john d. cash: university of melbourne paper prepared for ...web.isanet.org/web/conferences/ap hong...

Ontological Insecurity, Cultures of Anarchy and the

Unconscious

John D. Cash: University of Melbourne

Paper prepared for the International Studies Association, Asia-Pacific Conference: Hong Kong, June 25-27th 2016.

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E-mail: [email protected]

Ontological Insecurity, Cultures of Anarchy and the Unconscious

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In the past several years the concept of ontological security has found its way

into International Relations theory, where it has provided a valuable means of

expanding understandings of what is engaged and what is at stake in the achievement

or maintenance of security within and between States. Anthony Giddens’ depiction of

ontological security has formed the basis of this development in IR theory (Giddens

1984 & 1991). In particular, Giddens’ account of how chaos haunts the ontological

security of individuals has subsequently been extended to the analysis of international

relations between states, particularly in the ground-breaking work of Mitzen (2006)

and Steele (2005 & 2008). For both, the resilience or stickiness of a State’s or

institution’s adherence to its role-identity can be best understood as the effect of the

anticipated and feared chaos and radical disruption that stepping out of that role-

identity and its self-affirming routines would generate. It is on this basis that

attachments to established role-identities and routines are formed and, thereafter,

deepened over time and in relation to the reciprocal practices and role-identities of

other interacting States.

In this account, in order to maintain a coherent identity and a set of routines that

reaffirms that identity – that is, in order to maintain ontological security – State

institutions develop a tendency to relate to other States and other groups and

institutions in a quite specific way, organized by a quite specific culture of anarchy

with particular qualitative characteristics that, in turn, organize the reciprocal

construction of self and other and the norms of legitimacy for the exercise of power,

authority and violence. Following Wendt (1999), we could say that they adhere to

either Hobbesian, Lockean or Kantian modes of interaction and over time these

modes of interaction become more deeply internalized, thereby both organizing and


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constraining that relationship more thoroughly and, also, profoundly affecting the

self-understanding and identity of the States in interaction and their institutions and

agents. A major pay-off from this account is the recognition that a State’s need and

desire to maintain its ontological security may trump the need and desire to maintain

physical, economic or strategic security, with significant effects both internally and in

the relations between States. As Mitzen puts it with regard to conflict that maintains

the ontological security of States as they interact: “conflict may benefit a state’s

identity even as it threatens its body” (Mitzen 2006b, 365).

While I agree with many aspects of this approach, I argue that it relies unduly

on Giddens’ account of ontological security and his partial and limiting incorporation

of unconscious processes into this account. By regarding chaos as the sole alternative

to the maintenance of the practices that support an established role-identity, this

approach fails to adequately capture both the variety of ways in which psychic

integrity can be maintained and the variety of ways in which the available cultural

repertoire can support ontological security when it is challenged. For social

institutions such as nation-states participating in the international system, another,

more common option when ontological security is threatened, is to activate or

reactivate an eclipsed or repressed cultural form with its attendant political discourses,

along with the alternative routine practices it organizes. In what follows I will argue

that this shift to an alternative cultural form that is available within the cultural field,

even if previously repressed and delegitimized, is a common move for corporate

institutions such as States and other corporate agents faced with threats to their

ontological security. Ontological security is re-established, prior to collapse into

chaos, as the newly legitimated cultural form – either already available within the


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cultural repertoire of the nation-state or present within its broader cultural field but

not as yet incorporated into its repertoire - displaces the old. Of course, and this is a

crucial point, to re-establish ontological security by shifting to and validating a

qualitatively different cultural form and its attendant political discourses is also to

reconfigure the qualitative characteristics of the State’s role-identity and its relations

to some salient other States and institutions. This follows from the fact that each

cultural form within the cultural field encodes specific ways of thinking, feeling and

relating to self and other (including collective selves and others) and to issues of

power, authority and violence. Each cultural form thereby promotes a proper way of

being, thinking, feeling and relating and competes with other cultural forms to

establish its propriety and hegemony. Moreover, as I will develop below, rather than

the simple shift from one culture of anarchy (say Lockean) to another (say

Hobbesian), such qualitative shifts may involve the reconfiguration and re-

amalgamation, as it were, of a cultural repertoire that already incorporates more than

one culture of anarchy. For instance, a previously repressed and marginalized

Hobbesian culture of anarchy may be revalorized and achieve broader scope in the

organization of the relations between states.1

1To explain my usage, a cultural field is the full set of cultural forms and attendant political discourses present withinany field of interaction and communication. In the international relations setting, a cultural form is a particular qualitatively distinct culture (of anarchy), present within the cultural field: one that is drawn upon in the constitution of a role identity performed within a relationship between States. Wendt’s Hobbesian, Lockean and Kantian cultures of anarchy are pertinent ways of characterizing different cultural forms in the IR context. A cultural repertoire is the particular set of cultural forms that are already available to corporate agents, such as States. They have already been incorporated into the amalgam of cultural forms that States draw upon in organizing their identity and defending against ontological insecurity. Some of these forms may, at certain times, be repressed or delegitimated. Yet, they remain available within the repertoire and may be drawn into the performance of a State’s role identity, while also supporting that State’s ontological security. Such reconfigurations of the cultural repertoire are most likely to occur when


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To develop these arguments I will draw upon psychoanalytic theory in a

manner that integrates it into social and political theory. This is an approach that I

first developed with reference to “identity, ideology and conflict” in Northern Ireland

and that deploys psychoanalytic theory to address the qualitative characteristics of

competing political discourses and their implications for social and political relations

(Cash 1996). Cynthia Burack terms this approach “psychoanalytic political theory”

and usefully summarizes its principal features as follows:

“Group psychoanalysis – (as developed by “psychoanalytic political theorists”)

– provides a method of theorizing discourse as expressing defenses, emotions

(such as fear, anxiety, guilt, love, and rage) and interpersonal issues (such as

dependence, trust, trauma, vulnerability, mourning, conflict and relations to

authority) that are inscribed in group discourses” (Burack 2004).

As this summary highlights, a particular virtue of psychoanalysis is its concern with

emotions as well as cognitions and with psychic defense mechanisms that organize

both thoughts and emotions in ways that defend against anxiety and the loss of

ontological security. The great strength of psychoanalysis is that it provides an

account of human subjects as passionate subjects capable of reasoning, but always

subject to the distortions of rationalization. A further step in my argument is to

recognize that the psychic processes that generate such reasoning and rationalizing,

along with their emotional intensities and their defenses against anxiety and

ontological insecurity, are deeply embedded in cultural forms and manifest as

political or bureaucratic discourses of one kind or another.

a State’s responses to pressing contingencies arising within the relationship leads it to bring previously repressed or marginalized forms into fuller operation.


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In what follows I will draw out some of the implications of the above

observations; in particular with regard to this process of revalorising an alternative

cultural form available within the broader cultural repertoire, rather than falling into

chaos. I take as one of my starting points Alexander Wendt’s opinion that “the role

that unconscious processes play in international politics is something that needs to be

considered more systematically, not dismissed out of hand” (1999, 278). I also note

that Wendt’s subsequent turn to quantum theory has involved certain shifts in his own

position that interestingly overlap with some major aspects of psychoanalytic theory.

In particular, via quantum theory Wendt (2006) has posited a collective unconscious

marked by an entanglement between culture and identity.2 In a significant

modification of his earlier argument, cultures themselves are understood as less

deterministic even though “the radical indeterminacy of a quantum world does not

change the fundamental point that anarchy is what states make of it” (2006, 212). This

conclusion builds on the recognition that “although cultures make some outcomes

more likely than others”, “uncertainty cannot be reduced beyond a certain point, no

matter how much learning states do” (2006, 212; emphasis mine). My own way of

making a similar point is to emphasize the dynamic capacity of unconscious processes

to reconfigure the internal organization of the cultural repertoire that a State draws

upon in performing its relationship with another State or States.

I mention Wendt’s alternate route to collective unconscious processes and

entanglement via quantum theory for two reasons. First, despite his later reservations

about the psychoanalytic account of unconscious processes as against the claimed

strengths of quantum theory, this quantum shift implicitly aligns with psychoanalytic

2 See Wendt (2015) for a detailed development of his general argument regarding “quantum mind and social science”.


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theory in addressing the multi-layered complexity of intergroup and international

relations, including unconscious aspects of subjectivity and culture that are typically

unobserved. The second, more immediate, reason is that, on my reading at least,

Wendt’s three cultures of anarchy – Hobbesian, Lockean and Kantian – and their

three degrees of internalization are at least implicitly invoked or presumed in the more

recent literature on ontological security and international relations.3

Ontological Insecurity

In order to fend off ontological insecurity, human subjects lean on and draw

upon the cultural forms and routine practices that are available to them within the

cultural field they inhabit. They rely upon these cultures and routines in order to

organize and perform their identities. Consequently, when these identity-affirming

cultures and routines are radically challenged, their ontological security is threatened.

The proper ordering of their world is thrown into disarray. What comes next?

What comes next? That is the central question I wish to address as it opens

onto a more complex understanding of how ontological security is maintained, or re-

established, when alternative cultural supports are available. For individuals, what

comes next depends on both the psychological resilience of the individual, of course,

but also the cultural supports they can draw upon. When these cultural supports are

minimal or exhausted, the individual will typically struggle to improvise new ones, or

recycle old ones; even if these are rudimentary and brittle. Sometimes such attempts

to establish and maintain ontological security fail, with disastrous consequences for

3 See Wendt 1999, chapter 6.


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the individual. Giddens explains this well when he argues that, “(o)n 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 disorganization, but a loss of the sense of the very

reality of things and of other persons”. Giddens continues by arguing that what is at

stake is the maintenance or collapse of “time, space, continuity and identity” and “the

prospect of being overwhelmed by anxieties that reach to the very roots of our

coherent sense of being in the world” (Giddens 1991, 36 & 37).4 This account echoes

Laing’s similar and foundational account of ontological security: “a basically

ontologically 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” (Laing 39). Both provide a strong account of what is at stake in avoiding

the loss of ontological security and they highlight the intense anxiety about

disintegration that motivates human subjects to defend against that loss.

These same motivations apply to State actors. They, too, are motivated to

maintain a coherent sense of the nation-state as an actor within the international field.

Typically, they have available to them a complex cultural repertoire to draw upon in

order to achieve this coherent sense of themselves and to maintain the national

identity by reconfiguring the particular form it takes. What follows next, then, when

the established routine practices and role-identity are radically challenged by

circumstances is, typically, the shift to a different cultural form, or the revalorization

of a different cultural form, that achieves a sense of coherence by defending against

4 Samuel Beckett’s play, “Waiting for Godot”, presents a powerful rendition of collapse into ontological insecurity, but also of momentary revival as the principal characters, Didi and Gogo, struggle to maintain their ontological security within a thoroughly exhausted cultural field. See Cash, 2009b.


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anxiety through different unconscious mechanisms. Another way of putting this is to

say that the cultural repertoire constructed by and available to the interacting States is

reconfigured, such that a previously repressed or marginalized cultural form, along

with the unconscious mechanisms it promotes as the proper way to defend against

anxiety and thereby maintain ontological security, gains a greater presence in the

interactions between states.

Repressing the unconscious

Anthony Giddens’ account of ontological security warrants close attention, as

this is the account that is followed by Mitzen, Steele and many others working on

ontological security in the international relations context. The first point to make is

that Giddens draws directly on psychoanalytic theory, but he does so in a way that

fails to take due account of the presence of unconscious processes within the

structuration process itself. For Giddens the unconscious serves as the fundamental

support of the structuration process without itself having any dynamic role in

organising the repertoire of rules and resources that both enable and constrain that

process. Rather, it has a prior role in establishing, or failing to establish, the psychic

capacity for ontological security of the individual actor; a capacity that enables that

actor to participate successfully and creatively in the routines of everyday life. It does

so by grounding, or, alternatively, failing to establish, the actor’s capacities for trust,

autonomy and initiative. For Giddens, the unconscious is present within the social as

the mere pre-history of the competent actor.


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In my opinion this is a very unsatisfactory account of the relationship between

the unconscious and the social. We can see this if we consider the manner in which

Giddens handles a distinction he draws between routine situations and critical

situations. Routine situations are organised by the specific sets of rules and resources

that are embedded in particular institutional and social settings. These routine

situations constitute the field of structuration and rely upon the knowledge of

individuals at the levels of practical and discursive consciousness. Unconscious

processes are not present within these routines. Critical situations, on the other hand,

occur “in circumstances of radical disjuncture of an unpredictable kind which affect

substantial numbers of individuals, situations that threaten or destroy the certitudes of

institutionalised routines” (1984, 61). When faced with such an overwhelming threat

to their ontological security individuals may be said to have fallen out of culture and

into nature. That is they fall into, or regress into, a culturally unmediated

psychological state in which primitive psychic defence mechanisms predominate. It is

worth reiterating that these primitive defence mechanisms are understood as having

only an individual location; they have no place within the structuration process itself.

Critically, they do not have any place in the organisation of a set of institutionally, or

socially, located rules for the structuration of social communication and interaction at

moments of crisis. For instance, there is nothing akin to Habermas’ account of

ideology as systematically distorted communication in which unconscious processes

shape and distort intersubjective communication (Habermas, 1971). For Habermas,

drawing directly, if critically, on Freudian theory, the culture of an institution, a

society or, by extension, an inter-State relationship, is itself understood as a

compromise formation in which some unconscious desires and aggressivities are

excommunicated from the participants’ consciousness – yet, produce distorting


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effects due to their unconscious presence and the way in which that presence

organizes, distorts and circumscribes communication, identity and agency.

It should be clear, then, that, for Giddens, the unconscious has no dynamic

role within the organisation and re-organisation of the cultural repertoire that human

subjects draw upon in order to maintain ontological security. By way of contrast, the

following discussion of a classic psychoanalytic study of an institution draws out how

these unconscious psychic and cultural processes operate within, yet also beyond, the

individual human subject; how unconscious processes are encoded into the cultures of

institutions and are drawn upon by human subjects as they perform their identities and

role-identities.

The structuration of the unconscious in culture: a case study

With different emphases and inflexions many psychoanalytic traditions have

preserved and extended Freud’s recognition of the incorporation of the unconscious

into the dynamic processes of cultural formations, including the study of institutions

(Freud 1959 & 1972). A finely observed study of this kind is Isabel Menzies Lyth’s

analysis of the nursing system within a London Hospital; titled “The Functioning of

Social Systems as a Defence Against Anxiety”. Menzies Lyth (1988) consulted to the

nursing service of a London hospital that was losing the best of its nursing recruits.

She observed that the dominant cultural form within the nursing service required and

legitimated a restricted set of psychic defences against anxiety that nurses were

expected to draw upon in order to defend against the anxieties aroused by performing

the difficult and distressing tasks that the care of ill and dying patients inevitably


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involves. Only behaviors and mentalities organized by a restricted set of unconscious

psychic processes of a paranoid-schizoid character – to use Kleinian terminology -

were recognized as proper.5 More complex psychic processes were excommunicated

and rendered improper by the dominant culture. Complex emotional states were

disallowed by the instituted culture, with the effect that a more mature working-

through of anxiety, grief and desire was forestalled. In these circumstances it is hardly

surprising that some nurses – with an over-representation of the best of the new

recruits – exited the scene rather than completing their training. Many did so due to

the dissonance between their characteristic mode of defense against anxiety, grief and

desire - typically marked by Klein’s “depressive position” – and the culturally

mandated paranoid-schizoid defenses that were so deeply embedded within the

nursing system, at least at the time of the Menzies Lyth study in 1959. For a second

group of nurses, whose characteristic mode of defense against anxiety, grief and

desire matched the instituted paranoid-schizoid culture of the nursing service, the

mandating of routines organized by paranoid-schizoid processes maintained their

ontological security. However, Menzies Lyth discovered that it also placed the well-

being of both nurses and patients at risk and threatened the capacity of the nursing

service to retain its best recruits and reproduce itself. Menzies Lyth (1988, 51)

condenses her main argument in the following sequence:

An important aspect of … socially structured defence mechanisms is an attempt

by individuals to externalise and give substance in objective reality to their

characteristic psychic defence mechanisms A social defence mechanism

5 The psychoanalytic theory of Melanie Klein (1948 & 1975) is referenced here and below. This theory has been influential in the psychoanalytic study of groups and institutions, as well as in the analysis of individuals, including children. It is central to the work of the Tavistock Institute, with its focus on institutions. See Menzies Lyth 1988. For its extension to the analysis of intergroup relations see Cash, 1996 and Burack, 2004.


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develops over time as the result of collusive interaction and agreement, often

unconscious, between members of the organization as to what form it shall take.

The socially structured defence mechanisms then tend to become an aspect of

external reality with which old and new members of the institution must come

to terms.

The first step in this argument proposes that each individual has a characteristic

way of handling anxiety; their characteristic psychic defense mechanisms. The second

step proposes that in a group or institutional setting individuals will attempt to

externalise their characteristic way of handling anxiety – so that their way becomes a

feature of what she terms “objective reality”. Another way of putting this is to say that

each individual attempts to create a match between their characteristic psychic

defense mechanisms and the defense mechanisms that are part and parcel of the

culture of the group or institution. It is not surprising that this should be attempted. If

such a match can be achieved then the person will feel at home within the group, as

no dissonance will emerge between the individual and the institutional defenses. This

takes us to the third step in the argument. In a group setting many individuals together

establish what we might term an unconscious contract about which defenses are

proper – which defenses should be used by members of this group or organization as

they deal with anxiety. In this way, through a process of unconscious collusion and

bargaining, eventually a legitimated social defense mechanism is produced. And then

comes the fourth step, which is the radical step in the argument. As Menzies Lyth puts

it: “The socially structured defence mechanisms then tend to become an aspect of

external reality with which old and new members of the institution must come to

terms”.


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Once created, the culturally mandated defenses persist and are instituted as

proper. They become integral aspects of the culture of the institution, an aspect of

intersubjective reality that exercises power over subjectivity. They are embedded

within the culture of the institution. This is a radical step because, now, the

legitimated defenses that subjects are expected to use in order to handle anxiety are

presented to them by the culture of the institutions they find themselves in. So the

next generation of nurses arrives at the hospital door to be met by an already

assembled social defense system that claims the right to determine the proper way for

the nurse to think, feel, work and relate within the institution. The nurse must

accommodate to this, or be seen to fail – to be a bad nurse. As Menzies Lyth puts it

we “came to realize that the complaints (about junior and senior nurses) stem from a

collusive system of denial, splitting and projection that is culturally acceptable to –

indeed, culturally required of – nurses” (57; my emphasis).

Here we have an exemplary instance of how a specific, socially instituted

cultural unconscious reaches into the interior of individual psyches and radically

affects both subjectivity and sociality. In this example we see a social world in which

work routines have become repetitive and repressive and in which creative working

through is construed as indulgent and irresponsible and, hence, is proscribed. Clearly,

the dominant cultural form and its preferred practices and mentalities carry strong

implications for subjectivity and sociality in such a setting.

This case study indicates how unconscious processes are encoded into the

culture of an institution and, thereafter, are established as the proper form for the


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construction of self and other and of authority, power and violence. It highlights how

identifications with and passionate attachments to the culture and routines that support

ontological security can become so internalized that change is forestalled, even

though the senior managers in the nursing service – and many other nurses –

recognized that change was necessary and consciously endorsed such change. But that

is only part of the story, although it is the part Menzies Lyth reports. The other part is

one that we need to infer, but it is clearly present in the phenomena reported,

particularly in the fact that they were losing the best of the new recruits to the nursing

service. Why was this happening? We can assume that the old nursing culture worked

well enough over many decades. It had symbolic efficiency in that its preferred

routines were accepted and new recruits fitted readily into the required mentality and

routines. There was minimal psychic dissonance. But from the late 1950s on, in

England and, no doubt, elsewhere, educational and occupational opportunities were

opening up for young women in a way that had not been the case previously. The

Second World War may well have prepared the way for post-war changes in the

freedoms available to young women. By the late 1950s and thereafter, an alternative

cultural form – available in the broader culture but still excluded from the near-total

institution of the nursing service – became more available to many young women,

especially the more talented ones. This alternative was organized by quite a distinct

set of unconscious processes; processes that promoted creativity, responsibility, a

capacity to learn from experience and to dwell in ambivalence, and a capacity to resist

autocratic authority and recognize the complexity of situations. In Kleinian terms, this

is the set of psychic processes characteristic of the “depressive position”. Clearly, this

alternative cultural form had not been incorporated into the cultural repertoire of the

nursing service, which, as I have indicated in my adaptation of Goffman’s


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terminology, may be usefully characterized as a near-total institution. However, just

as clearly, this cultural form was available within the broader cultural field. The

struggle within the nursing service that Menzies Lyth addresses is one in which

attempts were being made to draw an alternative cultural form into the cultural

repertoire of the nursing service and to establish it as the proper form through which

to perform the role-identity of nurse.6

When drawn upon, as it was by some nurses, even as they recognized its

“illegitimacy” within the instituted nursing culture at that time, this alternative

cultural form, with its encoded defences against anxiety, construed individuals,

groups and corporate institutions as complex and multifaceted. It is from this complex

construction that ambivalence arises and is contained. Rather than being split and

projected in ways characteristic of Klein’s paranoid-schizoid position, “others” and

other groupings - including frustrating others, distrusted others and, even, despised

others - are construed as complex subjects with both positive and negative aspects.

Consequently, the capacity for the handling of complexity, for the shifting of

perspective and the enactment of bargaining and compromise is greatly enhanced. Of

course, the nursing case is just one empirical example far from the field of

international relations, but it clearly highlights that, contra Giddens, unconscious

processes are internal to the routines that support ontological security.

When manifest within the international relations context, the move away from

the primacy of a Hobbesian culture of anarchy organized by psychic processes of

6Eventually, the changes Menzies Lyth advocated were successfully instituted, especially with the transfer of nurse training to the Universities.


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splitting and projection to an alternate cultural form involves a shift where the other is

no longer construed as the enemy. Instead, the other is construed as the adversary-

neighbour, and potentially the collegial-neighbour, who, like the self, is regarded as

equally entitled to participate in decision-making and equally capable of compromise

towards an agreed settlement.7 The unconscious defenses characteristic of Klein’s

depressive position support both a self-regarding Lockean culture of anarchy that,

significantly, construes the other as like the self, and, also, the Kantian culture of

anarchy with its other-regarding emphasis and concern. That these two cultural forms

rely on the same constellation of defenses against anxiety to maintain ontological

security carries the implication that learning processes within a deeply entrenched

security accord, as against psychodynamic processes of defense, will play a greater

role in any move or reconfiguration that establishes the primacy of a Kantian culture

of anarchy. The Lockean and Kantian cultures of anarchy bear a family resemblance

to each other for the very reason that they have displaced both the psychic processes

of splitting and projection and the friend-enemy distinction as master signifier that,

entailed as they are, together organize the self-other relationship in a particular way.

However, the psychoanalytic point remains that they continue to be susceptible to

displacement by a reconfiguration that reinstalls the authority of a Hobbesian culture

and renders proper the psychic processes of splitting and projection.

Falling Out or Reconfiguration?

7This brief description draws on my discussion developed in Cash, 1996 and, more recently and briefly, Cash, 2009a.


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Now turning to the incorporation within IR theory of this approach to

ontological security, I will focus on Jennifer Mitzen’s work, especially her essay

“Ontological Security in World Politics: State Identity and the Security Dilemma”. I

do so as this essay usefully condenses, in an admirably clear and precise manner, the

main elements of this recently developed approach. In that essay Mitzen (2006b, 342)

characterizes ontological security as follows: “ontological security refers to the need

to experience oneself as a whole, continuous person in time - as being rather than

constantly changing – in order to realize a sense of agency”. She cites Giddens and

also Ronald Laing as sources of this argument – and follows Giddens’ argument very

closely thereafter. In particular she argues that “agency requires a stable cognitive

environment” and that “deep (cognitive) uncertainty renders the actor’s identity

insecure”. Chaos is likely to follow if this unbearable instability and uncertainty

persist. As Mitzen (2006b, 346) puts it:

Giddens argues that all social actors intrinsically know that behind the routines

of daily life, ‘chaos lurks’. Constant awareness of such chaos would generate

tremendous anxiety, making it extremely difficult to reconcile competing threats

and take any action at all.

In order to avoid these dire and disabling outcomes, established role- identities and

their cultural supports and routine practices are adhered to. Hence, in certain

circumstances the need to maintain ontological security may trump physical, strategic

or economic security needs.

As already argued, this approach fails to adequately incorporate unconscious

processes and their role in the maintenance of ontological security. It operates with a

far too restricted understanding of human subjectivity and the ways in which human


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subjects draw upon and negotiate instituted cultural forms in order to maintain

ontological security. Much of this follows from its conceptualization of the human

subject as a centered subject cognitively and emotionally invested in adherence to

established role-identities and routines. This argument about passionate attachments

has its virtues, but its failure to incorporate both the decenteredness of the human

subject and the internal differentiation of cultural repertoires, leads it to misconstrue

what typically follows when ontological security is threatened. In other words, the

Giddens-derived account lacks the dynamism of the psychoanalytic account due to its

unmediated emphasis on the need for consistency and stability. It only observes one

part of a larger, more complex and more dynamic process.

Psychoanalytic theory, through its concern with unconscious processes

(whether in Freudian, Kleinian, Lacanian or other variations), argues that the human

subject is a divided and decentered subject. That claim complicates the Giddens-

derived emphasis on the need to maintain the coherence of the self. While

psychoanalysis does recognize that human subjects need to maintain a sense of a

coherent identity that is centered, consistent and continues through time and changing

circumstances, psychoanalysis also regards this as a misrecognition in which the

unconscious is occluded and yet produces significant effects. As Freud (1961b) put it:

“The ego is not master in its own house” however much it imagines itself to be. This

feature of the ego highlights that even ontologically secure individuals cannot

inoculate themselves against the unconscious – nor what I am terming the cultural

unconscious, as exemplified in the Menzies Lyth study. Another way of putting this is

to point out that for Giddens – and hence for those IR scholars who follow his

position closely – the unconscious is outside routine practices – it is what we fall into


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at critical moments when our familiar role-identities and routines have collapsed or

disintegrated. My argument to the contrary is that identities and routines are

organized, in significant ways, by unconscious processes; and this is clearly evident

in the nursing case study discussed above. We don’t escape the unconscious in the

cultures of institutions and the routine practices they organize. Rather, unconscious

processes await us there and for so long as we act as a good subject who operates

according to the required codes, we also tend to identify with and internalize the

cultural repertoire of that institution. It is that cultural repertoire and its unconscious

processes that we draw upon and negotiate in our performance as competent actors.

The mistake made by IR scholars who rely unduly on Giddens’ account of

ontological security is that they too readily equate the maintenance of psychic

integrity (in order to avoid the fall into chaos) with the maintenance of a currently

established role-identity and its accompanying mentality. They fail to adequately

recognize two inter-related dimensions of the need and desire to maintain ontological

security in order to avoid chaos. First, with regard to psychic processes, the ego, when

threatened with dissolution, will resort to extreme defenses such as splitting itself and

projecting internal aspects onto others in order to hold onto a degree of integration. In

particular, Kleinian theory, with its account of paranoid-schizoid defenses against

anxiety, provides a detailed account of the ego’s desperate desire to maintain some

degree of coherence in the face of threats to its integrity, even when this involves a

reorganization of the psyche itself (Klein, 1948 & 1975). To characterize this

dynamic capacity for psychic reorganization in order to defend against intense

anxiety, Klein developed the concept of psychic positions, rather than stages, as

“positions” better captures the dynamic flexibility of these unconscious processes.


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Positions can be entered and exited in a flexible process of what I have chosen to term

re-positioning.

Second, complex cultural repertoires, such as those that are characteristic of

nation-states interacting within the international arena, typically contain alternative

cultural forms that enable psychic reorganization, or re-positioning, while also

preserving the imaginary self-recognition of the States in interaction as centered and

coherent, even as they shift to a qualitatively different mentality and set of routine

practices. These alternative cultural forms can support distinctly different ways of

maintaining an integrated state-identity that is, itself, transformed by this shift. Such

reconfigurations that maintain the imaginary self-recognition of the States in

interaction as centered and coherent are possible because the cultural repertoire drawn

upon is typically composed of an amalgam of political discourses that, across their

range, contain qualitatively distinct ways of defending against anxiety and, second,

because this amalgam can be reorganized to promote previously repressed or

marginalized discourses and their encoded defenses. The crucial point is that their

reconfiguration is an available means of jettisoning an established role-identity while

avoiding the fall into chaos by validating and authorizing an alternative cultural form

and its political discourses, that have qualitatively different defenses against anxiety

encoded into them. Such a reconfiguration generates a different set of practices and

displaces or marginalizes established role-identities while, at the same time,

preserving the sense of continuous and coherent State identities. This re-centering is

disguised by unconscious processes of misrecognition in which the State, as agent,

transforms itself and the way it relates to relevant others while, at the same time,

recognizing itself and its identity as continuous across this transition. These effects


21

are the product of unconscious processes and can be analyzed through Freud’s (1959

& 1960) account of the ego, Lacan’s (1988) account of the imaginary and Klein’s

(1948 & 1975) account of psychic positions (rather than stages) that remain available

as qualitatively different defenses against anxiety. In other words, such an account is

consistent across psychoanalytic traditions.

We should also notice that this approach resolves many of the issues that

plague the extension of individual psychic states to the analysis of corporate

institutions; the issue of “scaling up”. It does so by demonstrating that cultural forms

and their accompanying political discourses have unconscious processes encoded into

them and that these same unconscious processes are, thereby, enacted by individuals

who identify as agents of the State or institution, as they perform their role-identity.

This integration of institutions and agents arises from the structuration process in

which agents draw upon and reiterate the cultural forms that enable and constrain

their identity. Of course, such reiteration may involve the reorganization of the

cultural repertoire; that is a crucial aspect of structuration theory. It should be

apparent, then, that the principal way in which my argument departs from or extends

Giddens’ position is that it recognizes that structuration processes extend to the

structuration of the unconscious within cultural forms and their social or institutional

location. While Giddens’ own focus on the ontological security of individual persons

suffers from his limited and limiting incorporation of psychoanalytic theory, the

extension of this approach by Mitzen, Steele and others onto a consideration of the

ontological security of corporate institutions and agents, such as nation-states in

interaction, compounds these limitations as it overlooks the availability of alternative

cultural forms and their alternate defenses against anxiety and the loss of ontological


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security. To state this in terms of three leading psychoanalytic figures, this approach

fails to recognize that the ego is not master in its own house, as Freud would have it;

fails to take account of the imaginary, as Lacan would have it; and fails to take

account of the ego’s capacity to divide itself in order to survive, as Klein would have

it.

A fuller incorporation of psychoanalytic theory introduces a more complex

account of human subjectivity that extends beyond Giddens’ concerns with the

centeredness of the human subject as an ontologically secure agent. Freud’s (1961b)

argument that the ego is not master in its own house, although due to its narcissism it

imagines itself as such, Klein’s (1975) account of the ego’s capacity to split and

project itself and its objects and thereby re-position itself in order to survive and

Lacan’s (1988) account of the mirror-stage, the formation of the ego or “I”, and how

this “I” is captured within the inertia of an imaginary relation and therefore is blind to

the ‘other scene’ of the unconscious: such misrecognition, re-positioning and many

other fundamental aspects of psychoanalytic theory highlight that ontological security

is quite consistent with the maintenance of both aggressivity towards the other and an

image of the State or Nation as a “self” acting on the highest of moral principles. In

other words, cultural repertoires can incorporate both Hobbesian, Lockean and,

sometimes, Kantian cultures of anarchy, while, through misrecognition and re-

positioning, ensuring that one preferred self-image of the State (typically Lockean or

even Kantian) is foregrounded and the other (typically Hobbesian) is screened from

consciousness through repression or projection.8

8 Sucharov ( 2006, 27) addresses the co-presence of different cultural forms that are available within a cultural repertoire when she proposes that “every society maintains not only a dominant (conscious) narrative, but an unconscious counternarrative as


23

If we carry this fundamental psychoanalytic observation to my argument

regarding the availability of an internally differentiated cultural repertoire – including

the cultural availability of qualitatively distinct unconscious processes – we can see

that an argument about distinct types that are stabilized through internalization - and

that face chaos and/or the dissolution of their identity should they fall out of the

culture and routines that support that identity - unduly restricts the dynamism and

complexity of situations like, for instance, the Cold War relationship between the

Soviet Union and the United States that Mitzen addresses. In that discussion Mitzen

(2006b, 359) is, in fact, keenly alert to the split between best intentions and the

socializing effects of actual practices, as is evident in her discussion of “fantasy

identities” as “role identities that remain in a bubble severed from practice”.

However, this very argument highlights the dynamic co-presence, within the cultural

repertoire of the Cold War relationship, of a mixture of qualitatively distinct cultural

forms, a dynamic co-presence that eventually supported a reconfiguration of the

relationship and the relevant role-identities.

Mitzen’s argument relies on the major claim that internalization or

socialization to type, as a role-identity, establishes and deepens passionate

attachments to routines that organize identities and structure inter-state relations.

While I agree that such passionate attachments are crucial aspects of such

relationships, there is more to this situation than a socialization- to-type argument can

capture. Both Hobbesian and Lockean and, at least in some relationships, Kantian

well, which the former has in part arisen to conceal”. While this captures the prospect of misrecognition, it lacks the dynamic complexity and the ongoing capacity for re-positioning and reconfiguration that I am attempting to address.


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rules for the construction of self and other and the proper forms of power, authority

and violence can co-exist and be drawn upon to support ontological security in what

are regarded by the actors as the proper circumstances. Indeed, in some

circumstances, ontological security may take advantage of the decentering of the

subject, such that both a friend-enemy culture and its routines and a qualitatively

different adversary-neighbor culture and its routines together help a State-actor and its

citizens make sense of, and respond to, a very complex and multi-dimensional

relationship. The Israel-Palestine relationship, at various historical moments, may

well provide evidence for the flexible efficiency of such a composite cultural

repertoire and its divided yet mixed mentalities.

Both Mitzen and Steele assume that socialization or internalization processes

operate in ways that are consistent with Wendt’s understanding, in Social Theory of

International Politics, of how any of the three cultures – Hobbesian, Lockean or

Kantian – can move from operating as an external demand to becoming an

internalized norm that motivates agency due to its intrinsic valuation by the actor.

This account of the movement from the first to the third degree of internalization has

several strengths. However, it suffers from the limitation of many socialization

arguments, in that the further internalization proceeds (towards the third degree of

internalization) the less dynamic and the more determinate a State’s likely range of

responses becomes. As Wendt (1999, 255) puts it in Social Theory of International

Politics, “It is Realists who should think that cultural change is easy, not

constructivists, because the more deeply shared ideas are internalized – the more they

“matter” – the stickier the structure they constitute will be”. This argument captures

an important, indeed central, (or should I say “centered”) aspect of the process, but, as


25

Wendt recognizes in his subsequent quantum theory derived argument about “radical

indeterminacy” quoted above, identities are never as closed as this implies. As I

would put this, while one form of being and relating may have become second-nature,

as it were, this does not remove the availability of alternate forms that may come into

operation as circumstances change. The relevance of this is that a socialization-to-

type argument that excludes or restricts the scope of unconscious processes within

institutions and cultures unduly constrains the dynamism of identities and relations.

Conclusion

This returns us to my leading question: what typically happens when a State’s

ontological security is profoundly challenged? Does its ontological security collapse

and chaos prevail? Or are alternative cultural forms, or reconfigured cultural

repertoires, resorted to? Raising this question allows us to highlight both the strengths

and limitations of the arguments developed by Mitzen and Steele. Their recognition

that States have a desire to maintain ontological security contains the possibility that

ontological security may trump physical or economic security. This is where the

theory takes on considerable practical and empirical significance. For instance, in

Mitzen’s example of Israel-Palestine after Oslo, trumping by the need to maintain

ontological security has perverse effects in the continuation of entrenched conflict.

According to this account, both Israel and Palestine were would-be security seekers

that could not convince themselves that they could trust the other sufficiently to

themselves act according to their best intentions. While both parties regarded

themselves as security seekers and wanted to act accordingly, “neither was sure that

the other was satiable” (2006b, 356). In turn, the other State, or proto-State, did not


26

experience enough indications of the good intentions of its other to recognize it as a

“security seeker” rather than as “greedy”. Consequently, both Israel and Palestine

acted in ways that ran counter to their best intentions and their preferred conception of

self. Over time – given their routine behavior – both internalized, or re-internalized,

an understanding of themselves as greedy and, by continuing to act accordingly, they

constituted themselves as a greedy-type State and were recognized as such by the

other.

Even this brief summary highlights that the approach I have outlined provides

a better understanding of this unfolding decline back into a friend-enemy or greedy

State relationship, while aspirations towards becoming security seekers were being

trialed. It does so because it recognizes, firstly, the co-presence of qualitatively

distinct cultural forms within the cultural repertoire established by the Israel-Palestine

relationship. Secondly, the psychoanalytic account of human subjectivity as

decentered supports an understanding of how this co-presence of cultural forms is

incorporated into the identities of the two parties as they negotiate their way between

relating as either security seekers, or as greedy. To phrase this in a Lacanian manner,

at any moment in that on-going relationship, one or the other of these cultural forms

may constitute the chain of signifiers that position the State-as-subject, while

simultaneously mirroring back through the imaginary a coherent identity to the parties

in interaction. That claim is consistent with the larger argument that the cultural

repertoire can also support alternate ways of thinking, feeling and relating and

alternate norms regarding the proper exercise of power, authority and violence.

Significantly, these alternate role-identities and routines (greedy or Hobbesian in this

example of Israel-Palestine) may haunt the relationship and produce perverse effects


27

while, at the same time, escaping the preferred self-understanding of the parties in

interaction. Indeed, detailed empirical research may well reveal that this other,

disowned cultural form haunted the attempts by both Israel and Palestine to both

become and to be recognized as security seekers, by working its effects at critical

moments, while simultaneously being disowned. Of course, in the end that is an

empirical question. However, given the long history of tensions and fluctuations in

that relationship, such an approach offers more scope to incorporate the complexities

of the relationship as it has unfolded.

To take another example, the United States had no difficulty in reviving a

friend-enemy culture for significant aspects of its foreign policy initiatives after

September 11, 2001.9 Again we can see how the reconfiguration of the cultural

repertoire of the United States as a super-power acting within the international arena

facilitated its resort to defenses of splitting and projection and the advocacy of a

concerted “war on terror” while preserving its preferred self-understanding as a

security-seeker.10

Finally, my argument does not detract from the importance of ontological

security as a significant factor in the relations between States. That observation

remains of great value (and I believe that my own account strengthens that position).

However, my more thorough-going incorporation of psychoanalytic theory certainly

9 George W. Bush’s statement that “[e]very nation, in every region now has a decision to make. Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists” and the foreign policy initiatives that followed this statement are a classic instance of this reconfiguration and its policy implications. Clearly, the reconfiguration relies on the culturally available psychic defenses of splitting and projection and proclaims that mode of maintaining ontological security as the proper mode.10 See Solomon, 2012 & 2015 for excellent discussions of “affect and discourse in response to 9/11”.


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does complicate the account of how the need and desire for ontological security is

satisfied within a complex cultural repertoire that offers more than one way of

defending against ontological insecurity.11 No longer are States caught in an either/or

dilemma where they either adhere to established routines and role-identities, even

when that adherence tends to perpetuate conflict, or, as the dread alternative, they fall

into chaos. There are more options available. Through unconscious processes of

misrecognition and re-positioning, alternative modes of relating can be resorted to

while maintaining a secure sense of a continuous and centered identity. These

alternative modes bring to the fore previously recessed elements of the cultural

repertoire that authorize different practices and new routines, while preserving

national identities and defending against the loss of ontological security.

11 I believe that my argument intersects in potentially productive ways with Jennifer Mitzen’s recent argument, only presented in unpublished papers to date, that “all security is ontological”. In brief, cultural repertoires construct and defend a variety of ways of being “at home” in the world, thereby both maintaining ontological security and undergirding other forms of security such as physical security.


29

References

Burack, Cynthia. 2004. Healing Identities. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Cash, John. 1996. Identity, Ideology and Conflict, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. -------- 2009a. “Squaring some vicious circles: Transforming the political in Northern Ireland”. In Consociational Theory. London & New York: Routledge. -------- 2009b. “Waiting for Sociality”. In Waiting. Melbourne: Melbourne University Press. Freud, Sigmund. 1959. Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego, New York: Norton & Company. ------- 1960. The Ego and the Id. New York: Norton & Company. ------- 1961a. Beyond the Pleasure Principle. New York: Norton & Company. ------- 1961b. “A Difficulty in the Path of Psycho-Analysis”. In Standard Edition, Vol. XVII, London: The Hogarth Press. ------- 1972. Civilization And Its Discontents. New York: Norton & Company. Giddens, Anthony. 1984. The Constitution of Society. Cambridge: Polity Press. ------- 1991. Modernity and Self-Identity, Cambridge: Polity Press. Habermas, Jurgen. 1971. Knowledge and Human Interests. Boston: Beacon Press. Klein, Melanie. 1948. Contributions to Psycho-Analysis, 1921-1945. London: Hogarth Press. ------ 1975. Envy and Gratitude. London: Hogarth Press. Lacan, Jacques. 1988. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan: Book II. New York & London: Norton & Company. Laing, Ronald D. 1990. The Divided Self. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books. Menzies Lyth, Isabel. 1988. “The functioning of social systems as a defence against anxiety”. In Containing Anxiety in Institutions. London: Free Associations Books. Mitzen, Jennifer. 2006a. “Anchoring Europe’s civilizing identity: habits, capabilities and ontological security”. Journal of European Public Policy 13 (2): 270–285.


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------- 2006b. “Ontological Security in World Politics: State Identity and the Security Dilemma”. European Journal of International Relations 12 (6): 341-370. Steele, Brent. 2005. “Ontological Security and the Power of Self-Identity: British Neutrality and the American Civil War” Review of International Studies, 31: 519-540. ------- 2008. Ontological Security in International Relations, Abingdon: Routledge. Solomon, Ty. 2012. “‘I wasn't angry, because I couldn't believe it was happening’: Affect and discourse in responses to 9/11” in Review of International Studies / Volume 38, Issue 4, pp. 907 – 928. ------ 2014. The Politics of Subjectivity in American Foreign Policy Discourses. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Sucharov, Mira. 2005. The International Self: Psychoanalysis and the Search for Israeli-Palestinian Peace. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. Wendt, Alexander. 1999. Social Theory of International Politics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ------ 2006. “Social Theory as Cartesian science: An auto-critique from a quantum perspective”. In Constructivism and International Relations. London & New York: Routledge. ------ 2015. Quantum Mind and Social Science. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Acknowledgements I owe particular thanks to Catarina Kinnvall and Jennifer

Mitzen, both of whom have encouraged my developing interest in ontological security

within IR theory. Josepha Laroche was the first to tempt me along this path when she

invited me to present a lecture at the Sorbonne, Paris 1. The ontological security

research group, convened by Catarina Kinnvall and Jennifer Mitzen, that first met at

Lund University in 2013 and thereafter at ISA and other international conferences,

welcomed me, a novice in IR theory, into their deliberations and conviviality – and I

wish to thank them all very sincerely.

john d. cash: university of melbourne paper prepared for ...web.isanet.org/web/conferences/ap hong...

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