Sun squaring the Moon symbolizes a fundamental conflict between the nurturing womb and the drive for independence, the conscious ego, and the unconscious, connectedness, and individuality and the masculine and feminine sides of the psyche. This conflict may be a source of anxiety, difficulty or dysfunction for you, or it may provide a creative tension that causes you to rise above and overcome the conflict.
At one level, you may feel that your identity and individuality are compromised by forces that are trying to control and contain you. These forces are represented by your family (particularly your mother), by the traditions and behavioral expectations of your culture and society and/or by the mundane and routine pattern of your life. You may feel the need to fight against and break free of conditioned responses, emotions, habits and behavior patterns. This can lead to rejection of those symbols of the ever-present unconscious—family, the past, social rules of conformity, etc.
Particularly if you are male, a poor relationship with your mother may be generalized to affect your relationships with [other] women and with the feminine side of your own psyche. This may psychologically force you to break new ground, seeking authenticity as an individual by freeing yourself from the irrational stereotypes that are held by the majority of people.
Nevertheless, you will find it very difficult to completely cast off the bonds of family, the past and your culture and you may carry a lifelong feeling of being haunted by these ghosts. You may feel that you are constantly fighting a battle for your own independence against those forces that have conditioned you in the past. Alternatively, those forces may be so strong as to overwhelm any independence of spirit on the part of you.
ou may remain a creature of your conditioning and fail to develop an authentic personality. In this case, you may secretly wish to throw off the bondage of your conditioning and may inwardly experience guilt and shame at your weakness in not asserting your identity rather than conforming to what is expected of you. Dysfunctional manifestations of this frustration will surely erupt, including pettiness, emotional problems, and backbiting.
At another level, this aspect symbolizes a conflict between your emotions and your rational sense of being. How you have conceptualized your identity is foreign to and in conflict with your emotional make-up. Emotions may be disturbing or may interfere with the way in which you wish to think about yourself. You may feel isolated from your emotions as if they are not really a part of you, and when they occur (or as likely as not, erupt) they are problematic.
One response to this is that you may build a psychological wall around your emotions and not recognize them. Another response is that you may see your emotions as an object, something to be controlled. Inner or open emotional turmoil is another possible manifestation, with you being constantly “at war with yourself” in a struggle between “head and heart” or between the “stout heart” (the Sun) and the “secret heart” (the Moon).
Another dynamic that may be associated with your rejection of emotion could be that you feel that you have been (or are) unnurtured, particularly as a child. Feelings of rejection may have been experienced, and these feelings may have been so painful that you shut down your emotions. The challenge for you is for you to reclaim your emotions. You must realize that emotions are a part of your identity, restructuring your self-concept to incorporate them. At the same time, you must nurture your neglected emotional body, which provides an opportunity to recast your emotional patterns in a more positive mode.
Finally, the square sometimes symbolizes the phenomenon of being blindsided. With Sun square the Moon, you may experience the sudden negative consequences of your emotions (or the emotional outburst of another).
You may also be blindsided by family members or by your past. Such incidents are generally a symptom of your having ignored or suppressed the conflict that is symbolized by the Sun squaring the Moon.
The transcendent potential of Sun squares the Moon is realized when, as part of the process of authenticating your self-identity, you address the conflicts symbolized by the Sun-Moon square. You have nourished your emotional body and you have become a strong, loving emotional being. You have rediscovered what is beneficial and wholesome about the past, traditions and family life. Realizing that your personality contains the sum of multiple cultural and family influences, you have recognized your Real identity as being independent of and beyond such conditioning. Nevertheless, you value and cherish your heritage. Through long and hard struggle, you have freed yourself from response-conditioning, yet humbly walk along the pathways of routine and conformity. You have ended the conflict within yourself between the masculine and feminine polarities by rising above duality into unity.
You have isolated your ego-identity from your greater self. In particular, you have divorced yourself from your feminine/emotional side and feel threatened by its energies. You feel that there are forces that would control you and these need to be opposed and controlled themselves. Thus, in constantly being focused on your conflict with the feminine/unconscious or its manifestations, you are indeed controlled. Your insecurity enslaves you. You are chained to your fear of emotion so that you are always trying to control your emotions or are simply blocking them out.
You live in an emotional straightjacket. You are constantly trying to free yourself from the influence of your mother or family in general. Your actions and attitudes are dictated by this rebellion. You are constantly fighting routine and conformist behavior-conditioning and consequently, do not settle down and cannot stabilize your life. You may be prone to impulsive and obsessive behavior as you passionately try to prove your independence. The subconscious power that is being suppressed within you will almost certainly manifest in negative ways, such as open conflict with family, tradition, societal expectations or domestic duties and as emotional outbursts, excessive moodiness, compulsive fears or obsessive behavior.