, the mother-image in your horoscope is a portrait of what the feminine represents to you - how you relate to yourself as a woman, and how you experience other women. Thirdly, it is a picture of your own "maternal" qualities - your capacity to nurture and care for yourself and others, your sense of safety and trust in life's essential kindness, and your ability to flow with time and circumstances and to know instinctively when to wait and accept with wisdom the situations which life brings.

The craving for adoration

The subjective image of your mother portrayed in your birth horoscope is a restless and disturbing one. Even if she chose to put her considerable energies into the roles of wife and mother, her image within you embodies an adventurous and theatrical quality - a kind of childlike enthusiasm and craving for romance and attention which no doubt conflicted with her family responsibilities. In terms of your own inheritance of this romantic, restless spirit, much depends upon whether your mother was able to live out any of it herself in a colourful career, or whether she was submerged in a conventional structure which frustrated her inner craving for adventure and excitement. The positive qualities which this mother-image offers are those of a rich imagination and a vision of future potentials which can make life perpetually better and more rewarding. But if your mother could not live the eternal girl in herself and allowed her romantic dreams to be crushed, then you may be driven with a deep inner compulsion to live out the high drama she denied herself, without understanding fully why. Your mother probably tried to get the devotion and excitement she needed so badly through manipulative ploys, such as becoming ill at timely moments in order to ensure the absolute attention of her loved ones. And you may be left with a deep fear of commitment and of the trap of domestic responsibility because of your experience of the unhappiness of an adventurous soul that has been imprisoned.

Qualities of beauty and fragility

Your experience of your mother is deepened and rendered more potent by the fact that, on some level, you romanticised and idealised her, so that she emerges as a kind of princess from a fairy tale. Although she may seem to you to be anything but that now, nevertheless during your childhood you - and perhaps she as well - perceived in her many of the qualities of Cinderella: a refined and graceful figure who was subjected to a harsher and more difficult life than she might have wished for, but whose prince never arrived no matter how many frogs she kissed. Even if your mother had few material or educational opportunities, she probably possessed innate good taste and may, when younger, have been quite beautiful, or at least charming and popular.

V. RELATIONSHIP PATTERNS

The attractions of the loner

Because you are naturally gregarious and define yourself by the social contacts you make and the group with which you identify, you are intrigued by those who stand alone, who do not seem to be part of any recognisable social stratum and who appear to be sustained by some mysterious inner strength. You draw people out readily with your gift of easy conversation, but ultimately only those whom you can never really know or penetrate will hold your heart and your imagination. A more introverted partner might be an excellent complement to you, for you can offer such a man the warmth of your sunny personality and the kind of friendships, through your own circle of people, which he would find difficult to pursue on his own. In turn, a deeper personality could help you to overcome the fear of emptiness which often drives you compulsively into the company of people, and could teach you to find a sense identity within yourself.