Arnold van Gennep (1873–1957) was a French ethnographer and folklorist. In Les Rites de passage (1909) he argued that the ceremonies around birth, initiation, marriage, travel and death share one sequence: rites of separation from an old status, a transitional or “liminal” period, and rites of incorporation into a new one. The anthropologist Victor Turner later made the middle phase famous as liminality.

Van Gennep’s real discovery was order, not the number three. He showed that a change of status is made in steps, and that the last step is social: other people receive you into the new place. My clinical argument follows from that. Many people who come to therapy are not stuck in their pain so much as stuck between statuses. A death, a divorce, a diagnosis or a trauma has separated them from an old life, and nothing has received them into a new one. Therapy can hold that middle period and rehearse the return. It cannot finish the passage alone, because incorporation needs a community.

Who Arnold van Gennep was

He was born Arnold Kurr on 23 April 1873 in Ludwigsburg, in the Kingdom of Württemberg. His father, Carl Alfred Kürr (the family name is usually written Kurr), was a lieutenant in a dragoon regiment stationed in the town. His mother, Suzanne van Gennep, was Dutch. After the marriage ended she took back her own surname, and her son took it with her. He moved to France with his mother at about the age of six and became a French citizen in 1897.^{1, 2}

Finding that the Sorbonne did not teach what he wanted, he studied Arabic at the École des langues orientales and linguistics, Egyptology, Islam and “primitive religions” at the École pratique des hautes études.¹ He never held a university post in France. His only one was the chair of ethnography at the University of Neuchâtel in Switzerland, from 1912 to 1915, where he and Gustave Jéquier organized the first congress of ethnography and ethnology, held in Neuchâtel in 1914. He lost the post and was expelled from Switzerland after publicly questioning Swiss neutrality toward Germany during the First World War.^{1, 2}

His distance from the academy was not only bad luck. He often criticized the writings of Émile Durkheim and Marcel Mauss, and Rosemary Zumwalt has traced how tensions with the circle around Durkheim’s journal L’Année sociologique kept him an outsider to French academic life.^{2, 3} Durkheim’s The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life (1912) makes no specific mention of him, even though van Gennep had published on Australian totemism six years earlier.⁴

He spent the rest of his career as an independent scholar and is regarded as the founder of folklore studies in France. His Manuel de folklore français contemporain appeared from 1937 to 1958 and was left unfinished.^{1, 2} He died on 7 May 1957. English-language sources usually place his death at Bourg-la-Reine, the town outside Paris where he lived and worked; French sources say he died at Épernay, where he spent his last months with his daughter, and was buried at Bourg-la-Reine.^{1, 2}

The three phases: separation, transition, incorporation

Van Gennep signed the foreword in December 1908, and his friend É. Nourry published the book in Paris under a 1909 date. His French terms were séparation, marge and agrégation. The 1960 English translation by Monika Vizedom and Gabrielle Caffee renders them as separation, transition and incorporation.^{4, 5} In his own wording, a complete scheme includes “preliminal rites (rites of separation), liminal rites (rites of transition), and postliminal rites (rites of incorporation).”⁵ Limen is Latin for threshold.⁶

He did not claim that every ceremony stresses all three equally. Rites of separation dominate funerals and rites of incorporation dominate weddings. Transition rites carry the weight in pregnancy, betrothal and initiation. The pattern also nests: a betrothal is itself a liminal period between adolescence and marriage, with its own separation, transition and incorporation.⁵

The model began with physical space. In his chapter on the territorial passage he describes the neutral zones between territories, where a traveler “wavers between two worlds,” and he reads the doorway the same way: “the door is the boundary between the foreign and domestic worlds in the case of an ordinary dwelling, between the profane and sacred worlds in the case of a temple.”⁵ He also argued that sacredness “is not absolute.” In what he called “the pivoting of the sacred,” a person who moves from one position in society to another comes to see the sacred where he once saw the profane, or the reverse, and such changes disturb both the person and the group. It is “the function of rites of passage to reduce their harmful effects.”⁵

Two of his points still matter clinically. First, status change is social, not biological. He insisted that “physiological puberty and ‘social puberty’ are essentially different and only rarely converge,” which is why so-called puberty rites happen at ages that have little to do with the body.^{4, 5} Second, meaning lives in sequence. He wrote the book to react against the habit of pulling single rites out of a ceremony and “considering them in isolation, thus removing them from a context which gives them meaning and reveals their position in a dynamic whole.”⁵ He cited James George Frazer and The Golden Bough throughout, yet he wrote that Frazer and Wilhelm Mannhardt had studied the ceremonies of the turning year “from a special point of view” and seemed not to have related them to other rites of passage.⁵

He made no claim to be the first to notice that these ceremonies resemble one another, and his conclusion says plainly that he was not. His claim was about order: why the rites come in the sequence they do.⁵ The same conclusion holds his best sentence: “life itself means to separate and to be reunited, to change form and condition, to die and to be reborn,” and “there are always new thresholds to cross.”⁵

What Victor Turner added

The English translation appeared in 1960, with an introduction by Solon T. Kimball.⁴ The Scottish anthropologist Victor Turner (1920–1983), who had done his fieldwork among the Ndembu of Zambia, then Northern Rhodesia, read van Gennep in the early 1960s and made the middle phase his subject.^{6, 7} His essay “Betwixt and Between: The Liminal Period in Rites de Passage” was collected in The Forest of Symbols (1967), and The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure followed in 1969.^{8, 9}

Turner described liminal people as structurally ambiguous: no longer what they were, not yet what they will be. Their condition is marked by humility, seclusion, ordeals and sexual ambiguity, and by communitas, the intense, leveling fellowship of people who pass through the threshold together.⁷ He also held that liminality cannot last. Either the initiates return to ordinary social structure, or the liminal group hardens into a structure of its own, which he called normative communitas.⁶ In 1974 he coined “liminoid” for the optional, leisure-time experiences of industrial societies, such as a rock concert, that feel liminal but change no one’s status.⁶ Critics have noted that Turner tended to treat liminality as renewal, when for many people it is uncertainty and dread.⁶ Our essay on Victor Turner, ritual and liminality goes further.

The threshold in depth psychology

Van Gennep’s book shaped the three-part plan of Joseph Campbell’s The Hero with a Thousand Faces (1949): departure, initiation and return.¹ Jungian clinicians took the threshold inward. The analyst Joseph Henderson devoted Thresholds of Initiation (1967) to initiation patterns in analytic case material.¹⁰ Robert Moore’s lectures on ritual and initiation, collected as The Archetype of Initiation (2001), take sacred space and ritual process as their subject.¹¹ In 1991 Nathan Schwartz-Salant and Murray Stein edited a Chiron volume that set liminality beside D. W. Winnicott’s transitional phenomena.¹² Marion Woodman subtitled The Pregnant Virgin (1985) “a process of psychological transformation.”¹³

A popular argument grew out of this work: modern societies have lost their initiations, and people improvise risky substitutes. It runs through men’s movement writing such as Michael Meade’s Men and the Water of Life: Initiation and the Tempering of Men (1993).¹⁴ It is a reasonable hypothesis, not an established finding, and I would not use it to diagnose whole groups of young people. The depth tradition has its own risk here. Jung’s psychology has itself been described, in a line credited to Peter Homans’s Jung in Context (1979), as a form of “permanent liminality” in which there is no need to return to social structure.⁶ A therapy that falls in love with the threshold can keep a person there.

Grief, trauma and the unfinished passage

Van Gennep’s clearest psychological passage is about mourning. “During mourning, the living mourners and the deceased constitute a special group, situated between the world of the living and the world of the dead,” and how soon the living leave that group depends on how close they were to the person who died. Widows and widowers stay longest. The rites that lift mourning are, in his terms, rites of reintegration into society.⁵

Grief research now describes something similar. Prolonged grief disorder, which the American Psychiatric Association voted to add to the DSM-5-TR, is described as an attachment disturbance marked by yearning for the deceased, loss of meaning and identity disruption.¹⁵ A 2017 meta-analysis of 14 studies put its pooled prevalence after non-violent bereavement at 9.8 percent, about one bereaved adult in ten, though the authors warn the studies vary widely.¹⁶ Reading “identity disruption” as an unfinished change of status is my interpretation, not the researchers’ claim. It fits Colin Murray Parkes’s older description of bereavement as a psychosocial transition, a forced revision of a person’s assumptions about the world that some people manage and some do not.¹⁷

Does ritual itself help? The evidence is thinner than the theory. A review of 17 studies on funerals and bereaved relatives’ mental health, done early in the COVID-19 pandemic, found the quantitative results inconclusive: five observational studies found a benefit from taking part in a funeral and six did not. The qualitative studies pointed to what mattered, which was whether the bereaved could shape the ritual and say goodbye in a way that meant something to them.¹⁸ Kimball made the same point in 1960: “ceremonialism alone cannot establish the new equilibrium, and perfunctory ritual may be pleasant but also meaningless.”⁴ A 2018 review of the psychological research describes ritual as serving three regulatory functions: regulating emotion, performance goal states and social connection.¹⁹

Trauma is a harder fit, and van Gennep never wrote about it. Calling trauma an “involuntary rite of passage” is a metaphor, and it can mislead. A rite of passage is assigned by a community, it is led by people who know the sequence, and it ends. Trauma has none of these. Telling a survivor that suffering is an initiation can press them to find meaning before they are ready. Still, a leading cognitive model and a large meta-analysis line up with the idea of a passage left open. In Ehlers and Clark’s cognitive model, persistent PTSD involves a sense of serious, current threat, driven in part by a trauma memory that is poorly elaborated and poorly placed in context. The event has not been filed as past.²⁰ And in a meta-analysis of 14 risk factors, factors that operate during or after the trauma, including lack of social support, predicted PTSD somewhat more strongly than factors that came before it, though every effect was modest.²¹ Memory that has not become history, and a community that has not received the person back: that is about as far as the analogy honestly goes.

What this looks like in therapy

The first use of van Gennep in a session is diagnostic in the plain sense: which part of the passage is this person in? Many people arrive after a separation nobody marked. A quiet divorce, a layoff, leaving a church, an adult child moving out, a miscarriage, a retirement or a new diagnosis can all end an old status without any rite at all. Naming the separation, and the loss inside it, is often the first piece of work. Our page on existential therapy for a life that no longer fits covers this ground.

The therapy frame works something like van Gennep’s doorway. The same room, the same hour, a clear beginning and end mark off a space where a person can be between identities for a while. Jerome Frank’s Persuasion and Healing (1961) argued that psychotherapies and related healing practices share a relationship, an expectation of help, a rationale that explains the trouble, and a ritual or procedure that patient and healer carry out together.²² Meta-analytic evidence supports the importance of these common factors, including the alliance, empathy and expectations.²³ The claim is not that therapy is a religious rite, only that its structure is part of what helps.

Some therapists build explicit rituals into the work. Onno van der Hart published a book-length study of therapeutic ritual, Rituals in Psychotherapy: Transition and Continuity (1983), and described leave-taking rituals in grief therapy, in which a person parts with symbols connected to the deceased as a way of taking leave.^{24, 25} The narrative therapists David Epston and Michael White framed the end of therapy itself as a rite of passage.²⁶ Family therapists have done the same with family rituals.²⁷ In practice this can be as plain as an unsent letter read aloud, an object returned or buried, or an anniversary kept on purpose. The research I could find on specific therapeutic rituals is mostly case reports and clinical writing, so they belong in therapy as offers, never as requirements.

The third phase is the one therapy most often neglects. If incorporation is social, a good ending includes a plan for who needs to see the change: a friend, a congregation, a family, a group of people who have lost what you have lost. With trauma, that is the work after the memory work. With grief, it is the slow return to a social world that has kept moving. The office can hold the threshold. The return happens outside it.

Where the model stops

Van Gennep built the book from the detailed descriptions and monographs that had accumulated by his day, and most of the ceremonies he analyzed belonged to communities in which a change of status was a public event.⁵ The passages people bring to therapy today are mostly private and unrecognized, with no one in the role of elder. The model is a map for asking questions, not a theory of the mind. The questions are still good ones: what has ended, what is unfinished, and who will receive you on the other side?

If you are in the middle of a transition that no one around you has named, that is a reasonable thing to bring to therapy. At Taproot Therapy Collective in Hoover we work with grief, trauma and life transitions from a depth-oriented perspective. You can read about our grief counseling in Hoover and Jungian depth therapy, or contact us with questions.

References

1. Wikipedia contributors. (2026, July 25). Arnold van Gennep. In Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. Retrieved November 8, 2026, from https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Arnold_van_Gennep&oldid=1366003372
2. Contributeurs de Wikipédia. (2026, November 7). Arnold van Gennep. In Wikipédia, l’encyclopédie libre. Retrieved November 8, 2026, from https://fr.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Arnold_van_Gennep&oldid=241119853
3. Zumwalt, R. (1982). Arnold van Gennep: The hermit of Bourg-la-Reine. American Anthropologist, 84(2), 299–313. https://doi.org/10.1525/aa.1982.84.2.02a00030
4. Kimball, S. T. (1960). Introduction. In A. van Gennep, The rites of passage (M. B. Vizedom & G. L. Caffee, Trans., pp. v–xix). University of Chicago Press. Quotation from p. xvii.
5. van Gennep, A. (1960). The rites of passage (M. B. Vizedom & G. L. Caffee, Trans.). University of Chicago Press. (Original work published 1909). Quotations from pp. 11, 12–13, 18, 20, 65, 89, 147, 178 and 189.
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