What Psychotherapy Can Do

As an equivalent system, psychotherapy provides counterparts to separation, liminality, and reintegration. In psychotherapeutic terms, the correspondences are psychological destructuring, flux and turmoil, and restructuring. Recognizing liminal parallels and noting that psychotherapy is a present-day creation of ancient initiation rituals but missing the important distinctions between the liminal and liminoid, they observe: To me, liminality seems to be the heart of the mid-life transition and the key to understanding its nature and psychological function. it is legitimate to speak of mid-life liminality as potentially transformative. In the midst of the emotional flux and turmoil of midlife liminality, persons struggle with fundamental splits and dynamics of their personalities and undergo internal structural changes that will affect their attitudes and emotional reactions permanently. The net result will be a transformation of consciousness. Indeed, liminal categories of thought have been used psychotherapeutically to interpret the meaning of depression in important transitional moments. As a liminal quality, death experiences of the self frequently translate into depression, a catalyst for forms of rebirth.