The origins of personal safety

Abstract

This article presents a theoretical analysis of the main approaches to defining the concept of personal
safety. It examines the conceptual foundations of personal safety analysis across various schools of psychology.
It is noted that the overall transformation of the security environment significantly influences how individuals’
subjective sense of safety and danger changes. On the basis of a wide array of national and foreign scientific
sources, a trend has been identified that personal safety is impossible without a deeper understanding of the sense
of security as a fundamental psychological construct, the formation of which throughout life is ensured by early
experiences of interaction with loved ones, and which develops into a system of self-regulation in adulthood

It has been found that a gradual reevaluation of priorities in interpreting the issue of security has shifted the focus
from the purely external (public security) to the individual sphere, where protection and safety are not perceived
separately from the individual’s needs, actions, and interests. Accordingly, in a psychological context, the concept
of personal security takes on a deeper interpretation of its meaning and is associated with subjective experiences
of a sense of security, inner stability, and the capacity for self-regulation. The main approaches to understanding
personal safety — including psychoanalytic, humanistic, and systemic — provide grounds for asserting that this
phenomenon is a dynamic construct that develops throughout a person’s life. The concept of personal safety is
defined as a state of personal safety manifested at the level of physical, psychological, and social comfort, formed
during the process of personality development, and determining the nature of one’s relationships with others and
strategies for interacting with the world.