Therapeutic Tarot: Counseling or Healing?
AUTHOR’S NOTE: I recently came across a debate in the online tarot community that argued whether a tarot reading should be used as a form of therapy that, instead of seeking an answer to a specific question, can “work through and heal the anxiety underlying why the question is being asked in the first place.” There was some push-back against using the term “emotional therapy” when reading for other people because as a mode of psychological treatment it carries legal obligations related to licensing and certification. Personal counseling didn’t come off much better in the court of expert opinion, although “life-coaching” wasn’t touched on in the conversation. The main takeaway was to make it abundantly clear that we are not trained and qualified as mental-health practitioners with a psychoanalyst’s or psychotherapist’s pedigree (unless we are credentialed as such and mainly use tarot as an adjunct to our professional practice).
In The Book of Thoth, Aleister Crowley observed that the fact of consultation implies anxiety and discontent on the querent’s part, the understanding and alleviation of which can benefit from receiving certain revelatory cards in the draw. As one aspect of the diviner’s preliminary assessment (Crowley’s “First Operation”), the ability to accurately “tell the querent why he has come” for the session is the benchmark of credibility for the ensuing divination. However, the approach is more mystical and anecdotal than analytical, and it is definitely not clinical. The focus is largely situational and there is nothing to recommend it as a source of therapeutic healing.
As a psychological astrologer back in the early 1970s I became well-acquainted with the pertinent theories of Carl Gustav Jung, and I also took up tarot studies at around the same time, finding that the tarot had not yet succumbed to the Jungian “group-think” that became de rigueur for the metaphysical scrutiny of self and others shortly thereafter. To be honest, although I used it for attaining self-awareness and fostering self-development for the better part of forty years, I never found tarot to be an especially effective tool for mind-work due to the risk of “confirmation bias.” To this day I find it weak for psychological purposes and much prefer natal astrology. On the other hand, “fortune-telling” tarot and horary astrology have become my go-to predictive instruments.
When it comes to any kind of constructive counseling, I prefer to steer clear of offering actionable advice as much as possible, instead providing glimpses of a plausible future and suggesting that querents consider positioning themselves to take advantage of my insights, whether psychologically or pragmatically. I will even go so far as to convey how they might approach the answer while acknowledging that I’m only trying to give them the ammunition to go hunting for it on their own. I don’t want the legal liability of taking on the role of healer. Whether my prompting amounts to useful “guidance” is up to the seeker to decide.
In the 1950s, Norman Vincent Peale’s Power of Positive Thinking, which espoused a type of auto-suggestion or self-hypnosis that supposed we can achieve whatever we want merely by imagining it into existence, caused psychological damage to some aspirants who could not make it happen and never recovered from the disillusionment. I have no problem with the concept of “bootstrapping” but I believe it must have a footing in the reality of current resources before it will take us anywhere.
A tarot reading can help to identify those untapped assets, but recognizing and mobilizing them are two different propositions. While there is nothing wrong with affirmative reinforcement and its goal of improving self-esteem and productive optimism, the premise behind schemes like the Law of Attraction (which is just an old idea with a fresh coat of paint) doesn’t seem to hold water if we mistake wishes for certainties and wait idly for them to come true. In the realm of “horses and beggars” the two won’t necessarily converge via “wishing” unless we conduct our lives in a way that encourages their mutual cooperation.
As a professional diviner, I see our mandate to be empowering our clients to pursue self-mastery by choosing to act in their own best interests, and to downplay wholly inspirational enabling recommendations that amount to little more than “cheer-leading.” Trying to therapeutically instill this regenerative mindset by applying tarot’s symbolic abstractions is not likely to fair any better than Peale’s discredited assumptions.
Originally published at http://parsifalswheeldivination.wordpress.com on December 11, 2024.
