Ontological security and trust

Practical consciousness is the cognitive and emotive anchor of the feelings of ontological security characteristic of large segments of human activity in all cultures. The notion of ontological security ties in closely to the tacit character of practical consciousness -- or, in phenomenological terms, to the `bracketings' presumed by the `natural attitude' in everyday life. On the other side of what might appear to be quite trivial aspects of day-to-day action and discourse, chaos lurks. And this chaos is not just disorganisation, but the loss of a sense of the very reality of things and of other persons. Garfinkel's `experiments' with ordinary language connect very closely here with philosophical reflection about the elemental characteristics of human existence. <sup>2</sup> To answer even the simplest everyday query, or respond to the most cursory remark, demands the bracketing of a potentially almost infinite range of possibilities open to the individual. What makes a given response `appropriate' or `acceptable' necessitates a shared -- but unproven and unprovable -- framework of reality. A sense of the shared reality of people and things is simultaneously sturdy and fragile. Its robustness is conveyed by the high level of reliability of the contexts of day-to-day social interaction, as these are produced and reproduced by lay agents. Garfinkel's experiments contravened conventions so firmly held that the reactions of those exposed to these breaches were dramatic and immediate.

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Those reactions were ones of cognitive and emotional disorientation. The fragility of the natural attitude is evident to anyone who studies the protocols of Garfinkel's work. What happens is a flooding in of anxiety which the ordinary conventions of day-to-day life usually keep successfully at bay. The natural attitude brackets out questions about ourselves, others and the object-world which have to be taken for granted in order to keep on with everyday activity. Answers to these questions, if they were to be posed in a blunt way, are more radically uncertain than the sense in which knowledge as a whole `lacks foundations'; or rather, the difficulties inherent in resolving them are a fundamental part of why more seemingly `provable' forms of knowledge and claims cannot be given a completely secure base. To live our lives, we normally take for granted issues which, as centuries of philosophical enquiry have found, wither away under the sceptical gaze. Such issues include those quite properly called existential, whether posed on the level of philosophical analysis, or on a more practical level by individuals passing through a period of psychological crisis. They are questions of time, space, continuity and identity. In the natural attitude, actors take for granted existential parameters of their activity that are sustained, but in no way `grounded' by the interactional conventions they observe. Existentially, these presume a tacit acceptance of the categories of duration and extension, together with the identity of objects, other persons and -- particularly important for this study -- the self.

To investigate such matters on the level of abstract philosophical discussion is, of course, quite different from actually `living' them. The chaos that threatens on the other side of the ordinariness of everyday conventions can be seen psychologically as dread in Kierkegaard's sense: the prospect of being overwhelmed by anxieties that reach to the very roots of our coherent sense of `being in the world'. Practical consciousness, together with the day-to-day routines reproduced by it, help bracket such anxieties not only, or even primarily, because of the social stability that they imply, but because of their constitutive role in organising an `as if' environment in relation to existential issues. They provide modes of orientation which, on the level of practice, `answer' the questions which could be raised about the frameworks of existence. It is of central importance to the analysis which follows to

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see that the anchoring aspects of such `answers' are emotional rather than simply cognitive. How far different cultural settings allow a `faith' in the coherence of everyday life to be achieved through providing symbolic interpretations of existential questions is, as we shall see below, very important. But cognitive frames of meaning will not generate that faith without a corresponding level of underlying emotional commitment -- whose origins, I shall argue, are largely unconscious. Trust, hope and courage are all relevant to such commitment.

How is such faith achieved in terms of the psychological development of the human being? What creates a sense of ontological security that will carry the individual through transitions, crises and circumstances of high risk? Trust in the existential anchorings of reality in an emotional, and to some degree in a cognitive, sense rests on confidence in the reliability of persons, acquired in the early experiences of the infant. What Erik Erikson, echoing D. W. Winnicott, calls `basic trust' forms the original nexus from which a combined emotive-cognitive orientation towards others, the object-world, and self-identity, emerges. <sup>3</sup> The experience of basic trust is the core of that specific `hope' of which Ernst Bloch speaks, and is at origin of what Tillich calls `the courage to be'. As developed through the loving attentions of early caretakers, basic trust links self-identity in a fateful way to the appraisals of others. The mutuality with early caretakers which basic trust presumes is a substantially unconscious sociality which precedes an `I' and a `me', and is a prior basis of any differentiation between the two.

Basic trust is connected in an essential way to the interpersonal organisation of time and space. An awareness of the separate identity of the parenting figures originates in the emotional acceptance of absence: the `faith' that the caretaker will return, even though she or he is no longer in the presence of the infant. Basic trust is forged through what Winnicott calls the `potential space' (actually, a phenomenon of time-space) which relates, yet distances, infant and prime caretaker. Potential space is created as the means whereby the infant makes the move from omnipotence to a grasp of the reality principle. `Reality' here, however, should not be understood simply as a given object-world, but as a set of experiences organised constitutively through the mutuality of infant and caretakers.

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From the early days of life, habit and routine play a fundamental role in the forging of relations in the potential space between infant and caretakers. Core connections are established between routine, the reproduction of coordinating conventions, and feelings of ontological security in the later activities of the individual. From these connections we can see why seemingly minor aspects of day-to-day routines come to be invested with the emotional significance which Garfinkels `experiments' revealed. Yet at the same time, daily routines express deep-lying ambivalences which their early involvement with discipline implies. Routine activities, as Wittgenstein made clear, are never just carried out in an automatic way. In respect of control of the body and discourse, the actor must maintain constant vigilance in order to be able to `go on' in social life. The maintaining of habits and routines is a crucial bulwark against threatening anxieties, yet by that very token it is a tensionful phenomenon in and of itself.

The infant, as Winnicott says, is `all the time on the brink of unthinkable anxiety'. The very young child is not a `being', but a `going-on being', who has to be `called into existence' by the nurturing environment which the caretaker provides. ⁴ The discipline of routine helps to constitute a `formed framework' for existence by cultivating a sense of `being', and its separation from `non-being', which is elemental to ontological security. It includes orientations towards aspects of the object-world that carry symbolic residues into the later life of the individual. `Transitional objects', in Winnicott's terminology, bridge the potential space between infant and caretakers. These first `not-me' objects, like the routines with which they are virtually always connected, are both defences against anxiety and simultaneously links with an emerging experience of a stabilised world of objects and persons. Transitional objects predate `reality testing' in Freud's sense, since they are part of the concrete means whereby the child passes from omnipotent control to control by means of manipulation.

The trust which the child, in normal circumstances, vests in its caretakers, I want to argue, can be seen as a sort of emotional inoculation against existential anxieties -- a protection against future threats and dangers which allows the individual to sustain hope and courage in the face of whatever debilitating circumstances she or he might later confront. Basic trust is a screening-off

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device in relation to risks and dangers in the surrounding settings of action and interaction. It is the main emotional support of a defensive carapace or protective cocoon which all normal individuals carry around with them as the means whereby they are able to get on with the affairs of day-to-day life.

The sustaining of life, in a bodily sense as well as in the sense of psychological health, is inherently subject to risk. The fact that the behaviour of human beings is so strongly influenced by mediated experience, together with the calculative capacities which human agents possess, mean that every human individual could (in principle) be overwhelmed by anxieties about risks which are implied by the very business of living. That sense of `invulnerability' which blocks off negative possibilities in favour of a generalised attitude of hope derives from basic trust. The protective cocoon is essentially a sense of `unreality' rather than a firm conviction of security: it is a bracketing, on the level of practice, of possible events which could threaten the bodily or psychological integrity of the agent. The protective barrier it offers may be pierced, temporarily or more permanently, by happenings which demonstrate as real the negative contingencies built into all risk. Which car driver, passing by the scene of a serious traffic accident, has not had the experience of being so sobered as to drive more slowly -- for a few miles -- afterwards? Such an example is one which demonstrates -- not in a counterfactual universe of abstract possibilities, but in a tangible and vivid way -- the risks of driving, and thereby serves temporarily to pull apart the protective cocoon. But the feeling of relative invulnerability soon returns and the chances are that the driver then tends to speed up again.

Emphasising the interdependence of taken-for-granted routines and ontological security does not mean that a sense of `the beneficence of things' derives from a dogged adherence to habit. On the contrary, a blind commitment to established routines, come what may, is a sign of neurotic compulsion. This is a compulsiveness which has its origins in the infant's failure -- for whatever reason -- to open out potential space in a way that generates basic trust. It is a compulsiveness born out of unmastered anxiety, which lacks that specific hope which creates social involvements over and above established patterns. If routine is a central element of the autonomy of the developing individual, it

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follows that the practical mastery of how to `go on' in the contexts of social life is not inimical to creativity, but presumes it and is presumed by it. The paradigm case is the acquisition and use of language, but what applies in the discursive domain also applies to earlier forms of learning or experience.

Creativity, which means the capability to act or think innovatively in relation to pre-established modes of activity, is closely tied to basic trust. Trust itself, by its very nature, is in a certain sense creative, because it entails a commitment that is a `leap into the unknown', a hostage to fortune which implies a preparedness to embrace novel experiences. However, to trust is also (unconsciously or otherwise) to face the possibility of loss: in the case of basic trust, the possible loss of the succour of the caretaking figure or figures. Fear of loss generates effort; the relations which sustain basic trust are `worked at' emotionally by the child in conjunction with learning the `cognitive work' that has to be put into even the most repetitive enactment of convention.

A creative involvement with others and with the object-world is almost certainly a fundamental component of psychological satisfaction and the discovery of `moral meaning'. We do not need to resort to an arcane philosophical anthropology to see that the experience of creativity as a routine phenomenon is a basic prop to a sense of personal worth and therefore to psychological health. Where individuals cannot live creatively, either because of the compulsive enactment of routines, or because they have been unable to attribute full `solidity' to persons and objects around them, chronic melancholic or schizophrenic tendencies are likely to result. Winnicott points out that an `average expectable environment' in the early life of the child is the necessary condition of the development of such creative involvement. The infant has to go through a phase of `madness' which, in Winnicott's words, `enables the baby to be mad in one particular way that is conceded to babies', and which `only becomes madness if it appears in later life'. The `madness' of the infant is its creativity, at the stage at which early routines are being acquired and are opening out the potential space between the child and its caretakers. The infant `creates an object but the object would not have been created as such if it had not already been there'. ⁵

The establishing of basic trust is the condition of the elaboration of self-identity just as much as it is of the identity of other

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persons and of objects. The potential space between infant and caretakers provides the means of repudiating the other object as `not-me'. From the phase of being merged with the main caretaking agent, the infant separates itself from that agent, at the same time as the caretaker reduces the degree of constant attention given to fulfilling the child's needs. The potential space which allows for an early (and unconscious) not-me to emerge through separation parallels the stage of separating attained at some point in adult psychotherapy. As in early infant attachments, a break which is not achieved through trust and reliability can produce traumatic consequences. In both infant and adult patient, trust is a mode of coping with the time-space absences implied in the opening out of potential space. Although in a more conscious and self-aware fashion, like an infant the patient lets go as part and parcel of a process of achieving autonomy, in which the separation is also tolerated by the analyst.

Date: 2016-04-22; view: 1057