Ontological Insecurity: When Feeling Real Isn't a Given

In 1960 the London publisher Tavistock Publications brought out the first book by R. D. Laing, a Scottish psychiatrist then doing research at the Tavistock Clinic. The Divided Self was built from his work with people in psychosis, and its third chapter gave a name to something psychiatry had no ordinary word for. Laing called it ontological insecurity.

Ontological insecurity is the absence of the basic, taken-for-granted sense of being real. Most people experience themselves as alive, whole, continuous from one day to the next and distinct from other people so completely that they never think about it. Laing called that primary ontological security. For someone who lacks it, existence itself is never settled, so ordinary life, including being understood and being loved, can register as a threat to it.

What Laing meant by ontological insecurity

Laing meant a problem with being, not with confidence. An insecure person in the everyday sense worries whether people like them. The person Laing described cannot take for granted that they are there to be liked.

His phrase for the secure position was that a person experiences their own being as “real, alive, whole”. They feel located in their body, they feel the same person as yesterday, and their identity and autonomy are never really in question. None of this is an achievement. It is the ground people stand on without noticing, the way you do not notice the floor until it moves.

The insecure person has to do by effort what everyone else gets for free. They have to keep establishing that they exist, that they are separate, that they are not about to dissolve into someone else or into nothing. Laing’s point was that once you see this, a lot of behaviour that looks bizarre from outside starts to make sense from inside. Withdrawal and the refusal to be known stop looking like symptoms and start looking like defences of a self that does not feel it can survive contact.

The three dreads: engulfment, implosion and petrification

Laing described three characteristic fears, and each turns an ordinary good into a danger.

The first is engulfment. For most people, being understood is a relief. For the ontologically insecure, it can feel like being swallowed. If your sense of where you end and another person begins is thin, their closeness threatens to absorb you, and so love and understanding become things to fend off. Laing noticed that some patients reacted badly at the very moment a doctor understood them.

The second is implosion. Here the fear is that the world will come crashing in and obliterate an inner emptiness, and that the emptiness, however bleak, is at least something that belongs to you. Contact with reality becomes the threat.

The third is petrification, and with it depersonalisation: the fear of being turned into a thing. Another person’s look, or the way they handle you, can reduce you to an object, and the insecure person may do this to others first, treating them as things so they cannot do it back.

What unites the three is that the dangers are ordinary. Nobody is attacking these people. The threat is closeness itself.

The false self that does the living

Laing’s answer to how people survive this was a divided arrangement he called the false-self system, and it is where his work meets Winnicott’s. The inner self withdraws and keeps itself safe by staying out of contact, while a compliant, outward-facing self handles the world. It is the false self that goes to work and does what is expected. The inner self watches, unexposed and increasingly unreal to itself, because a self that never engages with anything has nothing to be real in.

Winnicott had described a similar split in infancy, a compliant self that forms when a child has to adapt to the environment too early. Laing took the idea somewhere darker. In his account the arrangement protects the inner self and slowly starves it at the same time, and in the cases he wrote about, the strategy could end in psychosis. The same logic runs, in milder forms, through the fear of a breakdown that feels like it has already happened, and through the question of what “good enough” care is protecting against.

How a psychiatric idea ended up describing nation-states

If you search the term today, most of what comes back is about politics, and there is a traceable reason.

In 1991 the sociologist Anthony Giddens borrowed Laing’s term in Modernity and Self-Identity and reshaped it. For Giddens, ontological security was the confidence that comes from routine, from the continuity of your life story and the predictability of your surroundings, and late modern life, with its loosened traditions and constant choices, put that confidence under strain.

In the 2000s international relations scholars took the idea one step further. Jennifer Mitzen argued in 2006 that states seek ontological security too: a stable identity kept up through routinised relationships with other states, even with enemies, which helps explain why countries sometimes cling to conflicts they could escape. By 2020, Catarina Kinnvall and Mitzen were writing that research on the idea had mushroomed and then run into an impasse, with critics complaining that it tilted towards explaining attachment to the status quo.

Something got lost on the way. Laing’s concept came from people for whom being understood felt like being swallowed. The borrowed version is about routine and narrative. It keeps his vocabulary of continuity and drops the terror.

What the evidence does and does not show

Ontological insecurity was never turned into a standard psychological measure, and it is not a diagnosis. Laing wrote clinical descriptions, not a scale. Attempts to measure it have been small: in 1988 the psychologist David Lester published a two-page note in Personality and Individual Differences relating parts of the concept to the ordinary personality traits of extraversion and neuroticism. That is close to the whole empirical record for the clinical version.

Laing’s later work also moved well beyond The Divided Self, into claims about families causing schizophrenia and a rejection of mainstream psychiatry, and those claims became the most contested part of his legacy. The early book holds up better as description than his later theories do as explanation.

So the firm ground is this. The Divided Self gives an unusually exact account of what it is like to lack the sense of being real, drawn from people who lacked it badly. It was not a theory the field went on to test, and it should not be used to diagnose anyone, yourself included. If Laing’s descriptions land close to your own experience, that is a reason to talk to someone qualified, not a reason to adopt the term as a label.

What the book still does, sixty-odd years on, is make the ordinary strange. Most people’s sense of existing was given to them before they could ask for it, and they walk around on it without a thought. Laing wrote about people who never received it, who spend their lives doing by hand what everyone else was handed. Whether that makes the rest of us secure, or just unaware of what we are standing on, the book does not say.

FAQ

What is ontological insecurity?

It is R. D. Laing’s term, from The Divided Self (1960), for lacking the basic, taken-for-granted sense of being real, alive, whole, continuous in time and distinct from other people. Laing called the ordinary version of that sense primary ontological security. Where it is missing, everyday contact with other people can feel like a threat to existence itself, not just to comfort or self-esteem.

What are engulfment, implosion and petrification?

The three forms of dread Laing described in ontologically insecure people. Engulfment is the fear that being understood or loved will swallow you. Implosion is the fear that reality will rush in and obliterate an inner emptiness. Petrification is the fear of being turned into a thing, an object without a life of its own, by someone else’s look or treatment.

Is ontological insecurity a mental health diagnosis?

No. It is a descriptive concept from existential psychiatry, not a diagnosis in any current manual, and it was never developed into a standard psychological measure. Laing drew it from work with people in psychosis. If the descriptions feel close to your own experience, that is worth talking through with a qualified clinician rather than treating the term as a label.

What is the difference between ontological security in psychology and in politics?

Laing’s version describes an individual’s felt sense of being real. The sociologist Anthony Giddens adapted the term in Modernity and Self-Identity (1991) to mean the security that comes from routine and a continuous personal story, and international relations scholars from the 2000s applied that version to states. The political version keeps the idea of continuity and drops most of the terror Laing was describing.