Ontological insecurity is R. D. Laing’s term for a precarious sense of existing as a real, continuous, autonomous person. It describes a difficulty in feeling securely present in one’s own life, with boundaries that allow contact with other people without the loss of oneself.
What does “ontological” mean here?
Ontology concerns being. In chapter 3 of The Divided Self, Laing uses the term to direct attention towards the person’s sense of their own existence. His description includes feeling real and alive, experiencing continuity over time, possessing an identity distinct from other people, and feeling that one’s existence has substance. [1]
Laing begins with the sense of continuity that insecurity puts into question:
A man may have a sense of his presence in the world as a real, alive, whole, and, in a temporal sense, a continuous person.
R. D. Laing — The Divided Self, p. 39 [1]
A person with a relatively secure basis of this kind can still suffer intensely. Loss, shame, conflict, uncertainty, and fear remain possible. The distinction concerns whether those difficulties occur within a reasonably secure sense of self or appear to threaten that self at a more fundamental level.
Ordinary language can obscure the difference. “I feel insecure” might mean uncertainty about a job interview, a friendship, or one’s appearance. Laing’s account asks a more basic question: does the person experience themselves as sufficiently real and separate to take part in a relationship at all? A particular social event may become the occasion for this difficulty without being its complete explanation. [1]
Why apparently ordinary contact may become threatening
If a person experiences their identity as precarious, closeness can have a different meaning. Attention may feel invasive. Understanding may seem to capture them within someone else’s account. An invitation to depend on another person may appear to endanger the separation on which their sense of existence depends.
Laing consequently warns against assuming that withdrawal demonstrates indifference. In the account he develops, external events may affect a person intensely even when their outward response looks remote. The attempt to limit contact can be understood as an effort to manage that intensity. It remains an interpretation to investigate with the individual, rather than a conclusion that can be drawn from distance alone. [1]
Consider an invented example. Someone becomes distressed when a friend confidently explains what they are “really” feeling. The friend intends reassurance. The person experiences the explanation as replacing their own account and leaving no room to exist separately. This illustrates the kind of question Laing invites us to consider; it is not a case from his book, a diagnostic sign, or proof of a particular cause.
Engulfment
Engulfment describes a fear of being absorbed into another person or relationship. Laing discusses the possibility that being loved, seen, or understood may all carry this threat. Isolation then offers some protection, although it brings loneliness and restricts the relationships through which identity might otherwise develop. [1]
The threat can therefore arise within apparently caring contact:
Engulfment is felt as a risk in being understood (thus grasped, comprehended), in being loved, or even simply in being seen.
R. D. Laing — The Divided Self, p. 44 [1]
The resulting difficulty can be especially painful because both available directions seem dangerous. Closeness risks disappearance into the other; distance risks abandonment to an increasingly private existence. More attention from a well-meaning person does not automatically resolve this problem. The meaning of the attention matters.
Implosion
Implosion concerns the threat of reality crashing into and overwhelming a precarious inner existence. Laing uses an image of a vacuum to convey a paradox: a person may feel empty while also fearing the very contact that might fill the emptiness. Even an unsatisfactory inner condition may seem to be the only identity available to preserve. [1]
This is a metaphor within a phenomenological description. It does not identify a physical event in the brain or establish a physiological mechanism. Its value depends on whether it helps clarify the experience being discussed.
Petrification and depersonalisation
Petrification concerns becoming, or being treated as, an object without a living subjective existence. Laing connects it with the fear that another person’s gaze or definition can turn a person into a thing. He also discusses the reverse manoeuvre: treating the other as an object in an attempt to reduce their threatening independence. [1]
His use of depersonalisation in this discussion includes an interpersonal meaning: the denial of another person’s autonomy and feelings. Readers should attend to that usage rather than assuming that every passage refers to a contemporary diagnosis of depersonalisation or derealisation.
The relationship with the false-self system
Later chapters describe an inner self protected from contact while outward activity is delegated to a false-self system. The connection with ontological insecurity is the attempt to remain invulnerable by keeping the most valued sense of oneself out of reach. That protection has a cost: action and relationship become less available as sources of felt reality. [1]
The two concepts should remain distinct. Ontological insecurity concerns the precariousness of being. The false-self system is one organisation of experience Laing examines in relation to that precariousness. The book does not justify using either as an explanation for every instance of social reserve, privacy, or compliance.
A concept open to disagreement
Later existential writers have questioned where Laing draws the boundary between ordinary vulnerability and clinical disturbance. Emmy van Deurzen, for example, argues that the experience identified by ontological insecurity has a much wider relevance to human life than a narrowly pathological reading allows. This is a subsequent interpretation, and its relationship with Laing’s more specific clinical account needs to be made explicit. [2]
That disagreement is useful. It asks whether ontological insecurity names a distinctive organisation of experience, a degree of vulnerability shared more widely, or different things in different uses. An authoritative explanation should identify which meaning is intended rather than moving silently between them.
Using the idea carefully
The concept can help a reader formulate questions about autonomy, continuity, embodiment, and the meaning of closeness. It is less useful when it becomes a label applied from outside. The interpretation should remain responsive to the person’s account and to alternative explanations.
Laing’s central invitation is to investigate what is threatened in an encounter. Somebody may be protecting privacy, avoiding a real danger, managing shame, or struggling to feel that they exist as a separate person. Those possibilities require different kinds of understanding. A shared outward behaviour does not make them interchangeable.
Continue with the false-self system, or return to the broader guide to The Divided Self.
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References and source notes
- Laing, R. D. (1960). The Divided Self: An Existential Study in Sanity and Madness. References use the Pelican edition, Penguin Books, 1970 reprint.Cited: chapter 3, pp. 39–42; p. 39; chapter 3, pp. 41–44; chapter 3, pp. 43–45; p. 44; chapter 3, pp. 45–46; chapter 3, pp. 46–47; chapters 4–6, especially pp. 94–96.
- van Deurzen, Emmy (2015). “Ontological Insecurity Revisited: Self-confidence Versus Anxiety.” In Paradox and Passion in Psychotherapy: An Existential Approach, second edition. Wiley. Publisher-provided chapter excerpt.Cited: opening discussion, publisher excerpt. Online source