The rite de passage — Arnold van Gennep’s tripartite schema of separation, liminality, and reaggregation — occupies a generative position across the depth-psychology corpus, functioning simultaneously as ethnographic datum, structural model, and psychological metaphor. Victor Turner’s elaborations in The Ritual Process remain the most architecturally rigorous treatments, tracing how the liminal phase suspends structural identities and opens the neophyte to communitas, that undifferentiated human bond underlying all social order. Jane Ellen Harrison draws on van Gennep explicitly to illuminate Greek mystery religion, arguing that myths of the hidden or slain kouros encode adolescent initiation rites of the deepest civic significance. Mircea Eliade reads the rite cosmologically: initiatory death-and-rebirth is not merely social transit but an ontological recapitulation of the cosmos. Jungian voices — Henderson in Man and His Symbols, Hollis in Under Saturn’s Shadow, Jung himself in The Symbolic Life — transpose the schema inward, treating the rite of passage as the external correlate of psychological individuation, and lamenting modernity’s failure to provide adequate transitional structures for men in particular. Janusz and Walkiewicz extend the framework clinically, mapping its three phases onto therapeutic transformation and life-course transgression. Across these voices, the central tension is whether the rite is primarily a social mechanism for reproducing structure or a genuinely transformative ordeal that, by dissolving structure, generates something new.
This work shows the contribution of concept of rites of passage and theory of liminality to the understanding of transformations in the course of a person’s life.
Janusz and Walkiewicz establish rites of passage and liminality theory as the structural matrix for understanding transformative and transgressive processes across the human life course.
, The Rites of Passage Framework as a Matrix of Transgression Processes in the Life Course, 2018thesis
Van Gennep, the father of formal processual analysis, used two sets of terms to describe the three phases of passage from one culturally defined state or status to another.
Turner identifies van Gennep’s dual terminology — separation/margin/reaggregation and preliminal/liminal/postliminal — as the foundational processual framework and subordinates it to his own concern with liminality as a space temporarily freed from structural norms.
, The Ritual Process Structure and Anti-Structure, 1966thesis
To these also one should add all rites de passage, which accompany any change of a collective sort from one state to another, as when a whole tribe goes to war.
Turner expands the rite de passage beyond individual life-crisis events to encompass collective transitions, linking it to status elevation, calendrical rites, and rites of group crisis.
, The Ritual Process Structure and Anti-Structure, 1966thesis
This “sacred” component is acquired by the incumbents of positions during the rites de passage, through which they changed positions.
Turner argues that the sacredness attaching to high structural positions derives from the humility and modelessness experienced during the rite de passage, grounding social hierarchy in prior liminal dissolution.
, The Ritual Process Structure and Anti-Structure, 1966thesis
Not only are such rites about transition from the dependencies of infancy to the self-sufficiency of adulthood, but equally about the transmission of such values as the quality and character of citizenship.
Hollis foregrounds the double function of rites of passage for men — developmental transition and cultural transmission — and mourns their disappearance from modern Western society as a source of masculine wounding.
, Under Saturn’s Shadow: The Wounding and Healing of Men, 1994thesis
Not only are such rites about transition from the dependencies of infancy to the self-sufficiency of adulthood, but equally about the transmission of such values as the quality and character of citizenship.
Hollis foregrounds the double function of rites of passage for men — developmental transition and cultural transmission — and mourns their disappearance from modern Western society as a source of masculine wounding.
, Under Saturns Shadow: The Wounding and Healing of Men, 1994thesis
de Passage, ceremonies of transition, of going out from the old and going in to the new. Myths, then, which embody the hiding, slaying and bringing to life again of a child or young man, may reflect almost any form of initiation rite.
Harrison applies van Gennep’s concept directly to Greek mythology, arguing that myths of the slain-and-revived youth encode initiation rites, and distinguishes between rites of adolescence, infant initiation, and ordination.
, Themis: A Study of the Social Origins of Greek Religion, 1912thesis
Thus, therapeutic work in a crisis is referenced directly to the three-phase structure of the rite of passage that enables to see how functional dimensions are interconnected with structural transformations.
Janusz and Walkiewicz argue that crisis therapy directly instantiates the three-phase structure of the rite of passage, mapping clinical intervention onto separation, liminality, and reintegration.
, The Rites of Passage Framework as a Matrix of Transgression Processes in the Life Course, 2018thesis
neophytes in many rites de passage have to submit to an authority that is nothing less than that of the total community. This community is the repository of the whole gamut of the culture’s values, norms, attitudes, sentiments, and relationships.
Turner describes the submission of neophytes during rites de passage as submission to the total community, positioning the communitas of liminality as the bearer of cultural wisdom transmitted through sacred instruction.
, The Ritual Process Structure and Anti-Structure, 1966supporting
The potential for change in the transition ritual is visualized by the balancing of symbols of decay with opposing symbols of growth and transformation: shelters and tunnels, which are both graves and wombs.
Janusz and Walkiewicz identify the symbolic logic of the transition ritual as the integration of contradictory forces — decay and growth, death and rebirth — as the generative mechanism of transformation.
, The Rites of Passage Framework as a Matrix of Transgression Processes in the Life Course, 2018supporting
the novice’s symbolic death signifies a regression to the embryonic state. But this is not to be understood only in terms of human physiology but also in cosmological terms; the fetal state is equivalent to a temporary regression to the virtual, precosmic mode.
Eliade reads initiatory death and rebirth not merely as social transition but as a cosmological regression to precreation, making the rite de passage a recapitulation of cosmic origins.
, The Sacred and the Profane: The Nature of Religion, 1957supporting
the novice for initiation is called upon to give up willful ambition and all desire and to submit to the ordeal. He must be willing to experience this trial without hope of success… to create the symbolic mood of death from which may spring the symbolic mood of rebirth.
Henderson distinguishes the initiation rite from the hero myth by its demand for submission rather than conquest, identifying the psychological core of the rite de passage as the symbolic death that enables psychological rebirth.
, Man and His Symbols, 1964supporting
religious rituals deny this rite of passage rather than foster it… What used to occur at home among close family now unfolds in a hospital room among medical professionals.
Pargament argues that modern Western funerary practice has dismantled the rite of passage around death, stripping mourners of the transitional process needed to transform their relationship to the deceased.
, The psychology of religion and coping theory, research,, 2001supporting
all important events of life are connected with elaborate ceremonies whose purpose is to detach man from the preceding stage of existence and to help him to transfer his psychic energy into the next phase.
Jung describes the psychological function of ceremonial rites of passage as the managed transfer of psychic energy between life stages, a mechanism for which modern institutions lack adequate equivalents.
, Collected Works Volume 18: The Symbolic Life, 1976supporting
there was another occasion, more solemn, charged with a civic importance beyond that of either christening or marriage, and that was his reception into the body of grown men as a full-grown kouros.
Harrison identifies the reception of the youth into the body of grown men as the civic rite of passage par excellence in ancient Greece, surpassing both christening and marriage in social significance.
, Themis: A Study of the Social Origins of Greek Religion, 1912supporting
rite de passage, 90
Burkert’s index entry places rite de passage within the broader conceptual architecture of sacrifice, restitution ritual, and rebirth in ancient Greek religion.
, Homo Necans: The Anthropology of Ancient Greek Sacrificial Ritual and Myth, 1972aside
rite de passage, 90
A duplicate index citation in Burkert locates rite de passage within a constellation of concepts including sacralization, sexual abstention, and ritual function.
, Homo Necans: The Anthropology of Ancient Greek Sacrificial Ritual and Myth, 1972aside