Introduction
The most important moments in human life—initiations, transitions to a new stage of development—are usually accompanied by rituals created by a particular culture. Rituals accumulate the experience of our ancestors who went through the same transitions generation after generation, and now, in our individual transformational period, we can rely on the stable forms of this experience, connecting us with the resources of the collective unconscious.
Together with our authors, we will try to look at rituals from different angles and discover the non-obvious facets of this phenomenon.
Let's start by relying on cultural traditions. Folk ritual practices are usually accompanied by music/singing. Analytical psychologist and music educator Ekaterina Makarenko shows what music and myths have in common and how a certain structure of sounds in ritual songs not only accompanies a person in transition but also helps to accomplish it. Folk rituals once merged with religious ones. Theologian and Jungian analyst Uwe Steffen examines water in the context of religious rituals and shows its symbolic meaning in psychic transformations throughout our lives—from birth to death. Olga Smagina links the repetition characteristic of ritual actions with archetypal patterns and reflects on the meaning of repetitions in culture, individuation, and analytical practice.
Now it's time to look at rituals with a critical professional eye. American researchers point out that strict adherence to rules in ritual behavior (characteristic, for example, of tribal culture) resembles obsessive-compulsive behavior (Alan P. Fiske and Siri Duehlmann). Indeed, in its extreme form, the ritualization of actions becomes a pathology, with its help people try to protect themselves from intrusions of the unconscious, to control it. However, in modern culture, much attention is paid to the development and value of control. American colleagues, creators of a podcast on analytical psychology (J. Lee, L. Marciano, D. Stuart), reflect on these paradoxes of OCD.
The Jungian focus highlights a very important aspect of rituals—connection with the sacred. That is why, together with researchers of Pacific tribes, we talk about common mechanisms but do not consider their ritual behavior pathological. About how to differentiate and maintain the psychoanalytic and Jungian paradigms, how to see the chance of transition from linear time stagnation to eventful time—in Susan Shept’s article, which offers two interpretations of a famous biblical dream and talks about her own age transition.
Contact with mana, psychic energy, and spiritual power is an important feature of transitions. Anthropologist Charles Laughlin devotes an article to the study of the mystical transpersonal experience, which is universal for all cultures.
What about analytical practice? And here rituals accompany us! Our colleagues Anna Pankova and Anna Sinitsyna analyze the rituals of entering therapy, and Roman Kononov considers analysis through the prism of epistolary genre/ritual.
Rules and agreements, framework and container, planning and control, education and science—all this is impossible without ritualization, but how to grasp the symbolic meaning of ritual, its binding and at the same time liberating essence? In 1823, Pushkin, while exiled in Bessarabia, wrote a poem related to a well-known ritual—releasing birds on Annunciation Day:
In a foreign land I sacredly observe
The native custom of old times:
I release a bird into freedom
On the bright holiday of spring.
I have become open to consolation;
Why should I grumble at God,
When to at least one creature
I could grant freedom!
Sometimes the very performance of a ritual performs the necessary psychic work within. We hope that this issue will also accompany your transitional processes.
Maria Loseva, Elena Purtova
Contents
Viewpoint
Susan Shept. Jacob's Ladder Dreams: Freudian and Jungian Perspectives
Olga Smagina. Repetition as an Archetypal Pattern
Ritual and Traditions
Ekaterina Makarenko. Folk Music in Ritual Practices
Uwe Steffen. The Symbolic Meaning of Water (Part I)
Ritual: Between Norm and Pathology
Siri Duehlmann, Alan P. Fiske. Cultural Rituals and Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder: Is There a Common Psychological Mechanism?
Joseph Lee, Lisa Marciano, Deborah Stewart. OCD: The Tormenting State of Suppression
Analytical Ritual
Anna Pankova, Anna Sinitsyna. Starting Analysis. Analyzing the Start
Roman Kononov. The Epistolary Metaphor in Psychological Practice
Living with Mana
Charles D. Laughlin. Mana: Psychic Energy, Spiritual Power, and the Perceiving Brain
Analytical Study of the Image
Christian Gaillard. Jung, Picasso, and the Color Blue (Conclusion)
