Don't get stuck in the middle!

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Liminality is the condition of being in between states, no longer what you were, not yet what you will become but suspended in a threshold state where the old identity has dissolved but the new one has not yet formed. Arnold Van Gennep identified it as the middle phase of every rite of passage, and Victor Turner showed that this apparent emptiness is in fact the most generative moment in human transformation, the necessary dissolution of previous self, necessary for change to occur.

The liminoid is Turner's term for the modern equivalent of liminal experience, it shows the same threshold energy, the same potential for transformation and subversion of the normal order, but occurring outside any containing ritual structure. Unlike the liminal, which is collective, obligatory, and held within a social framework that guarantees passage through to the other side, the liminoid is individual, and uncontained. There is no guaranteed exit point or destination, and predefined role model on the other side of the transition. This is why it can be far more likely to leave a person stranded in the between-state indefinitely.

It seems that generally speaking liminal is a normal transition through life and liminoid is being stuck in transition with no road map. The mid-life crisis appears to be a classic liminoid phenomenon. Men (mostly) reach a point in their life where the relative order of being married, bringing children up or forging a career have reached a natural conclusion. The old normal collapses away placing the man into a liminal condition. Unlike other liminal states such as puberty there is no clear exit point. While most people manage to break through into a new self, it is perfectly possibly to get stuck in this liminoid state and it is in this state that the person is likely to experience an emotional crisis. With no roadmap for this situation a sports car or motorbike gets purchased or the person decides to walk across Africa. Traditional therapy could be considered but there are real dangers in constructing the new persona after the old one has collapsed. It is quite possible that the liminoid state is eccentric or harmless and the mental health crisis occurs when a person exits from it into a badly constructed new identity.

To further expand my position, for a variety of reasons when a person went through puberty, it was a given that the person had a pathway. Their position in society as a child broke down and the person became liminal in puberty. There was a societal journey with a clear exit point. Boys became men and girls became women. The liminal state was confusing and exhausting but the end point was clear. However as society became more liberal in its outlook the exit point from childhood to adulthood became in some way chaotic and the exit point was not clear. The old self then breaks down but multiple exit points are apparently available. When the newly formed adult emerges its construction while physically clearly male or female has been subjected to damaging therapeutic interventions along the way. It is the intervention during the liminal stage that creates an environment for emotional crisis after the new persona has emerged.

The assumption underlying most such intervention is that transition is essentially binary: a switch from one stable state to another. What this misses is the liminal phase between them, and it is precisely there that the damage occurs. In the modern secular world, people are stripped of their old identity and left to wait for a new one to emerge, without the ritual containers, elder guidance, or clear exit points that traditional cultures built into the structure of passage. By the time the mental health system engages, it is already responding to the wreckage of an uncontained liminality rather than preventing it.

100 word summary

The epidemic of poor mental health in the developed world may therefore be less a medical phenomenon than a structural one, the predictable consequence of a society that has dismantled its mechanisms for managing liminal states without replacing them with anything adequate. Until we recognise the midlife crisis as a genuine passage requiring social support rather than a private failure requiring individual treatment, and until we acknowledge that offering young people multiple unanchored exit points from childhood does not liberate them but strands them, we will have no option but to continue delivering remedial therapy after the fact, treating at the end what could have been avoided altogether.

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