A cerimônia de casamento como rito de passagem

Abstract

The wedding ceremony is one of the old rites of passage, remaining in contemporary society in spite of an increasing number of free unions where the conjugal bond constitutes itself without intervention of Church or State. This ritual seems to survive currently and involve the engaged couple and their family of origin psychologically, marking a individual, familiar and social transition. For Analytical Psychology, rituals and, specifically, the rites of passage, can propitiate a psychological rebirth and consequent personality development. In the family life cycle perspective, the changes marked by the rites of passage, including marriage, affect not only the person who submits himself to the rite, but also his hole family, causing an increase of familiar stress in these periods. This ritual marks other challenges that not only families, but also bride and groom, as a couple and separately, have to overcome in order to constitute a third family, as for example, to form a conjugal system. The goals of this study were: comprehend the couple’s subjective experiences during the transition period that antecedes and follows the wedding ceremony; comprehend the familiar and conjugal relationships during this period and also how bride and groom perceives the changes of familiar and conjugal bonds; identify archetypical themes experienced by the engaged couple and evaluate the existence of any behavior that can be considered as having an initiatory character. Narrative interviews were done in regular periods immediately before and after the wedding, followed by thematic analysis. Five couples from medium and upper classes, who get married with a religious ceremony and a wedding party, participated on this study. The results were divided in two parts. In the first part, the results of the interviews as a hole were presented and discussed. This analysis signalized the existence of a division in gender papers concerning the wedding arrangements and the domestic tasks division in the beginning of the married life, the emphasis in the imminent separation of the parents that the brides and their mothers experienced and the bride and groom perception that the wedding marks a expressive change in their lives. In the second part, each couple history were treated separately, presenting expressive familiar, conjugal and individual changes, in men and women. The results points to the permanence of the wedding ceremony as a rite of passage and to the possibility of constituting a kind of an archetypical initiatory skeleton.