As I continue working to dig for the roots of what makes our culture so averse, fearful, violent and suppressive of the paranormal, psychic, and metaphysical, I've been working on a follow up essay from last year’s "Dismantling the Woo-Woo Taboo". This one is centered on psychiatry as the designated gatekeeper of what’s deemed “sane”. From my work in progress:

"The idea of ontological security originates from psychiatrist R.D. Laing’s 1960 book on the existential dimensions of schizophrenia, The Divided Self. He writes:

'If the individual cannot take the realness, aliveness, autonomy, and identity of himself and others for granted, then he has to become absorbed in contriving ways of trying to be real, of keeping himself or others alive, of preserving his identity, in efforts, as he will often put it, to prevent himself losing his self. What are to most people everyday happenings, which are hardly noticed because they have no special significance, may become deeply significant in so far as they either contribute to the sustenance of the individual's being or threaten him with non-being.'

Even if we take this concept of ontological security outside of the pure realm of psychological theory, events that cause radical upheaval in our lives can trigger a break in the continuity of our sense of reality — and we then become ontologically insecure, individually or collectively. Think of how tenuous “reality” has felt for such a vast number of us since 2020, or even in the last two months— we’ve been experiencing a collective break from a previous ground of ontological security that, while it was fragile before, did feel for many as a continuity and a normalcy that have now been irrevocably broken.

Then, asking about the “sanity” of a belief in- or an experience of the supernatural, is at core about asking “is my reality itself going to be challenged to a breaking point by this?”

Not all of us are grounded in a level of ontological security (and therefore, flexibility) to even ponder the question.