The concept of liminality enters the depth-psychology corpus principally through Victor Turner’s elaboration of Arnold van Gennep’s tripartite schema of rites of passage, yet its resonance extends well beyond ritual ethnography into clinical, developmental, and psychotherapeutic registers. Turner’s foundational formulation — that liminal entities are ‘betwixt and between,’ eluding the classificatory networks that ordinarily anchor persons within social structure — establishes the term’s conceptual gravity: liminality is not mere transition but a condition of productive indeterminacy in which ordinary categories dissolve and new potentials emerge. The term names both a structural position (the middle phase between separation and reaggregation) and an experiential quality — one saturated with ambiguity, symbolic richness, and proximity to power. Turner systematically contrasts liminality with the status system, generating a dense series of binary oppositions that illuminate what ordinary structure suppresses. Murray Stein imports the concept into depth-psychological work on midlife transformation, aligning it with the pupal stage of metamorphosis and the therapeutic middle phase where prior hierarchies have dissolved but new ones are not yet consolidated. Clinical researchers extend the framework further: Janusz and Walkiewicz apply it to illness trajectories and family life-cycle disruptions, noting that pathology may arise when persons cannot exit the liminal position. The central tension across these voices concerns duration and resolution — whether liminality is a transient generative threshold or a chronic state of structural collapse.
Liminal entities are neither here nor there; they are betwixt and between the positions assigned and arrayed by law, custom, convention, and ceremonial.
Turner delivers the canonical definition of liminality as radical indeterminacy — a condition in which persons elude all cultural classification and occupy an ambiguous threshold between socially assigned positions.
, The Ritual Process Structure and Anti-Structure, 1966thesis
The powers that shape the neophytes in liminality for the incumbency of new status are felt, in rites all over the world, to be more than human powers.
Turner argues that liminality is structurally opposed to the status system through a set of binary discriminations, and that the transformative forces operating within it are experienced as superhuman.
, The Ritual Process Structure and Anti-Structure, 1966thesis
this one — the middle one — as liminality. It transpires ‘betwixt and between’ the more fixed structures of normal life. In liminality, a person feels at a loss for steady points of reference.
Stein transposes Turner’s anthropological concept into depth-psychological and psychotherapeutic discourse, identifying liminality as the disorienting middle phase of personal transformation in which prior structures have dissolved and new ones have not yet formed.
, Transformation Emergence of the Self (Volume 7) (Carolyn, 1998thesis
liminality becomes central and he employs prefixes attached to the adjective ‘liminal’ to indicate the peripheral position of structure.
Turner traces van Gennep’s spatial and temporal terminology — preliminal, liminal, postliminal — showing how liminality marks the suspension of normative behavioral and symbolic constraints.
, The Ritual Process Structure and Anti-Structure, 1966thesis
a fairly regular connection is maintained between liminality, structural inferiority, lowermost status, and structural outsiderhood on the one hand, and, on the other, such universal human values as peace and harmony between all men.
Turner links liminality systematically to structural inferiority and outsiderhood, arguing that both positions share an affiliation with universal communitarian values that transcend hierarchical structure.
, The Ritual Process Structure and Anti-Structure, 1966thesis
Francis appears quite deliberately to be compelling the friars to inhabit the fringes and interstices of the social structure of his time, and to keep them in a permanently liminal state.
Turner extends liminality from ritual transition to a deliberately maintained institutional condition, arguing that Francis of Assisi institutionalized permanent liminality as the optimal precondition for communitas.
, The Ritual Process Structure and Anti-Structure, 1966supporting
such ambiguity need not by now surprise us, for it is a property of all centrally liminal processes and institutions.
Turner identifies ambiguity as a defining structural property of liminality itself, not merely of specific ritual content, and shows how this ambiguity operates differently across rites of elevation and reversal.
, The Ritual Process Structure and Anti-Structure, 1966supporting
some religions resemble the liminality of status elevation: They emphasize humility, patience, and the unimportance of distinctions of status, property, age, sex.
Turner extrapolates the liminal logic of ritual into comparative religion, distinguishing between religions that model the liminality of elevation and those that model the liminality of reversal.
, The Ritual Process Structure and Anti-Structure, 1966supporting
The undifferentiated character of liminality is reflected by the discontinuance of sexual relations and the absence of marked sexual polarity.
Turner demonstrates that liminality’s structural undifferentiation extends to the suspension of sexual distinctions, using Ndembu installation rites to show how sexual continence marks the liminal phase.
, The Ritual Process Structure and Anti-Structure, 1966supporting
neophytes in the liminal phase of ritual, subjugated autochthones, small nations, court jesters, holy mendicants, good Samaritans, millenarian movements.
Turner proposes a unified hypothesis linking structurally diverse phenomena — from ritual neophytes to political minorities — under the shared attribute of liminality and structural inferiority.
, The Ritual Process Structure and Anti-Structure, 1966supporting
disengagement from an established rhythm of life and entrance into a liminal state when experiencing dying and mourning that have introduced the structural collapse of previous state.
Janusz and Walkiewicz apply the liminal framework to clinical life-course transitions — illness, dying, mourning — arguing that these events produce structural collapse analogous to the ritual liminal phase.
, The Rites of Passage Framework as a Matrix of Transgression Processes in the Life Course, 2018supporting
the liminal religious condition they seek to bring about, in which their followers are withdrawn from the world, has close affinities with that found in the liminality of seclusion in tribal life-crisis rites.
Turner identifies the liminal religious condition sought by high-status founders of world religions as structurally homologous with tribal life-crisis seclusion, reinforcing the cross-cultural generality of the concept.
, The Ritual Process Structure and Anti-Structure, 1966supporting
Enduring and integrating contradictory feelings are the way of overcoming this liminal position.
Janusz and Walkiewicz locate the psychological work of the liminal position in the integration of contradictory affects, drawing a parallel between ritual symbolism and the therapeutic process of overcoming crisis.
, The Rites of Passage Framework as a Matrix of Transgression Processes in the Life Course, 2018supporting
those symbols of liminality that indicate the structural invisibility of novices undergoing life-crisis rituals — how, for example, they are secluded from the spheres of everyday life.
Turner catalogs the symbolic apparatus of liminality — seclusion, disguise, silence — as mechanisms that enact the structural invisibility of persons undergoing life-crisis transition.
, The Ritual Process Structure and Anti-Structure, 1966supporting
the ‘essential We’ has a liminal character, since perdurance implies in
Turner draws on Buber’s concept of the ‘essential We’ to characterize communitas as inherently liminal — a transient mode of genuine intersubjective relation that cannot be institutionalized without losing its quality.
, The Ritual Process Structure and Anti-Structure, 1966supporting
remaining ‘frozen’ in a particular phase of the life cycle that does not correspond to socio-cultural norms leads to the emergence of psychopathological symptoms.
Janusz and Walkiewicz identify pathological stasis in the liminal phase — the inability to progress through transition — as a generator of psychopathological symptoms across multiple clinical domains.
, The Rites of Passage Framework as a Matrix of Transgression Processes in the Life Course, 2018supporting
liminality is not the only cultural manifestation of communitas. In most societies, there are other areas of manifestation to be readily recognized by the symbols that cluster around them.
Turner clarifies that liminality is one among several cultural loci of communitas, and that the ‘powers of the weak’ represent an analogous domain of sacred potential within stable structures.
, The Ritual Process Structure and Anti-Structure, 1966supporting
and liminality, 95 liminality and low status, 125-130
The index entry confirms the systematic linkage Turner draws between liminality, communitas, and low status as interlocking conceptual nodes throughout the text.
, The Ritual Process Structure and Anti-Structure, 1966aside