“That Great Mother of Danger”

Abstract

Abstract Were one to trust the experts of “the risk society,” and the countless volumes that take risk as their object, one might conclude that we have lost sight of danger. How secure is the distinction? This essay registers the discursive proliferation that has surrounded risk, as opposed to the poverty of theorizations of danger. Since Mary Douglas's famous 1966 contribution, it is as if the two terms were synonymous. Yet linguistic usage, along with other counterexamples, signal that we might learn from attending to danger in its specificity. The essay then turns to Sigmund Freud, that little-recognized thinker of danger. It was Freud who located loss—and the mother—at the center of what he strikingly called the “danger-situation.”