ABSTRACT
The Rosarium pictures describe the union of opposites. The word Rosary does not mean a string of prayer beads but a rose garden, a popular medieval metaphor for any collection of wise sayings. The Rosarium story is a romance between opposites, a King and Queen: representing father, Animus and consciousness; and mother, Anima and the unconscious. It is like reaching the Rosarium picture, the naked truth but never getting into the bath or having intercourse. Whilst valuing psychoanalytic theory, which Robert probably understood better than Dale Mathers, Mathers felt he needed a more symbolic way to theorize his dilemma. The Rosarium pictures gave him a reflective space. It was not that, over eight years, the stages unfolded chronologically several might be present in a single session. The Rosarium pictures are symbolic, not concretizations. Using them helped him out of concretizing the form a transferential coniunctio could take.
