Sigmund Freud

Sigmund Freud built his entire life's work on the mapping of the human psyche, and his chart reads like an atlas of the depths. His Sun shines in Taurus, the bull, the earthy Venusian pillar of solid, unshakeable opinions and patiently built foundations. There is the man who, having qualified as a doctor of medicine in Vienna in 1881, laid the whole architecture of psychoanalysis stone by stone: free association, transference, the interpretation of dreams, the Oedipus complex, and the tripartite id, ego and super-ego that still furnish our language for the mind. That Taurus Sun sits in his seventh house of partnership, and true to it his method was born in the sacred one-on-one bond of analyst and patient, the talking cure that shines only between two people. His Moon in Gemini is the restless, endlessly verbal mind that finds comfort in words and ideas rather than in feeling, the perfect instrument for a theory made entirely of talk. Placed in his eighth house of death, sex and the buried, it is the healer's Moon with a keen eye for anything secret, the one who sniffs out what lies repressed beneath. Rising in Scorpio, the phoenix mask that no one can fool, he met the world as the great excavator of the unconscious, and he died in London exile in 1939 having remade Western thought.