The rite of passage stands as one of the most generative structural concepts in depth psychology, bridging anthropological field observation and the inner life of the psyche. Rooted in Arnold van Gennep’s tripartite schema — separation, liminality, incorporation — the concept is taken up across the corpus with remarkable range and intensity. Eliade treats initiation rites as cosmological re-enactments, in which the novice’s symbolic death and rebirth mirror the very structure of sacred reality. Campbell universalizes van Gennep’s schema into the monomythic hero cycle, reading tribal circumcision, subincision, and blood-feeding as outer expressions of an inner psychic necessity. Hollis, writing from a clinical Jungian position, laments the modern dissolution of meaningful male initiation, arguing that the absence of sanctioned rites produces a culture of uninitiated men unable to bear suffering consciously. Woodman presses the point further: every rite of passage demands a sacrifice, a death of the old dispensation, and without sacred ritual the psyche risks collapse into chaos. Janusz and Walkiewicz formalize the framework empirically, demonstrating that van Gennep’s structure maps onto somatic, psychological, and social transformation throughout the life course. The central tension in the corpus is between rite as collective, culturally embodied institution and rite as intrapsychic process that may occur — imperfectly, dangerously — without communal scaffolding.