This article is dense with its myriad possible interpretations and implications. The paper was, in part, a response to the attack by Hamas in October 2023, which resulted in an aggressive response by the Israeli government. For the purpose of this review, I will concentrate on two aspects of Stephen Frosh's paper: firstly, how security has become a signifier through which state regulation imposes control and surveillance; secondly, the proposal that operationalising psychoanalytic concepts may create a more communitarian society, leading to less aggressive approaches and a better understanding of both self and other/s.
Ultimately, Frosh's paper explores possible psychoanalytic dynamics underlying the events of October 2023 between Hamas and the state of Israel, and considers how psychoanalysis can be utilised in an attempt to interrupt the deathly engagement in the Middle East.
The attack by Hamas resulted in an increase of both anti-Jewish and anti-Palestinian sentiment, intensifying a greater sense of insecurity. For Frosh, Israel's response to this attack is related to a belief and need for absolute security and impenetrability; he argues that the potency of Hamas's actions lay in the disruption of the fantasy of invulnerability. He observes that this apparent need for absolute security paradoxically results in further creations of insecurity.
Frosh presents different psychoanalytic concepts. Firstly, that psychoanalysis privileges the concept of creating security within the therapeutic space, which allows for the patient to engage and express her hate and aggression, without destroying the clinician. The therapist will neither be damaged, nor will she retaliate. Frosh proposes that the particularity of the therapeutic place allows for the engagement of that aggression, with the aim that this extremity of affect may be eventually reduced. Through operationalising the transference relationship between clinician and patient a containing space is created. Latterly, he proposes utilising the Lacanian technology of disrupting the symptom, to reveal
that which is omnipresent. This takes up a contrary position from that which guarantees security within the therapeutic space.
Frosh postulates that Palestine disrupts Israel's foundational belief of the possibility of absolute security by refusing to accede to its demands and infringements. There is a circularity within this war; rather than providing stability violence is further evoked. There is an intrapsychic drive for stability propelling the motivations for the war.
He problematises this seeking for security, which is essentially a fantasy creating a trope of security/insecurity that we are bound within, and also queries whether security is intrinsic to a sense of wellbeing. Frosh explicates that it is essential to provide a place so that the individual's capacity to pause in moments of extreme tension may be fostered. The pause allows for the possibility of interrupting the acting out of one's feelings. This space is dependent on the existence of the other who holds the individual in mind. Emergent from this is the possibility of the individual who is then ‘grievable’ (Butler 2020).
Frosh critiques both the family and the sociopolitical for its current inability to provide a containing framework, which leads to a fissure of insecurity in individuals. The fundamental promise that society will take responsibility for its peoples has been broken with.
The promise of absolute security paradoxically leads to increased anxiety over potential threats producing a dynamic that permits state security to override individual wellbeing. The fantasy of absolute security allows for state measures to regulate and impose controls over its populace. This fantasy has infiltrated British contemporary culture and is now part of the quotidian, permitting control of the populace resulting in subjectivities of conformity and self-regulation. Is this the Winnicottian false self, Frosh asks? This subjectivity is governed by a form of governmentality promulgating and then managing those same fears. This does not alleviate people's anxieties but further increases them. Civil-liberties impingements by government are wholly accepted because there exists a priori a state of paranoia that we are threatened by the other. This contemporary narrative of the anxious individual is not directed to alleviating suffering. Rather, it further embeds the relationship
between state and citizen, resulting in further government oversight and contemporaneously people constantly striving for security.
Frosh postulates that it is imperative to engage with insecurity to acknowledge and provide ways to live through our ontological uncertainty. Precarity is at the roots of our being and existence. The concept of this all-secure mother, propounded in attachment theory, is fallacious and creates forms of idealised expectation. Neither the mother nor any other source can offer life without precarity. Frosh's article directs us towards an acceptance that insecurity is part of one's lived existence. This requires the renunciation of the fantasy of total security both intra- and interpsychically. Acceptance of one's constitutional insecurity allows for the possibility of exploring ways to live with risk without resorting to the rigidification of psychic mechanisms.
We are all embodied and embedded in violence. The infant is impinged upon during the greatest state of dependence. This being a global experience, Frosh proposes that identificatory processes with the other would allow for an acceptance and a recognition of this pan-human experience of vulnerability. Operationalising psychoanalysis to engage with the vulnerability within and between ourselves would develop a practice of how to engage with the essential vulnerabilities in all of us.
Frosh contends that the therapeutic techniques such as the Lacanian session, interrupting the symptom, the focus on that which is unnameable but omnipresent in conjunction with the containing space, could be extrapolated out into the sociopolitical arena. This disrupts the stasis within subjectivity, leading to emergent alternatives, away from the repetition cycle of suffering and further insecurity. Sociopolitical discourse would be predicated on the acceptance that insecurity is universal and that we all emerge out of the state of dependence. This would interrupt the death drive's insistence towards security/insecurity which results in destruction. Expanding therapeutic practices onto the wider arena would allow for the articulation of our inherent frailty, transitioning from the discourse of security to a public discourse of our constitutional fragility. Promoting rhetoric around our essential human vulnerability would allow us to explore ways of ameliorating the damage. Frosh argues that
it is our responsibility to respond to our vulnerabilities and insecurity as this would lead to the development of processes of restoration and the generation of different forms of ontological connection.
In conclusion, Frosh's contentions about governmentality producing insecurity in parallel with the intrapsychic compulsion for security significantly contributes to investigating current intractable positions both socially and psychically. His psychosocial approach invites a generative direction away from the compulsions of the death drive. However, this is profoundly challenging as I contend that we resist both our own and the other's psychic vulnerability and do not wish to grieve, whether for the loss of omnipotence/oceanic wonderment or for actual losses. Frosh argues that for an ethical position to be upheld the person must be kept in mind, which leads to the development of the secure self. I wonder if this is a position that is feasible. In a contrived setting like the therapeutic space this is hard won. Conceptualising the Freudian baby who is narcissistically driven to seek satisfaction highlights the difficulties of an ethical position. Given that the individual in current society is both represented and represents herself as driven by a sense of entitlement and demand for immediate gratification, how do we achieve a society in which we hold the other in mind? I feel that we are far from the ideal which JFK proposed when he said, ‘Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country.‘
‘(In)security’ by , is published in the International Journal of Psychoanalysis (2025), vol. 106: 184–190.