ritual

A service or ceremony enacted with a religious purpose or
intent, whether such a purpose or intent is conscious or UNCONSCIOUS
(see ENACTMENT; RELIGION). Ritual performances are based upon
mythological and archetypal themes, express their messages symbolically,
involve a person totally, convey a sense of heightened MEANING
for the individual and, at the same time, rely upon representations
congenial to the SPIRIT of the times (see ARCHETYPE; MYTH; SYMBOL).
When individual and COLLECTIVE rites no longer embody the spirit
of the times, new archetypal representations are sought or new interpretations
are given to old forms in order to compensate the
altered state of CONSCIOUSNESS.
Ritual functions as a psychic container for TRANSFORMATION (i.e.
INITIATION; MARRIAGE) when the psychological balance of a person
is threatened by the unexpected pq,wer of the NUMINOSUM during a
period of change from one status or way of being to another. lung
believed that man expressed his rilOst important and fundamental
psychological conditions in ritual and that if appropriate rituals were
not provided, persons spontaneously and unconsciously devised
rituals to safeguard the stability of the personality as the’ transition

from one psychological condition to another was affected. The ritual
itself does not affect the transformation, however; it merely contains
it.
lung’s interest in ritual occasioned his journeys to Africa, India,
and to the Indian tribes in the south-western part of the United
States. He was especially attracted to rituals of initiation, finding in
them parallels of psychological processes and progressions made by
the individual at different STAGES OF LIFE. In work with his patients
he observed that a reliance upon ritual was an aspect of each increase
in consciousness. His work on the psychology of the transference
(CW 16) can be seen as an INTERPRETATION of the ritual symbolism
of a psychological metamorphosis.
M. Eliade, anthropologist and student of comparative religion, was
a resource and colleague for lung in this field of investigation. Henderson
has related rites of initiation to clinical findings (1967), as has
Perry (1976).