That Great Mother of Danger”

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