Cover photograph by Anton Biletskyi-Volokh.
Transitions matter. They mark the passage from one form of life to another.
But few things consume as much time and energy as getting stuck somewhere in between.
Anthropologists call this in-between state liminality. In a traditional rite of passage, it has a structure: a separation, a period of uncertainty, a ritual, and some recognizable sign that the transition is over.
The threshold is meant to be crossed.
But when the interval has no end, it stops being a transition and becomes a trap.
The old form never dies. The new one never gets born.
Psychoanalysis offers two striking ways of thinking about this failure.
The first is a transition without a ritual.
In a borderline mode of splitting, incompatible realities can remain psychologically alive at the same time.
Crossing the threshold would mean choosing one reality. And choosing reality means accepting a loss: the perfect possibility that cannot exist in the real world.
As long as you remain both here and there, you can postpone mourning what will never be.
The second is a ritual without a transition.
In a perverse logic, the ritual serves the opposite purpose. It is no longer there to make the transition possible, but to ensure that it never happens.
Consider the cross.
In Christianity, the crucifixion points through suffering and death toward transformation. But what happens when the cross itself becomes the object of desire, rather than a symbol of passage?
The ritual remains. The transformation disappears.
These are psychoanalytic images, not clinical definitions. But the distinction is worth considering.
One way of being stuck refuses to cross the threshold.
The other keeps performing the crossing without ever leaving.
And in both cases, life remains suspended between something that cannot end and something that cannot begin.
A threshold is not a place to live.
Theoretical context
The concept of liminality belongs to the anthropology of rites of passage, especially Arnold van Gennep's The Rites of Passage (1909).
The contrast between borderline splitting and perverse ritual is an interpretive psychoanalytic metaphor, not a universal clinical classification or psychiatric diagnosis, and not an established finding attributable to van Gennep.