The target article suggests an intriguing bridge between the two disciplines concerned with the complex well-being of humankind: psychology and anthropology. First, its conclusions are similar to and significant to the well-established findings of classical anthropology: namely, the efficacy of the rites of passage (Van Gennep Reference Van Gennep1909/1960), inherent to every form of rituality within traditional societies, in managing critical transitions in human development, whether they refer to the cycle of a person's life (“birth, childhood, social puberty, betrothal, marriage, pregnancy, fatherhood, initiation into religious societies, and funerals” [Van Gennep 1909/1960, p. 3]); coming of age (Neagota Reference Neagota2011; Schlegel & Hewlett Reference Schlegel and Hewlett2011), marriage and death (Benga Reference Benga2011; Benga & Benga Reference Benga, Benga, Papa, Pizza and Zerilli2003); or to the “ceremonies of human passage … occasioned by celestial changes, such as the changeover from month to month (ceremonies of the full moon), from season to season (festivals related to solstices and equinoxes), and from year to year (New Year's Day)” (Van Gennep 1909/1960, p. 4), with both epical foundation rites and anniversary dramaturgy (Benga Reference Benga and Ştiucă2009). Secondly, the proposed integrative memory model, with its tripartite structure – autobiographical memories, semantic structures, and emotional responses – design the therapeutic process much in the way society monitors individual passage through rites and rituals. Explicitly, the model aims to develop “a common language that spans disciplines and a common mechanism underlying change” (sect. 9, para. 2).
Our core idea is that the validity of the Gennepian sequence in the standard rite of passage, which is made of separation from the old state, transition, and reincorporation into a new state, transcends the “fixed form” of traditionally transmitted rituality and belongs ultimately to the inherent passage of human life. Human life, like all life, is change, itself. Managing perpetual change is linked to managing crisis: by means of rituality, within customary societies, and by means of therapy, with the dwindling of customary, tradition-bound institutions within (post)modernity (see also Arnett Reference Arnett2012). Crises, though – because of the constancy of human variables – all are describable by means of Van Gennep's tripartite scheme. Seen under this light, the crises demanding therapeutic intervention from modern day psychiatry and psychology can all be included within the framework of the imperfect passage or transition: imperfect separation, prolonged transition (far beyond the concrete reorientation of the person towards an adjusted, more befitting, status), and unsuccessful reincorporation into the new condition. Disruptions within the development of the person throughout his or her ages, throughout the person's growing up, growing mature, and growing old, result in accumulations of traumas. Resolving the traumas must involve considering the disruptive event and its significance within the personal history. The markers of the person's fractured passage through his or her life are emotional memories of emotional experiences: the ways we all encode the Gennepian separation, transition, and unfinished reincorporation, within our autobiographical histories.
Thus, therapeutic change is expected to detect the prolonged transitional status and the incomplete passage, and convert it into the creation of the “coherent narrative account of what occurred” (sect. 2, para. 9). The similarities between traditional ceremonies involving larger group participation, and the psychotherapeutic (most often) one-to-one framework, needing to elicit a re-enactment of the stressful, unsolved situation, which is then incorporated within a corrective experience occurring in a new safe context, reside in the following aspects:
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The re-enactment of a script in a dramaturgical form, condensing semantic information and epitomizing a category of real experiences in a dramatized form, easy to anticipate for the insider: Assigning roles for reproducing a mythical script and thus rehearsing an illud tempus drama (sect. 2, para. 8; Benga Reference Benga and Ştiucă2009);
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The personal involvement, interest in the script – that is, probably setting the optimal arousal level for encoding, and further reconsolidating the integrative information (semantic, autobiographic and emotional) (sects. 3.1–3.3);
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The presence and amount of the personal experience of the individual as actor or character in the script, which ensures the emotional involvement of the individual, as well as the activation of autobiographical memory;
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The generation of a new narrative, based on the script, reproducing the narrative plot, yet loaded with both the emotional experiential load of the original plot, and the new emotional load – via the process of reconsolidation (sect. 4, para 6) (also considered a critical stage by trauma-focused interventions such as TF-CBT [see Cohen et al. Reference Cohen, Mannarino and Deblinger2006]); without the participants' experiential involvement in the rites and rituals, we cannot speak of their anthropological validity as cultural facts;
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The virtue of repeated retelling of memories (which may be cultural memories, as in myth and all the other epic genres) of improving consistency over time (sect. 5, paras. 4–5; sect. 6, paras. 1–4; sect. 7 paras. 1–3);
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The concrete difference between the person having not yet undergone the therapeutic–dramaturgical script, and the individual having covered the role in the script – be it collective, as in ceremonials, or bi-univocal, as in the modal therapeutic alliance;
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The quest for change, in both instances: traditional and modern-therapeutic;
-
The concrete importance of the features and the quality of the plot (i.e., semantic structures) in ordering autobiographical emotions and memories, which in turn restructure semantic memory.
The structure of the rites of passage may be studied nowadays in ethnographic customary settings just as in those of yore. The more archaic a ceremony – for example, the Romanian Green Man at St. Georges' (Neagota Reference Neagota2011), the therapeutic dance of the Căluşari (Benga & Neagota Reference Benga and Neagota2010), and more – the more analyzable it is as a cultural fact of its own syntax. Anthropology describes, puts forward, and interprets the change; psychology interacts, probes to the core motivations of the person, provokes and endlessly drills for the meaning within change. But after all, the process of human change remains the same, and its corresponding drama is the passage of time itself: Some passages last longer than they should; some never reach the necessary threshold to suitably allow changing. Yet the common denominator of all these changes is that managing the change is always linked to giving weight and meaning to the autobiographical history of the self, whether suitably, properly recollected or not, as a result of the unsolved traumas across the individual pathway.
The target article suggests an intriguing bridge between the two disciplines concerned with the complex well-being of humankind: psychology and anthropology. First, its conclusions are similar to and significant to the well-established findings of classical anthropology: namely, the efficacy of the rites of passage (Van Gennep Reference Van Gennep1909/1960), inherent to every form of rituality within traditional societies, in managing critical transitions in human development, whether they refer to the cycle of a person's life (“birth, childhood, social puberty, betrothal, marriage, pregnancy, fatherhood, initiation into religious societies, and funerals” [Van Gennep 1909/1960, p. 3]); coming of age (Neagota Reference Neagota2011; Schlegel & Hewlett Reference Schlegel and Hewlett2011), marriage and death (Benga Reference Benga2011; Benga & Benga Reference Benga, Benga, Papa, Pizza and Zerilli2003); or to the “ceremonies of human passage … occasioned by celestial changes, such as the changeover from month to month (ceremonies of the full moon), from season to season (festivals related to solstices and equinoxes), and from year to year (New Year's Day)” (Van Gennep 1909/1960, p. 4), with both epical foundation rites and anniversary dramaturgy (Benga Reference Benga and Ştiucă2009). Secondly, the proposed integrative memory model, with its tripartite structure – autobiographical memories, semantic structures, and emotional responses – design the therapeutic process much in the way society monitors individual passage through rites and rituals. Explicitly, the model aims to develop “a common language that spans disciplines and a common mechanism underlying change” (sect. 9, para. 2).
Our core idea is that the validity of the Gennepian sequence in the standard rite of passage, which is made of separation from the old state, transition, and reincorporation into a new state, transcends the “fixed form” of traditionally transmitted rituality and belongs ultimately to the inherent passage of human life. Human life, like all life, is change, itself. Managing perpetual change is linked to managing crisis: by means of rituality, within customary societies, and by means of therapy, with the dwindling of customary, tradition-bound institutions within (post)modernity (see also Arnett Reference Arnett2012). Crises, though – because of the constancy of human variables – all are describable by means of Van Gennep's tripartite scheme. Seen under this light, the crises demanding therapeutic intervention from modern day psychiatry and psychology can all be included within the framework of the imperfect passage or transition: imperfect separation, prolonged transition (far beyond the concrete reorientation of the person towards an adjusted, more befitting, status), and unsuccessful reincorporation into the new condition. Disruptions within the development of the person throughout his or her ages, throughout the person's growing up, growing mature, and growing old, result in accumulations of traumas. Resolving the traumas must involve considering the disruptive event and its significance within the personal history. The markers of the person's fractured passage through his or her life are emotional memories of emotional experiences: the ways we all encode the Gennepian separation, transition, and unfinished reincorporation, within our autobiographical histories.
Thus, therapeutic change is expected to detect the prolonged transitional status and the incomplete passage, and convert it into the creation of the “coherent narrative account of what occurred” (sect. 2, para. 9). The similarities between traditional ceremonies involving larger group participation, and the psychotherapeutic (most often) one-to-one framework, needing to elicit a re-enactment of the stressful, unsolved situation, which is then incorporated within a corrective experience occurring in a new safe context, reside in the following aspects:
The re-enactment of a script in a dramaturgical form, condensing semantic information and epitomizing a category of real experiences in a dramatized form, easy to anticipate for the insider: Assigning roles for reproducing a mythical script and thus rehearsing an illud tempus drama (sect. 2, para. 8; Benga Reference Benga and Ştiucă2009);
The personal involvement, interest in the script – that is, probably setting the optimal arousal level for encoding, and further reconsolidating the integrative information (semantic, autobiographic and emotional) (sects. 3.1–3.3);
The presence and amount of the personal experience of the individual as actor or character in the script, which ensures the emotional involvement of the individual, as well as the activation of autobiographical memory;
The generation of a new narrative, based on the script, reproducing the narrative plot, yet loaded with both the emotional experiential load of the original plot, and the new emotional load – via the process of reconsolidation (sect. 4, para 6) (also considered a critical stage by trauma-focused interventions such as TF-CBT [see Cohen et al. Reference Cohen, Mannarino and Deblinger2006]); without the participants' experiential involvement in the rites and rituals, we cannot speak of their anthropological validity as cultural facts;
The virtue of repeated retelling of memories (which may be cultural memories, as in myth and all the other epic genres) of improving consistency over time (sect. 5, paras. 4–5; sect. 6, paras. 1–4; sect. 7 paras. 1–3);
The concrete difference between the person having not yet undergone the therapeutic–dramaturgical script, and the individual having covered the role in the script – be it collective, as in ceremonials, or bi-univocal, as in the modal therapeutic alliance;
The quest for change, in both instances: traditional and modern-therapeutic;
The concrete importance of the features and the quality of the plot (i.e., semantic structures) in ordering autobiographical emotions and memories, which in turn restructure semantic memory.
The structure of the rites of passage may be studied nowadays in ethnographic customary settings just as in those of yore. The more archaic a ceremony – for example, the Romanian Green Man at St. Georges' (Neagota Reference Neagota2011), the therapeutic dance of the Căluşari (Benga & Neagota Reference Benga and Neagota2010), and more – the more analyzable it is as a cultural fact of its own syntax. Anthropology describes, puts forward, and interprets the change; psychology interacts, probes to the core motivations of the person, provokes and endlessly drills for the meaning within change. But after all, the process of human change remains the same, and its corresponding drama is the passage of time itself: Some passages last longer than they should; some never reach the necessary threshold to suitably allow changing. Yet the common denominator of all these changes is that managing the change is always linked to giving weight and meaning to the autobiographical history of the self, whether suitably, properly recollected or not, as a result of the unsolved traumas across the individual pathway.