Bookmark and Share
Intraspec.ca Psychology & Cognition
Intraspec.ca - Tools for Personal Development
Readings, writings and research on matters of health and well-being.
العربية български čeština Dansk Deutsch ελληνικά/Greek Español Suomi Français हिन्दी Hrvatski עברית Italiano 翻訳 한국말/Korean Lietuvių latviešu Nederlands Norsk Polski Português Română Русский/Russian Svenska українська Dịch 中文 (简体) 中文 (繁體)

19 June 2008; Modified: 12 September 2008; 15 September 2010;
Page Last Modified: 3 December 2011

Natal Chart — Barack Obama
Chart, Interpretations, and Analytic Commentary


The following image was generated at Astrodienst, 19 June 2008.

Natal Chart: Barack Obama: 4 August 1961 - 19:24, Honolulu, Hawaii
Prediction is very difficult, especially about the future.
Niels Bohr - Danish physicist (1885 - 1962)

Astrologically Speaking...

Birth Data Source:
Has Obama's birth certificate been disclosed?
...Obama was born at 7:24 p.m. Aug. 4, 1961, in Honolulu... The "secrecy" ended when Tommy Vietor at the Obama campaign sent a message to us and other reporters saying, "I know there have been some rumors spreading about Obama's citizenship, so I wanted to make sure you all had a copy of his birth certificate." A digital image was attached...
[Post includes link to birth certificate.]

Chart Assessments


My read of Barack Obama...

In context of the MBTI,  Obama is an ENFJ,  an Extroverted iNtuitive Feeling Judger,  with significant Introverted Thinking (manifesting in a tendency to decide for others,  rather than let them choose for themselves) and Introverted Perception (manifesting in a tendency to control relationships).

Obama's ennea-type is Two,  with a strong Three wing.
The passions ("sins") are pride and deceit,  rather than accidia and anger (9w1).
Heart triad (2,3,4),  not Gut (8,9,1).

Obama's birth chart presents three powerful dynamics:  a kite formation,  a grand square,  and a mystic rectangle.  Two points of the grand square are integrated with the base and apex of the kite,  and two points are integrated with the rectangle.  The other two points of the rectangle engage a critical aspect:  Mercury opposition Jupiter/Saturn in the 12th House.  The key element is Chiron (the kite base) in the 1st House,  opposing Pluto (the kite apex) - which is weakly conjunct the North Node - in the 7th.

As Chiron struggled with a mortal injury for which there was no apparent remedy,  Obama is also a "Wounded Healer".  In this case,  however,  the injury presents as a narcissistic conflict that arises from abandonment.  The absent father figure is unconsciously idealized and cathected as a self-object,  temporarily filling the void and providing the required narcissistic supplies for ego stability.  As developmental needs are no longer met by the paternal self-object,  there arises a cognitive dissonance that demands new models to serve as self-object and satisfy the self.

The maternal object is viewed with ambivalence because she cannot resolve the wound and may have caused or abetted it.  She contributes to the cathecting self by instilling the belief that the developing child is of superior capability and intelligence.  She also reinforces the cognitive search for new models which supersede previous self-objects as the necessity arises.

Obama harbors a deep need to resolve personal feelings that he is an outsider and does not belong,  yet he is convinced that his superior intelligence and empathic insights confer upon him a special knowledge,  a personal entitlement and moral authority.  The need for acceptance precludes outright self-assertion of his superiority,  because this is not a pragmatic strategy; rather,  he understands that acceptance must come through a focus on the perspectives and concerns of others.  He is adept at reading the attitudes of others and can quickly absorb ideas, then skillfully present them as his own.  He utilizes his empathic abilities and capacity for mimicry (e.g., he will incorporate vocabulary,  alter his pronunciation,  use similar postures) to make it appear that he is not different.  One may come away with the impression that "he is just like me", only later to realize that things may not have been as they seemed.  Obama is not focused on the subject,  but on egoic performance in maintaining cognitive stability in respect of the internal self-object.  He will remain inaccessible and unknown because he is unknown to himself,  a man of peripatetic ideas and assumed roles.

For Obama,  truth is relative,  an internally mediated variable he believes is subject to social manufacture.  What is "real" is a matter of agreement.  Positions will be adopted on the basis of their relevance to the casting of fact that serves his immediate objectives and facilitates his acceptance by others.  While there certainly are causes close to his heart,  these do not escape the influence of the narcissistic conflict:  conflation of personal with collective needs makes it likely that he will fall prey to narcissistic snares — that he can know all and heal all,  or to the defensive belief that he is never wrong.  Attempting to take the tiger by the tail,  he will confuse personal attributes with the collective capacity and will,  making it possible to cast himself as a symbol or see himself as the cause,  leading to an over-estimation of his ability to handle such responsibilities as may be acquired in the process.  He will become impatient and dogmatic because people do not understand that he knows what is best for them,  the nation,  and the world.  He will also evince suggestibility in response to the demands of important partners with whom he has allied himself in the quest to achieve his vision of the truth.

Obama has certainly inspired and made us think,  but his best contribution may not be as president of the United States.  — Richard Dagan, September 2008

Obama on the Couch: Inside the Mind of the President
Amazon.ca
Amazon.com
chapters.indigo.ca

[...]
On a psychoanalytic level, Obama is someone who tries to disconnect himself from fury through intellectual exertion and by strenuously trying to keep matters in clear focus. He doesn’t simply contain his rage or hold it inside his mind; he dissociates – a psychoanalytic term for disconnecting thought from feeling. This allows him to operate in a purely intellectual state, protected from the disruptive influences of excessive passions.

The 1789 French Revolutionary saying, “The tongue is the enemy of the neck," describes the approach Obama has always lived by. He turns a blind eye to his own rage; he seems almost sleepwalking when others would be screaming. This is not simply a matter of the president’s public persona pushing aside the private, enraged one. It is a profound ability to disconnect himself from feeling the full force of his own rage.

Ultimately, this is an expression of his fear of abandonment. In fact, what appears as detachment is the latest manifestation of a long history of removing himself from the fray in idiosyncratic ways. Growing up as a mixed-race child of two broken homes, and living in two dramatically different countries, Barack Obama learned to survive by carefully noticing everything around him while at the same time not allowing himself to feel the full emotional impact of his experience.

He dealt with loss without protest. He didn't complain when his mother abandoned him to pursue her passion for anthropology on far-flung expeditions, or when she removed him from the home of his stepfather in Jakarta when he was ten. Instead, Obama focused on surviving by getting along. He pursued inclusion relentlessly, even when circumstances repeatedly cast him in the role of the outsider.

It's not an accident that one of the strategies he developed to maintain his membership in groups was to keep his mouth shut. Indeed, his autobiographies show that he was repeatedly taught as a child to keep his feelings to himself. His stepfather Lolo told him regularly never to complain if he were hurt or in trouble. His high school basketball teammates reinforced that message some years later. And so by keeping careful and cautious watch of his surroundings, he learned to be at home in different groups, easily shifting from one to the other.

This kind of dissociation is at the core of some his greatest political strengths. It helped him become intellectually nimble, and acutely alert to his surroundings. It's only by adapting this kind of psychic position his entire life that Obama was able to easily joke at the White House Correspondents Dinner while knowing there was an active mission underway to kill Osama bin Laden.

But assuming this perpetually peripheral role has also taken a lasting toll. The anxiety of not belonging has grown to occupy an ever-greater part of his psyche. He writes in Dreams From My Father that when, as an adult, he was walking through the most dangerous parts of Chicago late at night, the greatest fear he had was the fear of not belonging. But now there is a new tension, between his need to belong and the demands of standing up for what he believes. The former is driven by his related fears of not belonging and being abandoned; the latter carries the risk of alienating others irrevocably. [...] [Read the full article]

Intraspec.ca : Tools for Personal Development — Readings, writings and research on matters of health and well-being.
Richard Dagan.  2002-2012.  A not-for-profit site.

Creative Commons License

All site content, except where otherwise noted, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
Exceptions, where copyright resides with the original author or current holder thereof, include all excerpted text and third-party images provided herein.
All such material is presented in accord with fair dealing and fair use, fully cited, and hyperlinked to source whenever possible. Logos and trademarks are the property of their respective owners. Country flags courtesy ConveyThis. Translation service courtesy Google.com. For privacy and legal notices, see About.

Lunarpages.com Web Hosting Interrobang: our pick for Punctuation Mark of the Year 2012, year of the Water Dragon.