Script Analysis and Change in the Rosarium Philosophorum

Abstract

Eric Berne (1972/1992) wrote that one aim of script analysis is to free people “so that they can open the garden of their aspirations to the world” (p. 131). Such aspirations were conceptualized as a derivative of physis, the growth force of nature that works against the limiting forces of the script. This “opening” brings awareness of the “moving self (p. 248) and the selfs many ego states. The author argues that this process is similar to what Jung called” individuation” (Jung, 1946/1969a, p. 158). Jung believed this psychic process was allegorized in the ancient alchemical text of the Rosarium Philosophorum, which he used to describe his” psychology of the transference” (Jung, 1946/ 1998). This article compares the metapsychology of transactional analysis with the different stages of the Rosarium and illustrates their coincidence with the use of a case vignette. The article concludes that there are curious parallels, giving transactional analysis an archetypal and transpersonal dimension perhaps not fully appreciated by the psychotherapy community.

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