"The core of every illness, physical as well as psychological, has a fundamental wound - a struggle of inner conflict which seems insurmountable and which can generate bitterness and rage, and the loss of the will to live . . ."           
                             Michael Balient

The "will to live" is a great mystery and every medical practitioner knows that it can and does affect the physical as well as psychological well-being of an individual. Survival depends on the sick person's desire to get well.  Consciously, one may declare that one wants life; but somewhere inside, he may wish to go home, and this longing or death wish may be more powerful than any conscious declaration of intent to get better.  

There are voluminous articles, books, theories etc. concerning the malady of depression and its debilitating effects on a person's "will to live".  Depression is a universal experience.  In its most severe form - it is crippling.   

Whether one's depression is considered serious enough to address will depend on how debilitating is appears to be.  If a person is strong-willed and strong-minded, he/she can often get on with life.  What is not generally recognized is that the depression does not go away; it merely becomes more or less unconscious, or expresses itself through the body - hence illness.

Why do some people have the ability to meet challenges and transition while others become bitter and hopeless and live on the brink of life and death?  This problem may have its origin in the enigma of the individual's inherent character to which his astrological birth chart (horoscope) can provide many insights. 

Clinical Depression

Usually involves loss of libido - a state of apathy and listlessness which coincides with the withdrawal of interest and energy from people, objects, and social activities.  Chronic tiredness is usually the physical correspondence.  The life force has dissociated itself from life.  Sometimes there is a sort of absent-mindedness and inability to concentrate.  Usually one neglects his personal hygiene - he can't be bothered to wash or wear clean clothes.  Sleeping and eating habits are erratic.  The outward manifestations are many - always a deviation from the normal.  It is if the person has been plunged into a deep, dark abyss - in which he is bound up with despair which is not felt.  Various life situations may trigger such a state such as grief, loss, a sense of abandonment, etc.

Manic Depression

A frenzied defense whereby the individual flies away from the encroaching darkness of deep depression up into semi-divine heights where he believes he is gifted, special, capable of achieving anything and virtually immortal.  Behind the manic flight lies the darkness and shadow.  The manic-depressive is stuck in the paranoid-schizoid position, bouncing back and forth between identification with all-badness and all-goodness alternatively.

The term "shadow" is a very large one - it can cover a number of dimensions of experience - one's weakness, one's inferiority, one's evil, one's deformity and darkness, one's primitiveness. 

Who are you without your mask, your acceptable persona?  The person who has plunged into depression is no longer able to use his persona to hide from the thing beneath, the mortal body with all its sin and darkness.  If we look at  depression in this context, it is the real end of childhood, the real facing of one's essential self and one's limits.  It usually is the beginning of a very important process of growth which depends upon an understanding and integration of the ills and fears that haunt the individual.  Without help and understanding, many people get stuck.

Suicide and Anger

Depression, caused by a powerful and ferocious repressed anger, will often motivate a suicide attempt/s.  An incomplete suicide is one which fails because it is meant to fail.  It is a plea for help and a way of punishing others and making them feel guilty and responsible for the terrible depressed state the person is in.

Phobias

This kind of unconscious depression makes itself known in convoluted ways - usually through physical symptoms and behavior patterns of a compulsively self-destructive kind.  There is not yet a connection between the person and the depression, except the symbolic one which an observer can see - the compulsive eating, smoking, drinking, lack of care for the body, sleeplessness, etc.  If one can begin to allow an awareness something begins to happen - usually the realization that one is terribly depressed.  That is a beginning.

The Depressive Position

This stage of development is part of the process of the emerging ego in childhood.  If the process is arrested or is not worked through, then particular stages of it will reappear in the adult person's pathology.  Melanie Klein's ideas are very valuable in helping us to understand the workings of depression (Envy and Gratitude, New York: 1984).  Klein suggests that this is a psychological state which does not permit integration of good and bad feelings.  A very young child is not yet capable of containing ambivalent emotions such as love and hate at the same time.  The young child cannot yet cope with the experience of both good and evil in the mother, or in himself or herself.  Klein suggested that there is enormous tension between the feelings of love and trust on the one hand, and hatred and destructiveness on the other.  If the ego cannot yet contain the realization that it is possible to feel both hate and love about another person without anyone being destroyed, and that it is possible for another person to be both lovable and hateful - then these ambivalent feelings will be split.  Either the mother is black and rejecting while the child experiences himself or herself as good and loving, or the mother is good and loving but the child experiences itself as black and evil   Either the good or the evil will be projected, while the opposite becomes identified with oneself.  Thus the paranoid-schizoid position - paranoid because paranoia always involves projection of one's own destructive feelings outside onto other people and schizoid because there is an essential split between emotions which belong to the same person and are felt toward the same person.

Paranoia is a pre-depressive state.  The movement from the paranoid-schizoid position to the depressive position means a gradual separation from the mother so that the child emerges as a separate entity with the beginnings of an individuality, and the mother also emerges as a separate entity who is different from the child.  Many people get stuck between these two stages of development.  

Lovers become either idealized divine objects or terrible cold rejecting monsters.  Usually the lover will start out by being idealized while one feels oneself to be inferior and lucky to have found such a wonderful person.  And then - when the lover does something hurtful - the divine object rapidly deteriorates into the devil while one emerges as the blameless victim of someone else's callousness.

So, we have considered depression as an inverted or indirect statement of unexpressed destructive emotions, and a stage of development which is necessary to allow the individual to pass from an infantile and unformed state to one where the ego, the center of consciousness, is strong and able to cope with and relate to life.  It is advisable to keep in mind the quality of mourning which inevitably accompanies this passage to a sense of individual self, because it is really a passage from childhood with its parental identification to maturity with its sense of separateness.  

Depression is concerned not only with destructive feelings, but also with separateness and separation, and therefore with mourning, even though there may not be an apparent external cause for grief.

The following is a compilation of astrological planetary configurations that are symbolic of an individual's propensity towards depression and his survival instincts.

~Scorpio - Capricorn~
~Gemini - Sagittarius~

There are four astrological signs which are inherently prone to depression - Scorpio, Capricorn, Gemini and Sagittarius.  These signs tend to express their problems through the symbol of depression in their own particular mode.

Sagittarius perceives life through the lenses of Jupiter-Zeus.  Given the enormous range of experiences available in life, he will focus selectively on the meaningfulness of those experiences - the higher purpose.  He will often not deal with the immediate negative feelings which a bad experience provokes as the negative feeling would cloud the intuitive perception of the meaning.  Because of this particular way of responding to life, there is often a big backlog of difficult of emotions tucked away in the subconscious of the Sagittarian's psyche.  However, he can avoid the depression of a Moon/Pluto - Venus/Saturn for many years.

Capricorn favors depression because it serves its inherent sense of guilt.  It is not predisposed to see a world full of inherent meaning pointing toward some profound spiritual goal.  It is the mortality of the world that Capricorn sees - its limitations, its inherent struggle, the fragile nature of life, and the extreme vulnerability of the human animal.  One cannot expect grace from heaven; life is hard and one must work and struggle.  Unlike Sagittarius, it does not register the inner meaning of an experience; rather it registers the experience as confirmation of the human condition.  It is an embrace of immediate experience rather than an intuition of the implications of the experience and the sensation function, rather than the intuition is the primary tool of adaptation and adjustment.  Capricorn's innate depression is neither pathological nor curable because it is part and parcel of the individual's vision of life.

Scorpio favors depression because it is an excellent and effective form of expressing vindictive anger while remaining relatively blameless in in the eyes of others - and also, depression keeps others out.  The roots of Scorpio's depression are separation, loss, and the dilemmas of human relationship because the god who stands behind this sign is the Great Mother, who represents the unity and life-preserving drives of all instinctual life.  The Scorpio personality always seeks to merge with what he /she loves, while at the same time fearing the loss of power which accompanies such merging.  The trigger for Scorpio's depression is loneliness and separation.

Gemini - (Splitting is also characteristic of Gemini and Sagittarius.  They will usually project the darkness outside onto other people or society or onto the body.)  

Saturn   &  Pluto  

  ~Key planets in the theme of depression~

Pluto is a symbol of primitive instinctual need.  One hates the person one loves because that person has the power to hurt and humiliate by withdrawing.  Splitting is characteristic of a Pluto-dominated person.  

When faced with the complexity of ambivalent emotion, the Plutonian personality will often divide the package neatly and either the person or the world become good while the other becomes evil.  Those who identify with all the blackness and ugliness in the family unwittingly carry the family shadow and those who project it onto others try to fight or convert the evil outside, typical of the religious in the world.  Scorpio and Capricorn usually identify with the darkness.  

Saturn, on the other hand, has much to do with the realistic acceptance of human limitation.  It has the capacity to face and tolerate the ambivalent nature of the world and of oneself. 

Although Saturn and Pluto are planets which  seem to be responsible for an individual's dark state, their gifts are paradoxically also the cure.  Saturn offers a serene acceptance of reality and a compassionate recognition of one's limits, and a capacity to contain one's difficult experiences without being torn apart by them.  Pluto helps one to face one's own darkness, fate, and relinquish the attempt to control life and trust the inner 'Other" that intelligently unfolds one's path in life despite oneself. 

Astrological Aspects: 

    Sun or Moon conjunct, square, or opposing Saturn or Pluto.  When there is a hard Moon aspect to Pluto, it is possible for the individual to carry the parent's depression.  The children of depressed mothers often themselves suffer from depression.  If the mother is constantly in a state of despair, the child will be infected by this.  The personal mother is the mediator of the archetypal mother for her child and if she is wandering blind and despairing in the dark, then she will inadvertently mediate only the Dark Mother - an experience of life which is negative, hopeless, bitter, and bleak. The depression is always present with  most people who have difficult Moon/Pluto aspects but it is generally unconscious except when it erupts in the form of black moods or physical symptoms.  Many people describe their mothers as "cold" but Pluto is never cold.  It can be vindictive and make the family suffer because she has been so humiliated through the denial of her emotional needs - but it does not mean she was unloving.  It helps to look more honestly at the mother - not to blame her - but to see what may have lurked beneath her surface.  She may not have been the strong, self-sacrificing person one thought, but she may have been deeply bitter and despairing, or perhaps even at the edge of a breakdown.  She may have been emotionally starving and turned to her child for solace from her unhappiness - which means turning the child into the mother.  Many people suffer from this "role reversal."  Unfortunately, before true understanding and compassion has been achieved, the child remains  angry, outraged and feels the pain of abandonment.  He/she has not been mothered.  

Saturn aspects are responsible for feelings of not being loved or accepted.  Usually love is given conditionally.

    Mars conjunct, square, or opposing Saturn or Pluto

A blocked Mars results in a feeling of impotence and victimization.  There is great unconscious rage which can express itself in a variety of ways including rage against oneself as well as the world outside.  Difficult Mars aspects are known for being "accident prone".  Migraine headaches and colitis may be health issues.  Chronic depression is suspect when an individual feels a profound sense of impotence, frustration and rage, generated by the feeling that one has no capacity for choice, nor power over one's own life.  Many people dissociate from this kind of deep depression and find escape routes such as compulsive work, large doses of TV, sex, alcohol or tranquillizers when the repressed blackness threatens to break through into conscious awareness.

    Saturn positioned in the 4th, 8th, or 12th

Cancer, Scorpio, and Pisces and their corresponding houses 4th, 8th, & 12th - are directly concerned with emotion and with motivations which lie below the surface of consciousness.  Saturn in these houses is extremely elusive because the average individual is rarely aware of the unconscious emotional frustration which lies behind his actions.  He only knows that he is isolated and emotionally vulnerable - if he knows this much.  Saturn is typical of the pain that finds its way to the therapist's couch for often an objective viewpoint is needed to help guide the person through the mazes of his own feeling nature.

    Venus conjunct, square, or opposing Saturn  

Venus in difficult aspect to Saturn is one of the astrological symbols of a lonely and emotionally deprived childhood and of feelings of being unloved, unlovable and isolated.  Because there has been an emotional withholding or deprivation of some kind in the family background early in life, the individual will probably not be able to separate from the parents as it is impossible to separate from that which a person has never had.  It is a stuck place and before the "depressive position" of a separate individuality can be reached, Venus-Saturn contacts must be worked with on a deep level as the individual will repeatedly seek a kind of perfect and un-conditionally loving parent in every adult relationship - and then be disappointed, rejected, and bitter when the lover or spouse doesn't fill the bill.  Inside, the individual is still a lonely, emotionally hungry child who cannot let go of the dream of unconditional parental love, and who is full of rage against life.

    Moon/Jupiter - Strong Moon-Jupiter contacts in juxtaposition to a severely depressed person with Venus/Saturn or Sun/Pluto contacts alongside tend to idealize life; the split runs the other way, and the individual projects all the bad outside and identifies with a wonderful mythic world where he/she is the divine child of the gods and is entitled to special exemptions from the usual rubbish which lesser mortals have to put up with in life.  This can be a rather manic pattern. 

  Sun/Neptune, Moon/Neptune & Venus/Neptune 

Neptune, even more than Jupiter, seeks an ideal state of existence.  The gap is too great between the individual's longing and the inner and outer reality which he/she meets in life and the abyss in between is the depression.

    Moon/Mars - Anger and Willfulness

This aspect is symbolic of a very powerful desire nature which does not like being thwarted.  The individual is not angry as long as he/she gets at least some of what he/she wants.  The Moon reflects an individual's instinctual needs while Mars reflects aggression and desire.  If they are aspecting each other, it is symbolic of a very insatiable appetite.  Moon/Mars is a statement of willfulness and anger which if repressed, will lead to depression.

Depression is like a flag being hoisted by the unconscious, making a statement: 

Look - there is something inside that needs to be felt and experienced and you are not dealing with it so here is a flag - a depression.

Pay attention to it instead of running away from it. 

Is there life after a depression?

Many astrologers learn astrology to cope with the unpleasant feeling that maybe life is really meaningless.  If we can find a bad Saturn transit we can blame our present state of circumstances on this and rationalize all will be O.K. in two weeks or so when the transit is over.  By doing this, one does not make the kind of deep and often frightening exploration that would lead to the core of the depression and ultimately - to the core of the self.  This just creates a barrier between the person and the experience and puts the issue off until another transit.   The astrologer remains unable to really grasp the importance of Saturn and Pluto.  One often uses spiritual beliefs and disciplines to avoid descending into the realm of depression.  While there is truth in them, there is also truth in the perception that sometimes life does seem meaningless and that in the end - everyone is mortal and that someday we will die.  We are alone, trapped in our separate bodies and psyches and the experience of universal oneness and love together with the promise of many lifetimes via reincarnation  is a subjective theory.  Depression is the body's truth just as meaningfulness is the spirit's truth.  One does not cancel the other out.  Life wears a double face.

Hopefully, one of the things that happens is that individual potentials and gifts get integrated into  consciousness and into life which were not available before.  Usually this includes a capacity to cope with separation and aloneness which the person may have previously lacked.  It strengthens the ego, which means strengthening self-confidence, self-worth and faith in life.  One lets go of the parents at last, and can therefore live one's own life.  If one can get this out of a depression, even a long one, one has received a very great gift.

Planets and progressions as triggers for depression

Transits and progressions of Saturn are often involved when a person becomes depressed.  An endogenous depression (a severe depression that is considered organic and unconnected with external events) is frequently connected with the two-year transit of Saturn over some critical point in the birth chart.  When the transit is over, the individual seems to come out of it.

A Pluto transit often appears coincident with the onset of a depression and because Pluto spends such a long time passing back and forth over a particular point in the chart, such a depression can go on for a considerable time.  

Saturn and Pluto passing over such a hot place in the chart  will pitch the individual into a powerful experience of what has been split off.  Both confront an individual with the truth and if this truth is an aspect of oneself that has remained infantile, hurt, and unable to forgive life for its horribleness, then one sinks down into their earliest experiences of childhood.  

This is true of progressed planets moving into strong aspect with the natal Pluto.  Very often this is the significator of a potential reclaiming of emotions and values which were lost in childhood and buried under a great deal of pain. 

Often it is the transits of Saturn and Pluto that trigger depression in someone whose problem is an unexpressed Mars, unlived Jupiter, or a frustrated Moon or Venus.  The source of depression seems to be a pocket of unlived life, dammed-up emotion, stifled imagination and unresolved anger and pain.

A Planet that can help

Transiting and/or progressed Uranus conjunct, sextile, trine to natal Sun can be tremendously creative for a person stuck in a depression.  It is an awakening of the sense of individuality - the light at the end of the tunnel.  As it approaches by transit or progression, it releases energy which as been trapped in the unconscious or trapped in old structures. 

However, very often the released libido is very difficult to integrate into the existing life situation, particularly if Uranus makes a transit to Mars.  An outburst of some kind may be urgently needed but the individual often fears disrupting the status quo; so the energy inverts and the person falls into a depression instead.  Likewise, if Uranus touches a Moon/Saturn square, all the early feelings of loneliness, rejection, and isolation will surface and will result in a depression.  A rule of thumb is that if the present situation cannot accommodate even a positive aspect of Uranus - Uranus/Jupiter, Uranus/Venus - the individual will try to deny that he or she is changing and depression may be the result. 

CHIRON &The Will To Live

Since Chiron's discovery in 1977, astrologers have been experiencing and exploring his themes, listening to new tales that resound to his ancient myth and coming to some understanding of his archetypal impact.  Now, it is believed that in order to live life to its fullest, one must face that part of oneself that would rather seek death.

What is Chiron's position in the birth chart and what aspects does it make to other planets?  As astrologers, we look at the symbolism of the polarity of the Sun and Chiron - hope versus despair - the will to live versus hopelessness. Although not aspected in every individual's chart both symbols are present.  They form an energy dynamic within the personality.  A direct aspect sharpens this dynamic and often becomes the focus of the individual's journey.

All the planets up to and including Saturn serve the development of the individual ego, best symbolized by the Sun as the center of individuality.  Chiron lies at the interface between Saturn and the outer planets, and mediates collective issues which impinge on and wound the individual by its nature.  Chiron's collective implications signify something collectively "un-healable" because the wound exists in the collective and is ancestral.  The Sun reflects each individual's sense of purpose and meaning in life and these are intimately bound up with the will to live and to become oneself. 

In myth, Chiron did not become a healer because he was wounded.  He was a teacher and healer before he was inflicted with his wound.  However, it could  be assumed that he suffered prior because of his lonely existence.  Although he belonged to a tribe of other centaurs (who symbolized natural instinctual powers) he separated himself from his tribe and remained isolated.  He represents the wise animal which of its own volition has chosen to serve human evolution and consciousness, rather than remain blindly subject to the instinctual compulsions of the animal kingdom.  He has turned his back on the savagery of his instinctual nature in order to serve the evolutionary pattern which he deems to be the way forward for the whole of life.  He is accidentally wounded by a poisoned arrow aimed at another centaur and the wound does not heal no matter what healing methods he applies to it.  Ultimately he retires to his cave howling in anguish, begging for death.  Zeus and Prometheus take pity on him and grant him the boon of mortality, allowing him to die in peace like any other mortal, although once he was a god.

This story implies a state of unfairness in life which is hard for any individual especially for the idealistic person involved in esoteric studies. We want to believe that life is fair and that goodness is rewarded and evil punished; at least in some other incarnation if not in this one.  

Chiron is an image of that in us which has been wounded unfairly by life, and by inescapable conditions which reflect failings and flaws in a collective psyche which is repititively clumsy in its efforts to progress.  We are victims of unfairly inflicted pain which produces repercussions through the generations leaving many of us full of bitterness and cynicism.  We are the recipients of physical and psychological damage whose causes lie not in any individual or even parental failing, but in genetic inheritance (a personal handicap) or collective disasters such as the Holocaust, African starvation/Aid Virus, the 9/11 Terrorist Attack on New York, the War in Iraq - where thousands of innocents have suffered death and inexplicable horrors.   The collective psyche over which we have no control and which, as individuals, we cannot be blamed.

Such collisions with the inescapable flaws of the collective can leave us full of bitterness and despair.  We may punish others because we feel maimed, wounded and irredeemable.  or we may punish ourselves.   In the final outcome - we must accept that there are no answers - no rewards.  Like Chiron, we must understand and except that we are only mortal and destined to be flawed as a collective.  This should trigger compassion in us - compassion of one lame person for another.

We all have to face Chiron and ask ourselves  "What is the nature of my wound?  How has life hurt me, and whom do I secretly blame?  Can I feel compassion and forgiveness for myself or only rage and self-pity?  Where do I sabotage or even destroy myself because of bitterness?"

Mental disorders represent the number "one" health problem for the U.S. and probably for the entire human population.  Some studies estimate that approximately 1/3 of all Americans suffer from some sort of emotional disturbance.  It has become a growing problem among children and adolescents.  The American Psychiatric Association (APA) estimates that 3 to 6 million young people may currently be depressed.