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Psychoanalysis, cultures of anarchy, and ontological insecurity

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  21 July 2020

John Cash Open the ORCID record for John Cash [Opens in a new window]
John Cash*
Affiliation:
School of Social & Political Sciences, University of Melbourne, Melbourne, Australia
*
Corresponding author. E-mail: [email protected]
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Abstract

When ontological insecurity looms, what comes next? Is chaos the sole alternative to the maintenance of established role-identities and routines? Or is there a more complex set of possible responses to the dread threat of ontological insecurity? The principal approach to ontological security in International Relations (IR) relies unduly on Giddens' account. Consequently, this approach fails to adequately capture both the variety of ways in which coherent and continuous identities can be maintained and the variety of ways in which the available cultural repertoire can support ontological security differently when challenged. Typically, ontological security is re-established, prior to collapse, through re-balancing of the cultural repertoire to give broader scope to an alternative cultural form and the qualitatively different practices it organizes. Due to misrecognition, this reorganization may proceed without disturbing the ontological security of states-in-interaction. Unconscious processes, encoded into cultural forms, are integral to such variable defenses against ontological insecurity. A re-conceptualization that regards Wendt's cultures of anarchy, and their qualitatively different modes of relating, as dynamically co-present within cultural repertoires, but with potentially variable weightings, complements this approach to ontological in/security.

Keywords

ontological insecuritypsychoanalytic theorymisrecognitioncultures of anarchycultural unconsciousunconscious defense mechanismsGiddens
Type
Symposium: Anxiety, Fear, and Ontological Security in World Politics: Edited by Catarina Kinnvall and Jennifer Mitzen
Information
International Theory , Volume 12 , Issue 2 , July 2020 , pp. 306 - 321
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2020

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