Preamble
When treating a patient, the goal of the psychoanalyst is to determine how much a given defense mechanism contributes to the symptoms and to the ego resistance of the patient (in other words, resistance to therapy) ... This is because “it is the task of the analyst to bring into consciousness that which is unconscious…” (A. Freud, 1936/1966).
Some defense mechanisms are seen as protecting us from within, from the instinctual impulses of the id (e.g., repression); other defense mechanisms protect us from external threats (e.g., denial).
Anna Freud identified and discussed ten defense mechanisms as being commonly recognized in the field of psychoanalysis: regression, repression, reaction-formation, isolation, undoing, projection, introjection, turning against the self, reversal, and sublimation. Anna Freud and Ego Psychology Mark D. Kelland Mark D. Kelland
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The structure of defense mechanisms was first introduced by S. Freud, then Anna Freud, M. Klein, and W. Reich.
M. Klein and others; Specifically, Dr. Reich, focused on resistance; He believed that when venturing into the deeper layers of the unconscious it would be pointless unless there is an understanding resistance keeps neurotic behaviors in place.
The main purpose of all defense mechanisms is to allow an individual to preemptively curtail imminent anxiety, or distress; It is a totally unconscious process, and it may include hiding, ignoring, changing and/or reshaping the external objective reality. It is important, at this point, to be reminded that every, action, or utterance has 2 reasons, one is a 'manifest', the other 'latent' a person is only aware of the 'manifest' reason while a professional searches to discover the 'latent'
By their vary nature defense mechanisms are unconscious and clearly, a derivative of subjective experiences or interpretations of reality in an effort to reduce psychological dissonance. Their understanding can be presumably achieved through psychodynamics. Defense mechanisms allow professionals to gain insight into and sometimes predict psychopathology. (Michael Kasdaglis, 1997) .
Not all defense mechanisms are necessarily predictors of psychopathology. There is a number of adaptive and highly adaptive defense mechanisms such as attachment, altruism, anticipation, humor, self-affirmation, self-monitoring, sublimation, and suppression. .
The value of observing and accurately identifying defense mechanisms in a structured interview cannot be overstated. Its diagnostic importance has been documented by several researchers. Studies have led to findings confirming the relationship between 'defense-groups' and psychopathology.
In one study, going back several years, published by the Brazilian Journal of Psychiatry (April 9, 2006), validates the correlation between defensive clusters and psychopathology. Some psychiatric diagnoses are related to particularities in the use of the defense mechanisms.
In another study preceeiding the previous one, a question was asked : Are anxiety or depressive disorders related to the use of specific defenses? In 1997 Spinhoven, P., & Kooiman, C. G. (1997) specifically looked into this question.
PD, OCD and MDD diagnoses seem to modify neurotic and immature defenses, whereas a diagnosis of SAD seems to modify only the immature defenses. However, depressive disorder has a greater influence on the use of immature mechanisms.'
Personality disorders are positively associated with the highly maladaptive immature defense style, and negatively associated with the mature defense style.
Defense Mechanisms are very interesting and important in our lives. They help us to understand our actions and emotions better than we would normally have. Personally, through my knowledge of defense mechanisms, I am able to distinguish between my reactions, and alter them to be more productive. Although there are many more developed theories on defense mechanisms, Sigmund Freud changed the way we think about our reactions through his 12 foundational defense mechanisms. Just like they have helped me in my life, I only hope they will help you as well.
- Denial
- Contrary to the belief that Denial is the refusal to accept reality or fact, individuals utilizing this defense, may acknowledge a characterological defect, illness, or event, but they will fail to acknowledge and/or recognize the magnitude and impact their issues have upon themselves, and/or others.
- Regression
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A person who suffers a mental breakdown assumes a fetal position, rocking and crying. Regressing when under a great deal of stress, a person may be refusing to leave the bed and engage in normal, everyday activities. Regression However, sometimes regressions can be adaptive and make part of more mature personalities, such as in playfulness and creative imagination. These adaptive processes have been known as regression in service of the ego or ego...
Regression, according to psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud, is a defense mechanism leading to the temporary or long-term reversion of the ego to an earlier stage of development rather than handling unacceptable impulses more adaptively.
Regression is the reversion to an earlier stage of development in the face of unacceptable thoughts or impulses. For an example an adolescent who is overwhelmed with fear, anger and growing sexual impulses might become clingy and start exhibiting earlier childhood behaviors he has long since overcome, such as bedwetting. An adult may regress when under a great deal of stress, refusing to leave their bed and engage in normal, everyday activities.
- Acting Out
- Acting Out is performing an extreme behavior in order to express thoughts or feelings the person feels incapable of expressing otherwise. Instead of saying, “I’m angry with you,” a person who acts out may instead throw a book at the person or punch a hole through a wall. When a person acts out, it can act as a pressure release, and often helps the individual feel calmer and peaceful once again. For instance, a child’s temper tantrum is a form of acting out when he or she doesn’t get his or her way with a parent. Self-injury may also be a form of acting-out, expressing in physical pain what one cannot stand to feel emotionally.
- Dissociation
- Dissociation is when a person loses track of time and/or person, and instead finds another representation of their self in order to continue in the moment. A person who dissociates often loses track of time or themselves and their usual thought processes and memories. People who have a history of any kind of childhood abuse often suffer from some form of dissociation. In extreme cases, dissociation can lead to a person believing they have multiple selves (such as “multiple personality disorder”). People who use dissociation often have a disconnected view of themselves in their world. Time and their own self-image may not flow continuously, as it does for most people. In this manner, a person who dissociates can “disconnect” from the real world for a time and live in a different world that is not cluttered with thoughts, feelings or memories that are unbearable.
- Compartmentalization
- Compartmentalization is a lesser form of dissociation, wherein parts of oneself are separated from awareness of other parts and behaving as if one had separate sets of values. An example might be an honest person who cheats on their income tax return and keeps their two value systems distinct and un-integrated while remaining unconscious of the cognitive
dissonance.
- Projection
- Projection is the misattribution of a person’s undesired thoughts, feelings or impulses onto another person who does not have those thoughts, feelings or impulses. Projection is used especially when the thoughts are considered unacceptable for the person to express, or they feel completely ill at ease with having them. For example, a spouse may be angry at their significant other for not listening, when in fact it is the angry spouse who does not listen. Projection is often the result of a lack of insight and acknowledgement of one’s own motivations and feelings.
- Reaction Formation
- Reaction Formation is the converting of unwanted or dangerous thoughts, feelings or impulses into their opposites. For instance, a woman who is very angry with her boss and would like to quit her job may instead be overly kind and generous toward her boss and express a desire to keep working there forever. She is incapable of expressing the negative emotions of anger and unhappiness with her job, and instead becomes overly kind to publicly demonstrate her lack of anger and unhappiness.
NARCISSISTIC / BORDERLINE DEFENSES
- Denial
- In Denial one does not negate the existence, or presence, of factual events, conditions, or information, but rather, there is an unconscious process impeding the recognition of the severity and/or magnitude of what is consciously accepted.
- Projection
- An unconscious process through which segments of the inner world, experiences, thoughts, feelings, and/or behaviors are projected to, or explained through other external objects.
- Projective Identification
- An unconscious process through which one identifies projected entities as reality, and then proceeds to act upon the projection as “reality.”
- Splitting
- An unconscious process through which one ‘splits’ objects into black or white, good or bad, right or wrong; without allowances for degrees, or gradients.
- Primitive Idealization
- An unconscious process through which cathected objects are endowed with omnipotence, omniscience, and unparallel beauty.
- Distortion
- The process of distortion entails the restructuring of reality to a level of congruence with one’s own inner needs, and ideas. Its manifest expression may be observed within hallucinatory, delusional, or idiosyncratic belief systems serving cognitive dissonance, as well as other defensive structures.
- Introjection
- An unconscious process through which one explains, identifies, integrates, or incorporates an external reality as emanating from within, e.g., as in identification with an aggressor.
- Repression
- An unconscious process through which one removes, painful, unwanted, or dissonant objects, events, wants
IMMATURE DEFENSES
- Acting Out
- Acts an unconscious impulse or affect to avoid affect. Acting gives into the impulse rather than prohibiting it. Avoids the tension of postponing expression.
- Blocking
- Inhibits thinking temporarily. May include affects and impulses. Resembles repression, except tension felt.
- Hypochondriasis
- Transforms bereavement, loneliness, aggressive impulses into self-reproach, pain, somatic illness. Avoids responsibility, circumvents guilt. Affliction due to ego-alien nature of introjects.
- Identification
- Crucial to ego development. A person may identify with a love object to defend against anxiety or pain, real or threatened. Person adopts quality or symptom of one about whom feels guilty. Identifies with aggressor.
- Introjection
- Although, vital to development, when used as a defense, can obliterate distinction between subject and object. Avoids painful awareness of separateness of threat of loss.
Avoids the anxiety of feared object as in identification with aggressor.
- Passive Aggressive Behavior
- Expresses aggression indirectly through failures, procrastination, illness that affect others more than self.
- Projection
- Attributes own feelings to another due to intolerable feelings or painful affects. In psychosis, become frank delusions and persecutions.
- Regression
- Attempts to return to earlier functioning to avoid tension at current level. Necessary for creativity.
- Schizoid Fantasy
- Retreats autistically to avoid intimacy, obtain gratification. Eccentricity repels.
- Somatization
- Converts psychic derivatives into body symptoms.
- Desomatization
- infantile somatic responses replaced by thought, affect.
NEUROTIC DEFENSES (A term used by: Helene Deutsch and Otto Fenichel)
- Controlling
- Manage or regulate environment excessively to avoid anxiety.
- Displacement
- Shifts an emotion or drives from one idea or object to another. Permits symbolic representation of less distress.
- Dissociation
- Drastically modifies personal identity or character to avoid emotional distress, including fugue states, hysterical conversion, DID, drug highs, religious joy.
- Externalization
- Perceives in external and objects, elements of one’s own personality, including impulses, conflicts, moods, attitudes, and styles of thinking.
- Regression
- A person who suffers a mental breakdown assumes a fetal position, rocking and crying. Regressing when under a great deal of stress, a person may be refusing to leave the bed and engage in normal, everyday activities. However, sometimes regressions can be adaptive and make part of more mature personalities, such as in playfulness and creative imagination. These adaptive processes have been known as regression in service of the ego or ego...
Regression, according to psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud, is a defense mechanism leading to the temporary or long-term reversion of the ego to an earlier stage of development rather than handling unacceptable impulses more adaptively.
Regression is the reversion to an earlier stage of development in the face of unacceptable thoughts or impulses. For an example, an adolescent who is overwhelmed with fear, anger and
growing sexual impulses might become clingy and start exhibiting earlier childhood behaviors he has long since overcome, such as bedwetting. An adult may regress when under a great deal of stress, refusing to leave their bed and engage in normal, everyday activities.
- Inhibition
- Inhibits or renounces ego functions consciously to evade anxiety arising out of conflicts with impulses, superego, environmental forces, or figures.
- Intellectualization
- Avoids affective expression, experience, relationship. Attends to external reality to avoid feelings, and details to avoid whole.
- Isolation of affect
- Splits or separates idea from affect. Represses affect. May remove one from object relationships.
- Rationalization
- Offers rational explanations to justify attitudes, beliefs, behaviors instinctually based.
- Reaction Formation- (Reversal)
- Transforms an unacceptable impulse into its opposite. If frequently used early, can become an obsessional character trait.
- Sexualization
- Endows sexual significance to an object or function
MATURE DEFENSES
- Sublimation
- An unconscious process through which one –over time- modifies psychosocially reprehensible or unacceptable behaviors into events, or actions with socially redeeming values.
- Altruism
- Experiences vicarious pleasure by serving others constructively and instinctually. Reaction formation is benign and constructive. Serving others does not take the place of meeting own needs.
- Anticipation
- Anticipates, plans for future inner discomfort that is goal directed. Careful planning or worrying and premature but realistic affective anticipation of dire and potentially dreadful outcomes.
- Asceticism
- Eliminates pleasurable effects of experiences. Uses morals to assign values to specific pleasures. Derives gratification from renunciation of all consciously-perceived base pleasures.
- Adaptive Regression
A person who suffers a mental breakdown assumes a fetal position, rocking and crying. Regressing when under a great deal of stress, a person may be refusing to leave the bed and engage in normal, everyday activities. Regression However, sometimes regressions can be adaptive and make part of more mature personalities, such as in playfulness and creative imagination. These adaptive processes have been known as regression in service of the ego or ego...
Regression, according to psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud, is a defense mechanism leading to the temporary or long-term reversion of the ego to an earlier stage of development rather than handling unacceptable impulses more adaptively.
Regression is the reversion to an earlier stage of development in the face of unacceptable thoughts or impulses. For an example, an adolescent who is overwhelmed with fear, anger and growing sexual impulses might become clingy and start exhibiting earlier childhood behaviors he has long since overcome, such as bedwetting. An adult may regress when under a great deal of stress, refusing to leave their bed and engage in normal, everyday activities.
- Humor
- permits overt expression of feelings and thoughts without personal discomfort or immobilization and does not produce unpleasant effects on others. A person may focus and tolerate what is too terrible to be borne. Wit, however, does not allow feeling of the affect at all.
- Sublimation
- Achieves impulse gratification and retention of goals via altering object to one that is socially acceptable. Channels instincts rather than blocking them. Acknowledges, modifies, directs feelings toward an object or goal, yet allows modest gratification of instincts.
- Suppression
- Decision or action to postpone attention to a conscious impulse or conflict Does not avoid issues but cuts them off. Acknowledges discomfort but minimizes it.