Anti Structure

he called the co-occurrence of these motives “structure” and “anti-structure”; and a reentry into the everyday world. Of these three moves, the most important for Turner’s critical and descriptive purposes was the mimetic phase

This passage identifies Turner’s coinage of ‘anti-structure’ as the term for the liminal phase’s simultaneous elaboration and challenge of everyday social structures, naming the mimetic-liminal encounter as the conceptual core of his entire framework.

Victor Turner, Victor Witter Turner, The Ritual Process Structure and Anti-Structure, 1966thesis

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Ritual Structure and Anti-Structure Victor Turner with a Foreword by Roger D. Abrahams

This is the title and bibliographic identification of Turner’s foundational monograph, the primary source in the corpus for the anti-structure concept.

Victor Turner, Victor Witter Turner, The Ritual Process Structure and Anti-Structure, 1966thesis

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this growth towards wholeness necessarily involves a creative relationship between the dark instinctual side of man’s nature and the light side represented by the conscious mind

Neumann’s argument that individuation requires engaging the dark, instinctual dimension of the psyche resonates structurally with the anti-structure dynamic as a necessary counterpart to conscious order.

Neumann, Erich, Depth Psychology and a New Ethic, 1949supporting

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integration or ‘wholeness’ is initially experienced as the worst thing imaginable… Their very survival as cohesive ‘selves’ has depended upon primitive dissociative operations which resist integration of the trauma

Kalsched describes how the psyche’s defensive dismantling of ordinary ego-structure in trauma mirrors the anti-structural dissolution Turner identifies in ritual liminality, though here it operates pathologically rather than transformatively.

Kalsched, Donald, The Inner World of Trauma: Archetypal Defences of the Personal Spirit, 1996supporting

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separation/individuation is another story. This requires aggression and, if aggression is missing in the ego, then it involves a confrontation with aggression coming from the archetypal level of the unconscious.

The separation-from-structure theme in individuation is mapped onto the fairy-tale motif of the Lindworm, gesturing toward the anti-structural threshold that must be crossed for development to proceed.

Kalsched, Donald, The Inner World of Trauma: Archetypal Defences of the Personal Spirit, 1996aside

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