The term ontological security was coined by psychiatrist R. D. Laing in the book The Divided Self in which it is described as a "basic existential position" from which a person "will encounter all the hazards of life, social, ethical, spiritual, biological, from a centrally firm sense of his [sic] own and other people's reality and identity." Ontological, in this context, is not used in a philosophical sense but in an empirical one, since Laing considered it the "best adverbial or adjectival derivative of being." The intellectual traditions that inform the concept are psychoanalysis, specifically British object relations theory in which Laing was trained, and existential philosophy.