Liminality - Depth Psychology

Depth Psychology

Jungians have often seen the individuation process of self-realisation as taking place within a liminal space. 'Individuation begins with a withdrawal from normal modes of socialisation, epitomized by the breakdown of the persona...liminality'. Thus 'what Turner's concept of social liminality does for status in society, Jung...does for the movement of the person through the life process of individuation'. Individuation can be seen as a 'movement through liminal space and time, from disorientation to integration....What takes place in the dark phase of liminality is a process of breaking down...in the interest of "making whole" one's meaning, purpose and sense of relatedness once more'. As an archetypal figure, 'the trickster is a symbol of the liminal state itself, and of its permanent accessibility as a source of recreative power'.

But other depth psychologies speak of a similar process. Carl Rogers describes 'the "out-of-this-world" quality that many therapists have remarked upon, a sort of trance-like feeling in the relationship that client and therapist emerge from at the end of the hour, as if from a deep well or tunnel. The French talk of how the anaytic setting 'opens/forges the "intermediate space," "excluded middle," or "between" that figures so importantly in Irigaray's writing'. Marion Milner claimed that 'a temporal spatial frame also marks off the special kind of reality of a psycho-analytic session...the different kind of reality that is within it'.

Jungians however have perhaps been most explicit about the 'need to accord space, time and place for liminal feeling' - as well about the associated dangers, 'two mistakes: we provide no ritual space at all in our lives...or we stay in it too long'. Indeed, Jung's psychology has itself been described as 'a form of "permanent liminality" in which there is no need to return to social structure'.