"Tarot and Psychology" - Arthur Rosengarten, Ph.D.

"Tarot and Psychology" by Arthur Rosengarten is a 290 page work on tarot through the eyes of a clinical psychologist. "In this book, I will lay the groundwork for approaching Tarot as a tool of significant psychological and spiritual usefulness and discuss its relevance to contemporary psychology" - Arthur Rosengarten.

I have read this book in two attempts. At first I read the two thirds of it and after 6 months, I read the remaining third. 

The author writes in a very scientific way and this book is packed with references, names and quotes. It mentions Freud, Jung, Rachel Pollack, Rider Waite, synchronicity, I Ching and many other things. 

To be honest, it was a very difficult and confusing read for me. It seemed that the author was beating around the bush and never really getting to the point. I lost my patience a lot of times while reading this book. It was interesting in its own masochistic way but, in my opinion, the complicated vocabulary wasn't necessary (unless the book was actually meant for professional psychologists and psychotherapists). 

An excerpt:

"An important trend for the past four decades has been the steady shift away from Freud's emphasis on instinctual wishes including the conflicts and defenses connected to those wishes, towards the increasing importance placed on the development of self and object representations (images), particularly at the pre ego developmental stages between 18 to 36 months of age ("on the road to object constancy"). Later in this book we will observe how a Tarot reading can be used to elucidate such representations through spread cluster interpretation, as we have already suggested in the previous chapter. Tarot applied in this framework can function as an adjunctive tool, a focusing technique of sorts, whose usefulness will depend on the phase of treatment and the therapist's specific intent." (Arthur Rosengarten, p. 68)

I did enjoy some of the findings and ideas within this book. It had a very interesting study-experiment in the end of the book about how does tarot really work and what is synchronicity. I think I actually was looking for a book that would talk about that and I think it answered to my question, that we don't yet have technology to measure synchronicity and cause of events where there is no visible connection between the outcome and the cause (just because it's invisible it doesn't mean it's not there). 

Also I loved tarot reading samples provided at the end of the book done with domestic violence victims and prisoners. That was a study that wanted to see if there would be a pattern of tarot cards fallen to people when the same problem is discussed (domestic violence). So that experiment actually revealed that some cards would come out more often to the people dealing with similar challenges in life (so there is a pattern and not a coincidence).

The author also provides a very good and accurate list of all tarot card meanings in the appendix of the book, including a phrase, traditional meaning and a proverb.

So, overall it was a very hard and heavy read for me but I found the things that I was looking for.