The Wounded Healer: A Symbolism Dated to the 1980S

The astrological reading of Chiron as the wounded healer was developed almost entirely in the decade after the discovery, most influentially by Melanie Reinhart and by the writers around the Centre for Psychological Astrology, and it draws on the myth of the centaur Chiron, the teacher of Asclepius and Achilles, who was accidentally struck by a poisoned arrow and, being immortal, could neither heal nor die of the wound until he surrendered his immortality. The reading has become widespread in modern practice: Chiron's natal position is taken to mark a persistent wound that becomes the source of a capacity to help others. The point that must be made plainly is the date. This is a symbolism constructed in the late twentieth century from the mythological name a discoverer chose, and it has no history before 1977. It may still be found useful; it is not ancient.

The Centre for Psychological Astrology, founded in London in the early 1980s by Liz Greene and Howard Sasportas, was the principal institutional home for the wounded-healer symbolism's early development, blending Jungian psychology with astrological technique in a way that shaped a great deal of the psychologically-oriented astrology practised since; Greene's own writing on Chiron and related archetypal material extended the theme well beyond the strictly wounded-healer reading into a broader vocabulary of core wound and vocation that later astrologers apply to other points in the chart by analogy.