Liminality and Adolescence. Victor Turner, Mukanda, and the Psychoanalysis or: the anthropologist's fallacy.

The subject of my dissertation is to identify the psychoanalytic subtext in the work of Victor Turner from its beginnings to the elaboration of the concept of structure and antistructure and, in close connection with this, clarifying the question if specific contradictions inherent to this concept are to be seen as a consequence of his inconsistent reception of psychoanalysis, which becomes manifest i.a. by oscillating between recognizing intrapsychic referents of ritual symbols and then turning away from this level of reference. Turners thesis concerning his concept of structure and antistructure claims that in the course of the liminal phase of rituals (he detects his concept of liminality from the processual and symbolic structure of the Mukanda-ritual of the Ndembu) social structure is eliminated and replaced by antistructure. This idea cannot be supported when considering the process of social life in the ritual field of Mukanda, which can be empirically verified. This objection had already been formulated by some of Turners colleagues in the 1970s. The main part of my thesis refers to this very point: In the course of being a par- ticipating observer of some episodes of a Mukanda-performance in summer 1953, Turner who simultaneously had begun to read Freud and whose specific sen- sitivity had been heightened by this actually saw something equivalent to anti- structure. But the corresponding referents of ritual symbolism were not to be found at a social-structural, but at an intrapsychic level: By Mukanda intra- psychic processes of transformation should be constellated in each neophyte. These are processes which characterize the phase-adequate development of a (male) adolescent. They take place in a tension field between the acquirement of integrated identity (structure) and the peril of identity diffusion or - as worst case - psychic fragmentation / psychosis (antistructure). Turner displaced this percep- tion to the level of social interaction, where with regard to antistructure nothing is to be seen. In the case of the Mukanda-performances described by Turner and other anthro- pologists between the 1950s and 1980s, a ritual symbolism relating to referents specific to adolescence, was prophylactically applied upon boys during their laten-cy-period. Some decades before Turners fieldwork this was unusual at least with some of the tribes practicing this ritual: Mukanda is not a latency- but an adoles-cence-ritual. To verify these parts of my thesis, a psychoanalytic interpretation of Mukanda (essentially based on publications of Gerhard Kubik), a description of the psycho- analytic concept of adolescence, and a definition of the notions of identity and structure which are relevant to this concept, are required. Concerning the possibilities of empirically verifying the quality of psychic struc- ture of an individual, I refer to Otto Kernbergs concept of structural diagnosis and to the axis structure of the operationalized psychodynamic diagnostics (OPD). My research-method is a psychoanalytic one and I especially refer to concepts of psychoanalytic structure- and object relations theory: I treat the parts of Turners work being in question as components of psychoanalytic facts and interpret the phenomenon becoming manifest in Turners confusion of levels of reference as a process of displacement, a process which was supported by his oscillating between structural-functionalism and psychoanalysis, his being betwixt and between Durkheim and Freud.