Liminality enters the depth-psychology corpus primarily through Victor Turner’s anthropological reformulation of Arnold van Gennep’s tripartite rite-of-passage schema, and from there migrates into Jungian and psychotherapeutic frameworks as an indispensable category for theorizing psychological transformation. Turner’s foundational articulation — that liminal entities are ‘neither here nor there; betwixt and between’ the classifications of structured social life — furnishes the conceptual grammar through which later writers, notably Murray Stein, map the middle phase of individuation as a dissolution of established hierarchies prior to re-constellation. Stein extends Turner’s structural anthropology into an explicitly depth-psychological register, reading the pupal stage of metamorphosis as the biological analogue of liminality’s characteristic loss of reference points. Bernadetta Janusz and Maciej Walkiewicz further operationalize the concept within life-course psychology and clinical work, identifying liminality as the constitutive moment of deconstruction and integration that governs transgression into new developmental phases. A productive tension runs throughout this literature between liminality as bounded ritual episode — with prescribed entry, ordeal, and reaggregation — and liminality as extended historical or existential condition characterizing entire epochs or individual lives. The concept’s persistent association with communitas, anti-structure, ambiguity, and symbolic death marks it as one of the more generative points of contact between social anthropology and the psychology of transformation.
Liminal entities are neither here nor there; they are betwixt and between the positions assigned and arrayed by law, custom, convention, and ceremonial.
Turner’s canonical definition establishes liminality as a state of ontological ambiguity in which persons elude the classificatory networks that normally anchor social identity.
, The Ritual Process Structure and Anti-Structure, 1966thesis
Let us now, rather in the fashion of Lévi-Strauss, express the difference between the properties of liminality and those of the status system in terms of a series of binary oppositions.
Turner systematizes liminality against the status system through a comprehensive set of binary contrasts — transition/state, communitas/structure, equality/inequality — making explicit its anti-structural logic.
, The Ritual Process Structure and Anti-Structure, 1966thesis
Here liminality becomes central and he employs prefixes attached to the adjective ‘liminal’ to indicate the peripheral position of structure.
Turner reconstructs van Gennep’s spatial and temporal vocabulary to demonstrate that liminality, far from being marginal to ritual, is the phase in which normal structural norms are suspended and re-created.
, The Ritual Process Structure and Anti-Structure, 1966thesis
In liminality, a person feels at a loss for steady points of reference. When the established hierarchies of the past have dissolved and before new images and
Stein translates Turner’s anthropological category into depth-psychological language, identifying liminality as the middle phase of individuation in which old structures have dissolved but new ones have not yet consolidated.
, Transformation Emergence of the Self (Volume 7) (Carolyn, 1998thesis
Liminality is the name for our collective experience during most of this passing century… the free experimentation with lifestyle, marriage, family patterns, and sexuality that is inherent in deep liminality.
Stein expands the concept from ritual episode to historical epoch, diagnosing modernity itself as a condition of sustained cultural liminality whose new patterns of wholeness remain emergent.
, Transformation Emergence of the Self (Volume 7) (Carolyn, 1998thesis
Liminality implies that the high could not be high unless the low existed, and he who is high must experience what it is like to be low.
Turner argues that the liminal phase functions dialectically to make structural hierarchy possible by requiring those of high status to undergo an experience of lowness that tempers future incumbency.
, 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, through Ndembu installation rites, that sexual continence symbolically enacts liminality’s defining property of structural undifferentiation.
, The Ritual Process Structure and Anti-Structure, 1966supporting
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 identifies liminality and structural marginality as the shared generative conditions from which ideological communitas and universal ethical ideals consistently arise across cultures.
, The Ritual Process Structure and Anti-Structure, 1966supporting
liminality: deconstruction, integration… The structural–functional analysis of empirical studies of physical changes, changing roles in society, and key changes in the area of mental and physical health.
Janusz and Walkiewicz operationalize liminality as the central transformative mechanism in life-course transitions — including illness, role change, and mourning — identifying deconstruction and integration as its defining functional processes.
, The Rites of Passage Framework as a Matrix of Transgression Processes in the Life Course, 2018supporting
Some religions resemble the liminality of status elevation: They emphasize humility, patience, and the unimportance of distinctions of status, property, age, sex, and other natural and cultural differentiae.
Turner extends the distinction between liminal elevation and liminal reversal into comparative religion, arguing that world religions in periods of rapid change themselves exhibit structurally liminal attributes.
, The Ritual Process Structure and Anti-Structure, 1966supporting
All attributes that distinguish categories and groups in the structured social order are here in abeyance; the neophytes are merely entities in transition, as yet without place or position.
Turner demonstrates that liminal neophytes are symbolically stripped of all structural markers, rendering them temporarily undifferentiated entities subject to communal authority and sacred instruction.
, The Ritual Process Structure and Anti-Structure, 1966supporting
Ambiguity need not by now surprise us, for it is a property of all centrally liminal processes and institutions.
Turner argues that ambiguity is not an accidental feature but the constitutive property of all genuinely liminal processes, making the simultaneous presence of antithetical functions structurally predictable.
, 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 document the clinical applicability of liminality to experiences of illness, dying, and crisis intervention, showing that the structural collapse of prior adaptive patterns defines entry into the liminal state.
, The Rites of Passage Framework as a Matrix of Transgression Processes in the Life Course, 2018supporting
The ‘essential We’ has a liminal character, since perdurance implies in
Turner connects Buber’s concept of the ‘essential We’ to liminality, treating genuine communal relationship as inherently transient and threshold-bound rather than permanent.
, The Ritual Process Structure and Anti-Structure, 1966aside
Being in the intermediate realm of imagination can also be compared to what athletes experience when they are ‘in the zone.’ There is a relaxed but totally focused flow from one thing to another.
McNiff invokes an implicitly liminal ‘middle realm’ of imagination as the creative space that accepts contradictory principles and enables their integration, paralleling the threshold function of liminality without using the term explicitly.
, Art Heals: How Creativity Cures the Soul, 2004aside