One of the inhibitions to learning from experience is the belief that we can create situations which are immune to shock and the need to change. The search for security is a prominent example, witnessed both in the individual fantasy of total security and in the way social groups, including whole states, can commit themselves to a hunt for security that actually makes them more insecure. In this talk, I raise the issue of fundamental insecurity, linking it to the rupture and repair cycle central to psychoanalysis. To learn from experience, we might have to recognise that vulnerability and unsettledness are basic conditions of human life, recurring in psychoanalysis and society alike.

Feminist and psychosocial scholarship have made significant contributions to the critique of psychoanalytic political and epistemological pillars over several decades. In this presentation I propose the concept of ‘co-poiesis’ to address a horizon of possibility within the risks and ethics of encountering others. In dialogue with feminist theory, ecology and peripheric psychoanalytic practitioners, such as Pierre Fédida and Anne Dufourmantelle, we will think of analytic transference and the politics of encounters in the contemporary psychosocially-informed clinic. Creativity, togetherness and the realm of possibility emerging from necessity are aspects we will consider when honing into anxiety and promises of security in contemporary discourse.

As Sophie Lewis (2022) indicates, “matricentric feminism has recently undergone a revival.” This paper thinks about this recent interest in relation to experiences of in/security. The return of the maternal can be interpreted as a response to the profound insecurities of contemporary life, generated by neoliberal policies over the last fifty years, which scholars have described in terms of the ‘unmothering’ of society (Stephens 2011; Segal 2020). In this regard, the maternal signals the need for forms of holding, containment and care historically associated with ‘maternalist’ policies, experiences that are elusive in contemporary society. At the same time, the maternal represents a horizon of possibility that goes beyond the political ambiguities and gender traditionalism associated with the maternalisms of the past. Current interest in the maternal foregrounds Adrienne Rich’s (1976) distinction between ‘motherhood’ and ‘mothering,’ emphasising mothering as a practice that can and must circulate beyond the nuclear family. This paper explores the idea that imagining a future defined by something other than current forms of ‘unmothering’ involves, at least in part, loosening the links between biological maternity, or motherhood, and the practice of mothering. With this in mind, the paper considers what psychosocial thinking can contribute to the process of mobilising mothering against social insecurity.