Giddens (1991) Modernity and Self-Identity – Chapter 2

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 see that the anchoring aspects of such `answers’ are emotional rather than simply cognitive (…)
What creates a sense of ontological security that will carry the individual through transitions, crises and circumstances of high risk? (…)

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 (…)

All individuals develop a framework of ontological security of some sort, based on routines of various forms (…) Since anxiety, trust and everyday routines of social interaction are so closely bound up with one another, we can readily understand the rituals of day-to-day life as coping mechanisms. This statement does not mean that such rituals should be interpreted in functional terms, as means of anxiety reduction (and therefore of social integration), but that they are bound up with how anxiety is socially managed.