Feeling insecure: a personal account in a psychoanalytic voice

The concept of ontological security has been taken up in human geography primarily through Giddens' (1990, 1991) formulation, but the idea has its origins in the writings of the existential psychoanalyst R.D. Laing. Returning to the psychoanalytic underpinnings of the concept, I use autobiographical vignettes to evoke and explore what it means to feel insecure. Using psychoanalytically informed illustrations of melancholia, ordinary acute anxiety and unconscious splitting, I develop a personal, subjective emotional geography of insecurity, and I caution against confusing certainty with ontological security.