Pluto in the 4th House/ Cancer (6)

Pluto in the 4th House/ Cancer

Returning to our image of the Zodiacal cycle mirroring the phases of childhood development, we arrive at the 4th archetype: Cancer/4th house. In the 3rd house/Gemini phase of development we see the desire to learn about the environment and with it the capacity for intellectual classification and language. We may conceptualize this process as the initializing of the physical-etheric body (Aries), the instinctive and emotional body (Taurus) and the mental body (Gemini), all of which coalesce in the formation of the ego, understood here to mean the conscious emotional body, symbolized by Cancer and the 4th house. It is with the development of the ego in Cancer that the personality becomes conscious of its surroundings in a more integrative fashion: my family, my society and my formative experiences. This is the central lens from which the individual then focuses on the world.

The Cancer archetype is cardinal. Pluto in any cardinal house or sign indicates the start of a new cycle. The cardinal sign Aries represents birth, a completely new experience in being. In Cancer and the 4th house the new cycle relates to the experience of emotional security. The soul intention here is to generate security in response to excessive attachment to external sources of security such as lovers, parents and family, work or ideological concerns. True happiness and contentment are impossible to achieve when there is excessive attachment to centers of meaning outside of the self. So the intention here is to come into right relationship with nurturing relationships of a familial nature.

With this being the beginning of a new cycle, likely as not, the individual has not yet grasped the evolutionary intention and many will be born into a family situation wherein one or both parents fundamentally misunderstand the true nature of the Pluto in Cancer/4th house individual. There may be some kind of traumatic shock or abuse, or the family may simply fail to meet the basic needs of the child. All of these experiences effectively cause this individual to rely on their own emotional resources from a very young age. As an infant one is naturally dependent on parental figures. The length of time the human infant is dependent on the parents is long relative to other mammals. As such the impact of emotional shocks or failures of care during early development is profound, forcing the person into a long-term sensitivity about the nature of their emotional body and the way in which they constitute their sense of security.

This placement may indicate a situation wherein one or both parents have complicated karmic back-stories with the 4th house Pluto individual, perhaps in cycles of letting each other down or through some kind of collective (familial, tribal) event in which the family were lost to each other, thereby fostering an ongoing unconscious insecurity. Such memories and the resultant stress can lead to a childhood situation in which compulsive emotional patterns of behavior are the norm, because difficult prior-life associations and present-life emotional transferences are recycled. The specifics of such karmic dynamics can be found by studying the chart of the 4th house Pluto individual alongside the chart of one or both of the parents. In addition, much can be learned by exploring the subjective dimensions of the early childhood experience and the existing karma can be intuited via the parent-child relations in early life.

I have found that the early childhood experiences which show up as transference dynamics in later intimate relationships (with best friends, lovers, therapists) contain the keys to prior-life dynamics. The strong feelings that are elicited from close adult relationships hold the key to intense childhood feelings, which if understood with a certain openness and depth lead directly back to the experiential level of prior-life dynamics.

This level of insight is of critical importance with the Pluto in Cancer/4th house person as they will likely develop emotional problems to the extent that their fundamental emotional needs were not met during childhood. Intense emotional memories from prior lives are evoked upon incarnating into this life which then permeate this person’s childhood like a mist. These feelings can follow the individual into adulthood until the evolutionary intention of learning to meet those needs in oneself is addressed.

The nature of the prior-life wounding can be so intense as to leave an emotional void in this person that is near-impossible to fill even if the parent is relatively loving or adjusted. In such cases the simple fact that the parent might have other concerns (e.g. working long hours, an ill relative to care for) might trigger unresolved feelings related to prior-life memories of abandonment and familial destruction.

The Pluto complex always contains the potential to manifest compulsively or as a cyclic power struggle. At times the Pluto in Cancer/4th house person has a parent who secretly or overtly manipulates them or seeks to dominate them in order to satisfy their own unmet childhood needs. This narcissistic wounding can form the basis for cycles of abuse that grow within the family as the abused person adopts the language of abuse as synonymous with love and family. They have repetitively experienced that familiar figures hurt them and as such when they have their own family they might express their love through the same abusive patterns that were modeled for them, perpetuating the cycle. Inevitably such cycles can cause tremendous pain and personal disillusionment and the individual can come to a place where they feel powerless to do anything to change. The inner guilt for doing to others what felt so terrible to themselves can contribute to despair.

For the Pluto in Cancer/4th house individual who has not had their childhood needs met, the potential exists for them to enter adult relationships with those same displaced needs, attracting partners onto whom they unconsciously project their unmet childhood needs. They can also attract partners who mirror back to them the same unsuccessful parental responses, re-traumatizing themselves over and over. Thus they are forced via the evolutionary impulse to look within for the source of security, to find the inner emotional centre of their identity. In fact such cycles of behavior will repeat over and over until the removal of external dependencies reaches a critical mass and they experience themselves in a new light.

This process of uncovering the roots behind problematic relationship dynamics is a staple of therapeutic work and it almost always involves having to understand the way the child learned to love and seeing how that same child is involved in seemingly adult relationships. This is true of a number of signatures, not just Pluto in the 4th house or Cancer. We might see this kind of dynamic involving planets in the 4th house square planets in the 7th house or their rulers, or aspects to the Moon, etc.

The archetypal square between the 4th house and the 7th represents the conflict between family of origin and one’s partners. This can be enacted on a literal level (mother does not think girlfriend good enough) or through psychological identification with the dysfunctional parental dynamics. The critical issue with the 4th house Pluto is that the underlying theme of the internal sourcing of one’s emotional security applies across the board and at a high level of intensity.

Pluto in relationship to the Moon in any aspect always leads to an intensification of the moods and the potential for emotional manipulation or acting out: tantrums, emotional withdrawal, feigning illness or emotional crisis used to gain attention. In some cases the person will create genuine illness or manifestations of extremity via self-harm or suicidal behavior in order to express their extreme frustration or to illicit the extreme response they fantasize would allay such frustration.

Another potential reaction to the extremity of emotional range is denial. The prior emotional shocks may have been so hurtful that the person learns to shut down prior to any feeling or natural connection arising with the idea that it is better to risk no contact than one in which the outcome is profound disappointment or let down. Such a reaction creates a conflict between the natural sensitivity, vulnerability and empathic capacity of this placement and the rigid or dissociative stance that they are adopting in order to control their powerful feelings.

The by-product of this conflict can be behaviors whereby the person uses attack as the best form of defense. They might learn to manipulate or control others, pushing them to their emotional limits or unconsciously seeking their emotional vulnerabilities in order to exploit them, and by so doing protect their own. Or they might take the approach of becoming invaluable to another person by discovering and exploiting the other person’s weakness, acting as the de facto counselor (or caretaker) without revealing their own vulnerability. Then they can be emotionally significant to another person without risk of being overexposed or having their own dynamics revealed. This close emotional context with others can become its own form of protectionism, denying the person’s deepest feelings while establishing seemingly irreplaceable significance in the emotional lives of others.

Pluto in astrology (1)
Pluto in astrology (2) Pluto complex
Pluto in the 1st House/Aries (3)
Pluto in the 2nd House/ Taurus (4)
Pluto in the 3rd House/Gemini (5)
Pluto in the 4th House/ Cancer (6)