The Instrument of Self-Reflection: Tarot's Unknown Truths

Photo by petr sidorov on Unsplash

In the professional world, people like to be known for their rationality, as leaders with five year plans and quarterly goals. Quietly, though, they are drawn toward practices that no spreadsheet can hold. To some, this looks like meditation, astrology or journaling, finding sense through holistic means, and to others, more commonly now – through tarot. Is tarot more than the old caricature of the fortune-teller? Research points to the evolution of the ethereal into something more tangible; tarot as an instrument for self-reflection. When the real challenge is facing oneself, the future is irrelevant. What’s required is a way to look inward.

Recent psychological analysis, found in Dr. Yiu Kwong Au-Yeung’s paper, 2025, argues that the power of tarot does not stem from mysticism, but rather, it comes from ambiguity. It works because humans cannot help projecting meaning onto images, discovering that in this projection, the truths that emerge are the ones that were not intended to be spoken aloud. Tarot forms the mirror; the honest, profoundly uncomfortable one.

Many dismiss tarot as superstition; something between fantasy and fraud. But people using it today are not searching for a prophecy, they’re searching for perspective. The function of the tarot card becomes a projective psychological test. The card does not tell someone who they are, but instead, that person tells themselves, using the card as a prompt. The unconscious leaks out in the interpretation, with symbolism evoking memories, hopes, fears and conflict. It allows a structured narrative to be created out of chaotic mind, without even being aware of it.

This may be why tarot is surely becoming a ritual for self-awareness, everywhere from coaching spaces to therapeutic settings, inviting something that is rarely allowed in the usual fast paced lifestyles; a long, curious pause.

The issue professionals face is the desire for control, which is often a spanner in the works of introspection. Tarot undermines that control. It asks us to set predictability aside and simply notice. The future cannot be managed by thinking hard enough, it comes from allowing it to occur. It opens doors that cannot be closed; realising that promotions being chased are laced in insecurity, not ambition, and the burnout that’s being normalised is an internal refusal to confront one’s own limits. Tarot does not offer answers, it gives access to the parts of the psyche being ignored while the professional persona drives the show… and this is exactly why it’s so attractive.

Within everyone is a quiet rebellion against rationalism, and symbolic practices such as tarot surge during times of uncertainty, with people desperate for meaning when it’s not provided by their institutions. When work is isolating, or the mental health systems are failing, people turn to tarot, not with the rhetoric of being anti-science or anti-logic, but to feed their psyche, rebelling against the rational things that let them down.

Humans are not machines, the complexity of the mind requires an eclectic mix of the tangible and elusive. Symbolic systems provide something that logic doesn’t; a language for what can be felt but not yet articulated. In so many cultures, the stigmatisation of mental health is still so prevalent, and tarot can provide a safe way to emotionally explore.  In some ironic twist, the reason so many people dismiss tarot, that it's ‘just symbolism’, is exactly the reason it works. A symbol evokes more than can be explained, it bypasses defences and it tells the truth.

In the modern life as it is, there is always the risk of a commercial trap; everything must be commodified, tarot included. The danger does not lie in the rising popularity of tarot, but that it gets stripped of its depth, being used as content; soothing instead of challenging. The real value behind using tarot only comes from confrontation and revelation, and these things cannot be bought or sold.  

It is not down to belief in magic, or acceptance of the mystical, it is the entrusting of the questions that need to be asked that lead to introspection. Whether through tarot or other reflective practice, being able to look into the mirror honestly is the difference between stagnation and transformation.

From the perspective of depth psychology, human consciousness is the negotiation between what a person knows about themselves verses what they refuse to know; the conscious verses the shadow. Tarot, when stripped of its superstition, acts as a portal to the unconscious; the truth that is told through the card through different people’s perspectives about themselves. The cards are not supernatural forces, but psychological ones, representing the parts of the self that have been hidden, triggered by the meaning found in the draws. The symbols work through speaking the language of the psyche, the irrational, the dreams, the metaphors. The interpretation of a card is not a discovery of fate, it is a decoding of the parts of the self that are being ignored, an invitation to begin that conversation. The conversation with the part that has been waiting for attention for a long time.

The full paper is published in the Global Review of Humanities Arts and Society, find the link here: (PDF) The Mirror, Not the Crystal Ball: A Psychological Analysis of Tarot as a Self-Reflection Tool

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