Tarot as a psychological tool.

Tarot is a deck of cards that is more than six centuries old, being the predecessor of our modern decks. The function of therapeutic tarot is to offer tools to investigate the patient's interior and for him to seek his own solutions, exploring repressed emotions that affect the present.

Although in the 15th century, tarot was conceived as a mix between game and divination, over the years it has become a therapeutic tool based on personal self-knowledge. It is not so much about predicting what will happen to the person, but rather understanding the circumstances so that, with his will, he can achieve his goals.

In parallel, the Freudian psychoanalytic school developed an interest in self-reflection through the exploration of the unconscious. However, its theories almost exclusively turned to sexual complexes, including interpretations of dreams with stages of growth during childhood.

It was Carl Gustav Jung who pointed out that one should not only look at the experiences or thoughts repressed by the individual, since they were part of several layers that he called the "collective unconscious" made up of anthropological approaches maintained by other civilizations.

With Carl Jung's contributions to the discipline, the major arcana represent the archetypal figures of the collective unconscious, as a symbolic sublimation of human needs satisfied in the past by the mythologies of different cultures in the form of universal images. Here would be the numberless arcana, the Fool, as the cosmic wanderer, the person who undertakes a search.

The "shadow" that we carry within is a part of our interior that is unknown, and that exerts an influence on us.

The cards would therefore be polysemic signs that are anchored in the consultation and that confer a narrative similar to Joseph Campbell's "hero's journey", in an increasingly abstract journey until reaching fullness in the card of "The World", apprehending the reality of the consultant.

In this shared story, the "hero" discovers his true potential with different tests, the ones after the 10th arcana "The Wheel of Fortune" being related to the inner world: We accept the defeat of our limits in "The Hanged Man" until reaching the major arcana number 13 of "Death" with the death of the ego passing through the resilience of "Temperance" with those more immaterial related to the unconscious such as "The Star", "The Moon" or "The Sun"

It is said that the three main human searches offered by philosophy have to do with religion, politics and self-realization.

In modernity, having "killed God" and disillusioned with the grand narratives, people opt for the help of self-therapy. Secularization and individualization have led to a growing interest in spiritual search practices of all kinds:

With the New Age school, beginning in the 1920s with the English Alice Bailey, the foundations for an esoteric astrology were laid, mixing spirituality and psychology using Jungian precepts.

Using the astral chart, they try to determine how existence is affected by a given space and time, although they do not give an answer to how we relate to the environment. Although Bailey addressed astrology in her work, including its relationship with the Kabbalah and other aspects of spirituality, she does not seem to have directly mentioned the tarot in her known writings. Her work focused mainly on theosophy, spirituality, occult philosophy and spiritual psychology, and not on the practice of the tarot.

Other proposals include those of Alejandro Jodorowski, his own interpretation of the tarot that differs significantly from conventional traditions. In his work "The Way of the Tarot", he offers a deeply personal and psychological view of the tarot, based on his own understanding of the archetypes and symbolism of the cards.

Jodorowsky has emphasized the value of the tarot as a tool for self-knowledge and personal growth. His interpretation of the tarot focuses on the exploration of the psychology and consciousness of the individual through the cards. He sees the tarot as a mirror that reflects the inner and emotional aspects of the person who uses it, with academic contributions to the original colors of the Tarot of Marseille. However, with his controversial "psychomagic" seemingly arbitrary actions are performed that suggest healing.

In short, he promotes a holistic approach to the tarot, which considers the balance between the spiritual and the earthly, the conscious and the unconscious.

The experimental or experiential tarot is a Tarot that compresses the New Age thought of the spiritual search, as it tries, through intentionally generated images and by computer, to be a tarot that is not oriented to divination in any of its possibilities, but only to meditation and inner reading.

The adaptability of the tarot throughout history, as well as its ability to serve as a tool for introspection, reflection and personal healing have been used in a variety of spiritual and therapeutic contexts. One of the keys to the success of the Tarot as a therapy is that the relationship between the consultant and the tarot reader turned out to be in all the case studies much more empathetic than the relationship between the consultant and the psychologist. Although individual practices and approaches vary widely, the tarot remains a powerful tool for exploring the inner world and the individual's journey towards a life worth living.

Nuria Acquaviva - nacquavivaps@gmail.com

Bibliography:

-Battezzati, Santiago; The psychologization of tarot and astrology: the definition of a morphology of the Self in a path of inner search; Institute of Economic and Social Development; Culturas Psi; 3, pp. 26-50. 2014.

-Nichols, S. Carl Jung and the Tarot. An archetypal journey. Ed. Kairós, 2008

-Parra, A. Empathy and magical thinking in the formation of the therapeutic alliance in psychologists and tarot readers. Journal of psychotherapy, Vol. 28, No. 106, 2017.

Related articles:

> The four elements in the Tarot

> Tarot and astrology (I). Major arcana, zodiac, planets and elements.

> Time in the Tarot (I). Years and seasons.

> R. Falconnier's Egyptian Tarot of (I)

> Marseilles Tarot. Medieval symbolism of the main colors.