Through the Classroom Lens: Existential Liminality Explained
Transcript
Today we’re going to dive into a paper by Professor RJ Starr titled Existential Liminality: A Theoretical Investigation into Identity Disruption and Transitional States. That’s a mouthful, I know. But if we break it down, the idea at the heart of this paper is something all of us have lived through, whether we’ve had the words for it or not.
RJ Starr is an academic psychologist and independent scholar. He writes at the intersection of psychology, culture, and meaning-making. He’s not a therapist sitting in an office, but more of a public thinker and teacher — someone who builds frameworks to help us see our own lives more clearly. His work often draws from existential psychology, identity theory, and cultural analysis. He has a knack for taking concepts that sound abstract, like “liminality,” and showing us why they matter to our everyday struggles with identity, belonging, and purpose.
So, what’s this paper about? At its core, Starr is talking about the in-between. Those periods of life when you’re no longer who you used to be, but you’re not yet who you’re going to become. That’s what he calls existential liminality.
Now, liminality is not a new word. It comes from anthropology. Back in the early 1900s, Arnold van Gennep studied rites of passage — things like weddings, funerals, initiations, graduations. He noticed that these rituals usually had three stages: separation, liminality, and incorporation. First you leave your old role, then you go through this strange middle phase where everything feels unsettled, and finally you re-enter society with a new role. Victor Turner later called that middle phase being “betwixt and between.” It’s the threshold moment, when old structures break down and new possibilities open up.
Now here’s the problem: psychology hasn’t done nearly enough with this concept. Sure, we talk about adolescence, or midlife crises, or identity development, but we usually frame growth as linear. You pass through a stage, you integrate, and you move on. If you get stuck, we often call it pathology — a disorder, a breakdown.
But Starr is saying: wait a minute. What if these in-between states are not dysfunction at all? What if they’re necessary phases of becoming? What if confusion, disorientation, and even emotional flatness aren’t signs of failure, but part of the process of identity breaking down and rebuilding? That’s the big move of this paper.
So, what does this mean? Let me give you an example. Imagine graduating from college. You’ve handed in your last paper, you’ve taken the graduation photos, and suddenly you realize: you’re no longer a student. But you’re not yet anything else. You don’t feel like a professional, you don’t have a stable identity in the world, and you can’t go back. That feeling of being suspended, unmoored, and a little scared? That’s liminality. And Starr argues it’s not just a cultural phenomenon. It’s a deep psychological state.
He calls it existential liminality because it doesn’t only show up in ceremonies like graduations or weddings. It can come from internal ruptures: loss, betrayal, disillusionment, or even a sudden realization that your life as you’ve been living it doesn’t make sense anymore. When this happens, people often report things like “I don’t know who I am anymore” or “I feel like I’m in between lives.” Sound familiar? Many of us have had moments like that.
I’ll be honest — it reminds me of a time in my own life when I had left a job that had basically defined who I was. Suddenly, people asked me, “So what do you do?” and I had no good answer. I wasn’t who I had been, but I wasn’t yet who I was becoming. It was uncomfortable, even a little terrifying. That’s the lived experience of existential liminality.
The paper makes an important distinction here: liminality is not the same as crisis. Crisis is sharp, urgent, and usually tied to a specific event. You lose a loved one, you get laid off, you experience a traumatic disruption. Crisis requires immediate stabilization. Liminality, by contrast, is slower, longer, and deeper. It’s not about getting back to “normal.” It’s about reconstituting who you are at a fundamental level.
This is where psychology has often gone wrong. We pathologize these liminal states. We treat them as mood disorders, adjustment disorders, or even personality disturbances. Therapists might try to restore equilibrium too quickly, to push someone back into coherence when what they really need is time in the in-between. Starr warns that this can short-circuit genuine transformation.
So, what does it actually feel like to be in this liminal state? Starr describes it phenomenologically — meaning from the inside out. People in liminality often feel a breakdown of narrative identity. They can’t connect their past, present, and future into a coherent story. Their sense of time collapses. The past feels distant, the future feels inaccessible, and the present feels flat. Emotionally, they might swing between numbness and overwhelm. Cognitively, they might loop in circles, obsessing without resolution. They can even feel estranged from others, unable to relate because they no longer have a stable self to present.
That sounds pretty bleak, right? But Starr insists it’s not pathology. It’s the psyche’s way of reorganizing itself. Think of it as the demolition phase before reconstruction. You can’t build a new structure on top of the old one — you have to let the scaffolding fall first.
Now, here’s a question you might be asking: why does this matter more now than before? Starr argues that modern culture has actually made liminality harder. Traditional societies used rituals to contain these thresholds. Weddings, funerals, initiations — they weren’t just parties, they were communal ways of saying, “Yes, you are in transition, but we will hold you through it.” In our modern, individualistic culture, those rituals are weaker. Social media offers pseudo-rituals, like changing your status, but they lack depth and communal support. As a result, more people are navigating liminality alone.
This is especially true for marginalized groups. Queer individuals, immigrants, people who don’t fit into dominant categories often live in a kind of chronic liminality. They’re never fully integrated, always “in between.” Starr says this isn’t just an occasional life stage for them — it’s an ongoing psychological condition, imposed by social structures.
Now let’s look at how this plays out across the lifespan. In adolescence, you’re no longer a child but not yet an adult. Erikson called this identity versus role confusion. Starr reframes it as existential liminality: the dissolving of inherited meaning structures, with no stable adult self yet in place. In midlife, you’ve built an identity — parent, professional, partner — and then those roles start to lose coherence. That’s when the scaffolding collapses and you ask, “What remains when what I was no longer fits?” Later in life, liminality often comes with retirement, loss, or aging. Roles fade, the future narrows, and the life narrative itself can start to dissolve. Each of these stages carries not only risk, but also the possibility of deeper reconstruction.
It reminds me of something one of my own professors once said: “The most important changes in life don’t happen when everything is clear. They happen when you don’t know who you are anymore.” That’s exactly the spirit of existential liminality.
So where does this leave us clinically? Starr argues that therapists need to learn to hold these states without rushing them. Instead of pushing for quick clarity, the task is to contain, to witness, and to help clients endure the ambiguity. In other words, the therapist becomes a kind of ritual container, offering the symbolic holding that society no longer provides.
And culturally, the paper challenges us to rethink how we mark transitions. If rituals are hollow, if social media performances are shallow, then how do we create new ways to honor the thresholds of our lives? Starr doesn’t give us a blueprint, but he insists the question matters. Because without collective recognition, people are left alone in what he calls a “psychic waiting room” — suspended, disoriented, but also on the verge of becoming.
Let me pause here and ask: so, what does this mean for you, sitting in this classroom? It means that the disorientation you sometimes feel — the “I don’t know who I am anymore” moments — may not be a problem to solve. They may be part of the very process by which you grow into a deeper version of yourself. Starr’s paper invites us to see those moments not as breakdowns, but as thresholds.
To wrap up, here are the takeaways. Liminality, originally an anthropological concept, has huge psychological significance. It’s not the same as crisis, and it shouldn’t be pathologized. Existential liminality is a prolonged state of suspended identity and disrupted meaning that can be painful but is also fertile ground for transformation. Starr’s work is urging psychology to take this concept seriously — to name it, to validate it, and to hold it, rather than rushing to erase it.
That concludes the explanation part of the paper. Now let’s open the floor for questions and discussion — and maybe even share a few of our own experiences of being “betwixt and between.”