ABSTRACT
In this paper I try to address a widespread and essentially mysterious form of trauma primarily associated with what van Gennep (1960) labeled the “rites de passage”of adolescence—the willfully imposed, and usually voluntarily accepted, cruelties of initiation rites, which, far from destroying the social fabric, appear to sustain society. As Frazer (1922) observed, the essence of the rite of initiation is trauma—“the essence of these initiatory rites, so far as they consist in a simulation of death and resurrection” (p. 802).
