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.