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Three specific forms of anxiety experienced by the ontologically insecure person, reflecting different threats to the individual's sense of self and existence.
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CHAPTER III Ontological insecurity We can now state more precisely the nature of our clinical inquiry. A man may have a sense of his presence in the world as a real, alive, whole, and, in a temporal sense, continuous person. As such, he can live out into the world and meet others: a world and others experienced as equally real, alive, whole, and continuous. Such a basically ontologically1 secure person will encounter all the hazards of life, social, ethical, spiritual, biological, from a centrally firm sense of his own and other people’s reality and identity. It is often difficult for a person with such a sense of his integral selfhood and personal identity, of the permanency of things, of the reliability of natural processes, of the substantiality of natural processes, of the substantiality of others, to transpose himself into the world of an individual whose experiences may be utterly lacking in any unquestionable self-validating certainties. This study is concerned with the issues involved where there is the partial or almost complete absence of the assurances derived from an existential position of what I shall call primary ontological security: with anxieties and dangers that I shall suggest arise only in terms of primary ontological insecurity; and with the consequent attempts to deal with such anxieties and dangers. The literary critic, Lionel Trilling (1955), points up the con- 1 Despite the philosophical use of‘ontology’ (by Heidegger, Sartre, Tillich, especially), I have used the term in its present empirical sense because it appears to be the best adverbial or adjectival derivative of ‘being’. 40This chapter explores the concept of ontological security as the fundamental sense of being real, alive, whole, and continuous in time, which allows a person to engage meaningfully with the world and others. It contrasts ontological security with ontological insecurity, where individuals lack these self-validating certainties, leading to profound anxieties and altered experiences of reality. The chapter uses literary examples to illustrate these states and introduces clinical observations about how ontological insecurity manifests, including three forms of anxiety: engulfment, implosion, and petrification.