Within the depth-psychology corpus, ‘Status’ is not treated as a simple marker of social rank but as a dynamic category that acquires psychological weight through its relationship to liminality, ritual transformation, and the structural organisation of collective life. Victor Turner stands as the preeminent voice here: his sustained analysis in The Ritual Process maps status as one pole in a binary opposition against the undifferentiated ground of communitas, and he distinguishes sharply between rituals of status elevation — which move initiands toward higher structural positions while passing through a humbling liminal phase — and rituals of status reversal, in which lowly temporarily assume positions of dominance over the high. Turner’s work reveals status not as a stable possession but as something perpetually constituted, dissolved, and reconstituted through ritual passage. Sri Aurobindo contributes a metaphysical counterpoint, treating ‘status of being’ as the necessary stabilising ground for any kinesis, a principle that resonates with depth-psychological concerns about the Self as foundation for individuation. Douglas Cairns adds the dimension of honour and shame, showing how the perception of another’s status structures the affective life of aidos in ancient Greek psychology. The term thus sits at an intersection of social anthropology, ontology, and moral psychology, making it indispensable for understanding how psychic and cultural transformation are organised around hierarchical structure and its temporary suspension.
Van Gennep, the father of formal processual anlysis, used two sets of terms to describe the three phases of passage from one culturally defined state or status to another.
Turner’s chapter introduction establishes ‘status’ as the structural category whose transformation is the very object of rites of passage, anchoring the liminality-status dyad as central to ritual analysis.
, The Ritual Process Structure and Anti-Structure, 1966thesis
Absence of status/status Nakedness or uniform clothing/distinctions of clothing Sexual continence/sexuality Minimization of sex distinctions/maximization of sex distinctions Absence of rank/distinctions of rank Humility/just pride of position
Turner’s binary table formally opposes liminality to the status system, demonstrating that status — alongside property, rank, and nomenclature — constitutes the structural order from which liminal experience represents a total, if temporary, release.
, The Ritual Process Structure and Anti-Structure, 1966thesis
Life-crisis rites and rituals of induction into office are almost always rites of status elevation; calendrical rites and rites of group crisis may sometimes be rites of status reversal.
Turner distinguishes two fundamental ritual modalities — elevation and reversal — organised around status, mapping each to distinct social occasions and psychological outcomes.
, The Ritual Process Structure and Anti-Structure, 1966thesis
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 status elevation/reversal distinction from tribal ritual into world religions, arguing that religious movements structurally replicate the psychological dynamics of status transformation on a civilisational scale.
, The Ritual Process Structure and Anti-Structure, 1966thesis
“You are not our king yet; for a little while we will do what we please with you. By-and-by we shall have to do your will.”
Turner’s ethnographic vignette of the king-elect’s ritual humiliation illustrates how the liminal phase of status elevation requires the temporary abolition of the very status being conferred.
, The Ritual Process Structure and Anti-Structure, 1966supporting
Religions, of humility with high status founders, of humility and status reversal, of status reversal and separatism.
Turner’s index entries confirm the systematic treatment of status elevation and reversal as paired, analytically distinct categories traversing both ritual and religious life.
, The Ritual Process Structure and Anti-Structure, 1966supporting
the feeling of aidós, entailing concentration on the self and one’s own status, is prompted by and focuses on consideration of the status of another, a person of special status in one’s own eyes.
Cairns demonstrates that in Greek moral psychology, the emotion of aidos is constitutively relational — structured by the mutual recognition of status — linking social rank directly to the affective and ethical life of the self.
, Aidos: The Psychology and Ethics of Honour and Shame in Ancient Greek Literature, 1993supporting
all energy, all kinetic action has to support itself on status or by status if it is to be effective or creative; otherwise there will be no solidity of anything created, only a constant whirl without any formation.
Aurobindo advances a metaphysical principle that ‘status of being’ is the necessary stabilising ground for all dynamic action, providing depth psychology with an ontological analogue for the structural function of status in psychic life.
, The Life Divine, 1939supporting
Life crises provide rituals in and by means of which relations between structural positio
Turner argues that life-crisis rituals are the primary mechanism through which structurally defined positional relations — and thus status boundaries — are renegotiated and renewed.
, The Ritual Process Structure and Anti-Structure, 1966supporting
systematically effacing human status as a matter of policy; this is the ultimate reason for calling totalitarianism absolute evil. When human status is effaced as a result of continuous suffering, the cost is not only moral.
In a passage drawing on Arendt, the text identifies the deliberate destruction of human status as the defining crime of totalitarianism, connecting the psychological category of status to questions of existential dignity and evil.
, Encounters with the Soul: Active Imagination as Developed by C. G. Jung, 1981aside
The key is to respond in a collaborative, accepting way that honors autonomy and does not invite defense of the status quo.
In a clinical context, ‘status quo’ functions as a therapeutic concept denoting the client’s resistant attachment to existing behavioural patterns, invoking the term’s structural dimension in a psychotherapeutic register.
, Motivational Interviewing: Helping People Change, Third Edition, 2013aside