Jun 27, 2026

Tarot of the Unconscious

Uncovering the Hidden Link Between Psychoanalysis and the Cards

Aliza Einhorn

Hosted by Christopher Russell

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Summary

I spoke with author Aliza Einhorn about her new book Tarot of the Unconscious: Uncovering the Hidden Link Between Psychoanalysis and the Cards (Weiser Books, 2026) United States: Red Wheel Weiser. Aliza Einhorn is a Psychoanalyst in training at the Center for Modern Psychoanalytic Studies in New York City. She's a graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop and a longtime tarot reader, tarot teacher, and astrologer.

“My book is a method” Einhorn tells me. The method is free association. This is the link to psychoanalysis. Einhorn wants us to free associate to the cards as one free associates to dream imagery.

“Let’s break it down. In any given Tarot card, as in a dream, there are images, visual details (what Freud might call the manifest meaning), and then there are the hidden meanings beneath those images (what Freud might call the latent meaning), which we only discover after we analyze it.” (p.44)

She is enthusiastic about the “infinite” meanings of the cards. In Einhorn’s world Card 7, The Chariot, is on Freud’s royal road to the unconscious. While Tarot books have historically engaged with Jungian though, Einhorn’s book is a “love letter to Freud.”

One of the book's most striking ideas is that people develop a transference to their deck — that how you treat your cards mirrors relational patterns from your past. In this interview we discussed an approach to transference adopted by Modern Psychoanalysis and referenced a foundational paper on countertransference. Listeners interested in the specifics of this approach to transference can find it here Clevans, E. L. (1983) On Countertransference. Modern Psychoanalysis 8:129-130.

Einhorn concludes “if there’s one thing I want to teach you in this book, one thing I hope you will remember, it’s that your unconscious is your friend. It’s good to get to know it.”

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Christopher Russell

Christopher Russell is a psychoanalyst working with individuals and groups. He is a member of the faculty at the Center for Modern Psychoanalytic Studies; a licensure qualifying institute in New York. CMPS is also the New York campus for the Boston Graduate School of Psychoanalysis. BGSP is the only accredited, independent graduate school of psychoanalysis in the country. Christopher is primarily interested in new books about Sandor Ferenczi and Hyman Spotnitz.

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