---
title: "The Rites of Passage Framework as a Matrix of Transgression Processes in the Life Course"
author: "Bernadetta Janusz and Maciej Walkiewicz"
year: 2018
shelf: "the-clinic"
purchase_url: "https://bookshop.org/search?keywords=Rites+of+Passage+Framework+Janusz+Walkiewicz"
in_stock: false
related: []
collections: []
content_type: "book-commentary"
key_takeaways:
  - "Janusz and Walkiewicz's reconceptualization of van Gennep's tripartite model as a \"matrix of transgression\" reframes liminality not as a phase to be traversed but as a structural principle operating recursively across the entire life course—an insight that exposes how thoroughly both developmental psychology and clinical practice have domesticated the concept of passage."
  - "By treating transgression as the operative mechanism within rites of passage rather than mere transition, the framework reveals that what depth psychology calls individuation and what anthropology calls initiation share a common engine: the deliberate violation of a prior identity structure, without which no genuine transformation occurs."
  - "The paper's greatest provocation is its implicit challenge to therapeutic cultures that manage liminality as pathology—positioning the chaotic, boundary-dissolving core of passage rites as precisely the element that modern clinical frameworks most urgently need to recover rather than suppress."
references: []
glossary_terms:
  - "transgression"
  - "passage"
  - "liminality"
  - "hollis"
  - "initiation"
scholar_prompts:
  - "How does Janusz and Walkiewicz's concept of transgression as the operative mechanism of passage compare with Victor Turner's account of \"anti-structure\" and communitas in *The Ritual Process*—are they describing the same phenomenon from different angles, or does the transgression framework capture something Turner's structural analysis misses?"
  - "In what ways does James Hollis's six-stage model of initiatory rites in *Under Saturn's Shadow* presuppose or fail to account for the recursive, matrix-like quality of transgression processes that Janusz and Walkiewicz propose across the full life course?"
  - "If Mircea Eliade in *The Sacred and the Profane* argues that modern secularization drains passage rites of ontological significance, does Janusz and Walkiewicz's framework offer a way to recover that significance within a clinical rather than religious container—or does it inadvertently confirm Eliade's pessimism?"
seo_title: "The Rites of Passage Framework by Bernadetta Janusz and Maciej Walkiewicz | Seba"
seo_description: "Scholarly commentary on Janusz and Walkiewicz's reading of van Gennep and Turner — liminality, transgression, and transformation across the life course."
---

**Transgression, Not Transition, Is the Engine of Psychological Development**

Janusz and Walkiewicz accomplish something deceptively radical in this framework paper: they relocate the generative force of van Gennep's rites of passage from the structural phases (separation, liminality, reincorporation) to the transgressive act that makes those phases psychologically real. This is not a semantic shift. Van Gennep's tripartite model, as Victor Turner elaborated it in *The Ritual Process*, describes the *architecture* of passage—the threshold, the liminal zone, the return. But architecture without a driving force is inert. What Janusz and Walkiewicz identify is that the passage itself requires a violation: of prior identity, of social position, of the psychic homeostasis that the ego has established. Without transgression—literally, a stepping across—there is no genuine liminality, only the simulation of change. Turner himself glimpsed this when he described how initiates are "leveled and stripped of all secular distinctions of status" and reduced to "some kind of human prima materia," but he framed this as something *done to* the novice by the ritual structure. Janusz and Walkiewicz reframe it as something the individual must participate in as an active process of boundary violation that recurs, in different registers, throughout the entire life course—not only at puberty or marriage but at every moment when the psyche's established order must be overthrown for development to proceed.

**The Life Course as Recursive Initiation Dissolves the Myth of the Single Threshold**

One of the paper's most consequential moves is its insistence that the rites-of-passage framework operates not as a one-time event but as a matrix—a repeating structural pattern that appears at every significant developmental node. This directly extends James Hollis's observation in *The Middle Passage* that "there is an autonomous process, an ineluctable dialectic, which brings repeated deaths and rebirths," and that without traditional rites, modern individuals are "cut adrift to wander without guidance." Hollis, in both *The Middle Passage* and *Under Saturn's Shadow*, identifies approximately six stages common to initiatory rites across cultures: separation, death, rebirth, teachings, ordeal, and return. Janusz and Walkiewicz take this further by arguing that these stages do not merely repeat in sequence at different life junctures but form a matrix—meaning that multiple transgression processes can operate simultaneously, intersecting and complicating one another. A person in midlife crisis is not simply undergoing a second adolescent initiation scaled up; they are caught in the interference patterns of overlapping passages, some incomplete from decades earlier. This matrix model accounts for phenomena that linear stage theories cannot: why a death in the family can reactivate an unfinished adolescent separation, why marriage can simultaneously function as both aggregation and a new separation from an earlier identity. The clinical implications are enormous. A therapist working with a patient in a life-course transition is not witnessing a single passage but navigating a layered field of transgressions, some achieved and some refused.

**Modern Culture's Allergy to Liminality Is Itself a Failed Transgression**

The framework carries an implicit cultural diagnosis that aligns with Mircea Eliade's assertion in *The Sacred and the Profane* that "one of the characteristics of the modern world is the disappearance of any meaningful rites of initiation." But Janusz and Walkiewicz sharpen this diagnosis. Eliade and Hollis both lament the *absence* of ritual containers. Janusz and Walkiewicz suggest something more unsettling: that modern culture has not simply lost its rites but has actively constructed systems—therapeutic, educational, pharmaceutical—that prevent the transgressive moment from occurring at all. When contemporary mental health policy, as Ann Belford Ulanov's work on chaos and psyche suggests, "abhors chaos," it is not merely failing to provide initiatory structures; it is actively suppressing the chaotic dissolution that makes genuine passage possible. The paper's framing of transgression as the necessary mechanism clarifies why so many substitute rituals in modern life—graduation ceremonies, corporate onboarding, even certain therapeutic protocols—feel hollow. They provide the *form* of passage without its *force*. They simulate transition without requiring the psychic violation of existing structure that gives liminality its transformative power. Turner's account of Tsonga circumcision rites, where boys are beaten, starved, and subjected to extreme physical ordeals, illustrates the point with bracing clarity: "The implication is that for an individual to go higher on the status ladder, he must go lower than the status ladder." This descent is not metaphorical decoration; it is the transgression without which no new identity crystallizes.

**Why This Framework Matters Now**

Janusz and Walkiewicz's contribution is not another rehearsal of the familiar lament about lost rituals. It is an operational reframing that gives clinicians, researchers, and individuals a way to diagnose *where* in the transgression process a life has stalled. Hollis writes that "we are daily obliged to choose between anxiety and depression"—anxiety if we move forward into the unknown, depression if we refuse the call. The transgression matrix provides the diagnostic grammar for that choice: it shows that what presents as depression may be a refused transgression, what presents as anxiety may be a transgression underway without adequate ritual containment, and what presents as chaos may be the necessary dissolution that precedes reintegration. No other single framework in the contemporary literature links van Gennep's anthropological architecture, Turner's concept of communitas, Eliade's phenomenology of the sacred, and depth-psychological accounts of individuation into a single clinical instrument with this degree of specificity. For anyone working at the intersection of life-course development and depth psychology, this paper does not merely contribute—it reorganizes the field of vision.