Pathologies of liminality: Degradation of Rituality and Loss of Transitionality. In-between Suffering on the Borders of Obsessive Neurosis and Borderline Disorder.

The liminal function of rituals is an expression of the transformative power of collective processes and subjective developments. Rites, transitional activities (playing, dramas, music, literature, arts, etc.) work as vector, catalyzer, mediator and symbolic container of experiences of transformative processes. In terms of unconscious psychosocial process, liminality becomes particularly evident in all situations in which the human condition goes through crisis of identity and everyday organization of borders is at risk. On several occasions (including clearly in the book “Civilization and its Discontents”, 1930), Freud proposed that there are pathological states in which the delimitation and borders of the Ego in relation to the external world become uncertain and painful. Authors take in consideration two specific conditions of sufferance, which although are different yet show an intriguing affinity in their difficult relationship with experience of borders and in living in liminal areas: obsessive neurosis and borderline condition. In the case of obsessive neurosis, the subject, morbidly repeating a specific ceremonial ritual, shuns the border, starting over each time in the anguished search for perfection and rigid division, without ever realizing the transition to a new state. In the case of borderline sufferance, on the contrary, the impulsiveness, the lack of integration of the Self leads the subject to live perpetually on the threshold, always oscillating from one extreme to the other, without being able to move from the margin and find an integration of opposites and polarities. This paper, through contributions ranging from anthropology to psychoanalysis, figures as a seminal work in the introduction of the concept of liminality into psychodynamic theory and clinical practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]