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This is a collection of thirty-one papers on the subject of initiation and rites of passage at all stages of life, approximately half the contributors being practising analysts (nearly all from the C. G. Jung Institute in Zurich), and the rest anthropologists, writers, youth workers and counsellors.
The book is divided into seven main sections concerning, respectively, initiation in liminal periods, youth, men, women, personal initiation, old age and dying, and initiation in ancient and modern forms.
Paradoxically, the subject of initiation is at one and the same time beloved of analytical psychologists and yet curiously neglected in the literature. Perhaps because analysis is always almost by definition concerned with transitions and trying to promote development which has become obstructed, the essential ingredients of transitional states in everyday life do not get so much attention.
This collection represents a most ambitious—one might almost say, heroic—attempt to give comprehensive treatment to the field, and the result is some fascinating and instructive material. At the same time the question arises as to whether it is a little over-ambitious, with the consequence that the result is lacking in focus and scattered. This applies particularly to the question of what sort of reader the book caters for.
Some chapters, such as chapter 6, ‘Vision quest’ by Steven Foster and Meredith Little, and chapter 2, by John Allan and Pat Dyck, ‘Transition from childhood to adolescence’, are straight handbook material for teachers of older students; in fact, the latter is actually called a developmental curriculum.
Other chapters concern explorations of the anthropological arcana of primitive initiation rites, for example chapter 14, ‘The Mescalero Apache girl's puberty ceremony’ by Claire R. Farrer, which would perhaps tend to be of interest only to the more devoted student of archetypal psychology and other anthropologists.
Other chapters take us straight into the consulting room