Defense mechanism

Definition

Defense mechanisms are unconscious mechanisms aimed at reducing anxiety that arises from three different scenarios:

• When the id impulses are in conflict with each other;
• When the id impulses conflict with superego values and beliefs;
• When an external threat is posed to the ego.

For example, when the id impulses (e.g. desire to have sex with a stranger) conflict with the superego (e.g. belief in societal conventions of not having sex with unknown persons), then the feelings of anxiety come to the surface. To reduce these negative feelings, defense mechanisms are employed.

The concept of the biological id impulses comes from Sigmund Freud’s structural model. Id impulses are based on the pleasure principle: instant gratification of one’s own desires and needs. Sigmund Freud believed that id represents the instinctual impulses in ourselves, which are aggression, and sexual. The sexual drive is our drive to live, to thrive and to grow. The aggression drive is our drive for safety and protection of our lives. Those two impulse drives are the motivating factors of our actions.

In the ego, there are two processes going on. First, there is the unconscious primary process, where the thoughts are not organized in a coherent way, the feelings can shift, contradictions are not in conflict or are just not perceived that way, and condensations arise. There is no logic and no time line. Lust is the important motive for this process. On the contrary, there is the conscious secondary process, to which strong boundaries are set, and in which the thoughts must be organized in a coherent way. More cognitions arise here.

The impulses from the id cannot be focused on the satisfaction, they must respect the reality of the world and the superego. The superego represents the learned (in the process of growing up) and internalized set of values and ethics, which gives individual the sense of what is right and what is wrong to do, feel and think.

When the anxiety becomes too overwhelming it is then the place of the ego to employ defense mechanisms to protect the individual. Feelings of guilt, embarrassment and shame often accompany the feeling of anxiety. Anna Freud describes in her book Ego and mechanisms of defense (1936) the concept of signal anxiety; she states that it is ‘not directly a conflicted instinctual tension but a signal occurring in the ego of an anticipated instinctual tension’. The signaling function of anxiety is thus seen as a crucial one and biologically adapted to warn the organism of danger or a threat to its equilibrium. The anxiety is felt as an increase in bodily or mental tension and the signal that the organism receives in this way allows it the possibility of taking defensive action towards the perceived danger. Defense mechanisms work by distorting the id impulses into acceptable forms, or by unconscious blockage of these impulses.

Maladaptive Use

Defense mechanisms are helpful and, if used in a proper manner, are healthy. However, if misused, the defense mechanisms may also be unhealthy. The maladaptive use of defense mechanisms can occur in a variety of cases, e.g. when they become automatic and prevent individuals from realizing their true feelings and thoughts. Also, a maladaptive use of defense mechanisms is when they are being employed in a continuous way that disrupts reality-testing. Denial and paranoid projection are considered to be psychotic in its nature, as their repeated use can cause people to lose touch with the real world and their surroundings and consequently isolate themselves from it and dwell in a ‘created’ world of their own design. For example, addicts are known to misuse such defense mechanisms as denial. Defense mechanisms can also be harmful if:

• There are too few defenses which can be employed in coping with threats;
• There is too much superego activity, which causes the use of too many defenses.

Main Defense Mechanisms

Sigmund Freud was the first person to develop the concept of defense mechanisms, however it was his daughter Anna Freud who clarified and conceptualized it. She has described ten different defense mechanism:Denial, Displacement, Intellectualization, Projection, Rationalization, Reaction formation, Regression, Repression, Sublimation, and Suppression. Later researchers have added some more defense mechanisms to the list;Identification, Undoing, Compensation (first described by Alfred Adler), Dissotiation.

Denial

An ego defense mechanism that operates unconsciously to resolve emotional conflict, and to reduce anxiety by refusing to perceive the more unpleasant aspects of external reality.

Denial is a psychological defense mechanism in which a person faced with a fact that is uncomfortable or painful to accept rejects it instead, insisting that it is not true despite what may be overwhelming evidence. The subject may deny the reality of the unpleasant fact altogether (simple denial), admit the fact but deny its seriousness (minimisation) or admit both the fact and seriousness but deny responsibility (transference). The concept of denial is particularly important to the study of addiction.

The theory of denial was first researched seriously by Anna Freud. She classified denial as a mechanism of the immature mind, because it conflicts with the ability to learn from and cope with reality. Where denial occurs in mature minds, it is most often associated with death and dying. More recent research has significantly expanded the scope and utility of the concept. Elisabeth Kübler-Ross used denial as the first of five stages in the psychology of a dying patient, and the idea has been extended to include the reactions of survivors to news of a death. Thus, when parents are informed of the death of a child, their first reaction is often of the form, "No! You must have the wrong house, you can't mean our child!"

Unlike some other defense mechanisms postulated by psychoanalytic theory (for instance, repression), the general existence of denial is fairly easy to verify, even for non-specialists. On the other hand, denial is one of the most controversial defense mechanisms, since it can be easily used to create unfalsifiable theories: anything the subject says or does that appears to disprove the interpreter's theory is explained, not as evidence that the interpreter's theory is wrong, but as the subject's being "in denial".

The concept of denial is important in twelve-step programs, where the abandonment or reversal of denial forms the basis of the first, fourth, fifth, eighth and tenth steps. The ability to deny or minimize is an essential part of what enables an addict to continue his or her behavior in the face of evidence that, to an outsider, appears overwhelming. This is cited as one of the reasons that compulsion is seldom effective in treating addiction — the habit of denial remains.

Understanding and avoiding denial is also important in the treatment of various diseases. The American Heart Association cites denial as a principal reason that treatment of a heart attack is delayed. Because the symptoms are so varied, and often have other potential explanations, the opportunity exists for the patient to deny the emergency, often with fatal consequences. It is common for patients to delay mammograms or other tests because of a fear of cancer, even though this is clearly maladaptive. It is the responsibility of the care team, and of the nursing staff in particular, to train at-risk patients to avoid such behavior.

Displacement

An unconscious defense mechanism, whereby the mind redirects emotion from a ‘dangerous’ object to a ‘safe’ object. In psychoanalytic theory, displacement is a defense mechanism that shifts sexual or aggressive impulses to a more acceptable or less threatening target that can serve as an emotional substitute.The most classic example is a worker, angry at his boss, obviously unable to direct his anger and hostility to his intended target, comes home and yells at his wife. She, now also angry and upset, displaces her anger on the child, who then further displaces it on their pet dog. In the caricature series of a famous Swedish cartoonist Bidstrup this chain of displaced aggression ends, when the pet dog bites the boss, who started it.We take it out on the people we love most often.

Another, far more destructive form of displacement, is what Anna Freud called "turning-against-self".It happens, when the anger and/or other negative emotions (such as hatred)are redirected towards oneself, instead of another object. This is dynamic is commonly associated with depression and suicide.

Intellectualization

Intellectualization is concentrating on the intellectual components of the situations as to distance oneself from the anxiety provoking emotions associated with these situations.

Intellectualization is a Defense mechanism|defense mechanism where reasoning is used to block confrontation with an unconscious conflict and its associated emotional stress. It involves removing one's self, emotionally, from a stressful event.

For example, a wife whose husband is dying from an illness, tries to learn everything about it, prognosis, treatment options. She may talk about it in scientific terms, analyzing and describing the medical facts about his condition. Doing that may help her not to feel all the pain, anger and onslaught of other emotions provoked by the imminent death of a loved one.

Intellectualization helps to protect us against the anxiety by separating oneself from the painful or stressful event hiding the emotions it provokes behind big words, almost scientific focus on the facts. It is accomplished by thinking about the event in cold, rational terms, clinically analyzing it.

Projection

Attributing to others, one’s own unacceptable or unwanted thoughts or/and emotions. Projection reduces anxiety in the way that it allows the expression of the impulse or desire without letting the ego recognize it.

Psychological projection (or projection bias) can be defined as unconsciously assuming that others have the same or similar thoughts, beliefs, values, or positions on any given subject as oneself. According to the theories of Sigmund Freud, it is a psychological defence mechanism whereby one "projects" one's own undesirable thoughts, motivations, desires, feelings—basically parts of oneself—onto someone else (usually another person, but psychological projection onto animals and inanimate objects also occurs). The principle of projection is well-established in psychology.

To understand the process, imagine an individual (Alice, for example) who feels dislike for another person (let's say Bob), but whose unconscious mind will not allow her to become aware of this negative emotion. Instead of admitting to herself that she feels dislike for Bob, she projects her dislike onto Bob, so that her conscious thought is not "I don't like Bob," but "Bob doesn't like me." In this way one can see that projection is related to denial, the only defense mechanism that some argue is more primitive than projection. Alice has denied a part of herself that is desperate to come to the surface. She can't flatly deny that she doesn't like Bob, so instead she will project the dislike, thinking Bob doesn't like her. Another, and an ironic, example is if Alice were to say, "Bob seems to project his feelings onto me."

The concept was anticipated by Friedrich Nietzsche:"He who fights with monsters might take care lest he thereby become a monster. And if you gaze for long into an abyss, the abyss gazes also into you."

— Beyond Good and Evil

When addressing psychological trauma the defense mechanism is sometimes counter projection, including an obsession to continue and remain in a recurring trauma-causing situation and the compulsive obsession with the perceived perpetrator of the trauma or its projection.

Jung writes that "All projections provoke counter-projection when the object is unconscious of the quality projected upon it by the subject."

Rationalization

In psychology, rationalization is the process of constructing a logical justification for a decision that was originally arrived at through a different mental process.

This process can be in a range from fully conscious (e.g. to present an external defense against ridicule from others) to mostly subconscious (e.g. to create a block against internal feelings of guilt).

For an example, consider a person who bought one of the first home computers in 1980 primarily motivated by the excitement of playing with a computer. If he felt that his friends would not accept "having fun" as a sufficient reason for the purchase, he might have searched for other justifications and ended up telling them how much time it was going to save him in doing his taxes.

Simply put, rationalization is making excuses for one's mistakes, and by doing so avoiding self-condemnation or condemnation by others. There are two types of rationalization. One is "sour grapes", from the Aesop's fable about the fox who thought that the grapes too high to reach were sour anyway. For example, a person after failing to get into a law school may justify himself by saying: "I would have hated being a lawyer anyway". More productive type of the rationalization is "sweet lemons", an assumption that everything happens for the best, trying to find the blessing in disguise, the proverbial silver lining. "So, I didn't get to the law school, but now I can really focus on finding my true vocation."

Rationalization is a post-hoc (after the fact) defense mechanism. It's connected to the self-serving bias: failure is ascribed to the outside factors, whereas the success comes from oneself.

Reaction formation

In Freud's psychoanalytic theory, 'reaction formation' is a defense mechanism in which anxiety-producing or unacceptable emotions are replaced by their direct opposites. For example, one who is strongly attracted to pornography, but has moral or religious obligations to avoid it, might become a staunch critic of it.

In Ken Wilber's developmental ontology (outlined in his book Integral Psychology), reaction formation is considered a neurotic defense. Arising from issues of self-concept, it is amenable to uncovering and interpretive therapies.

Anna Freud called this defense mechanism "believing the opposite", denial and reversal of an emotion. It might be one of the most difficult defense mechanisms to understand. When we have an emotion or a reaction that is too threatening or too anxiety provoking, we turn it into the opposite. This way, we aren't threatened by that emotion, or even the awareness of the emotion.Love turns into hate,hate turns into love. "Hell has no fury like a scorned lover".

One of the clearest examples of reaction formation can be seen in children between seven and eleven or twelve: boys "hate" girls, girls "hate" boys, they refuse to sit together or share the textbook etc. But for adults, observing this, the picture is quite clear.

The reversed feeling, resulting from the reaction formation, are often too excessive. The problems may start, though, when (like with denial and repression) a person starts to do this automatically, losing sight of his/her real feelings.

Regression

The reversion to an earlier stage of development in the face of unacceptable impulses.When we are faced with anxiety, we tend to retreat, as if in a "psychological time machine" to the point in time, when we last felt secure and safe - our childhood. Under stress or in an anxiety-provoking situation people very often can become more childish and primitive. Even an adult may want to curl up in bed in a fetal position with their favorite teddy bear.

Regression is an attempt to recapture some childhood satisfaction by relating to the world in a way, that was formerly effective (even though it's no longer so), and giving up of mature problem solving methods for it. It is as if person is trying to "please the world" in the way he/she tried to please his parents in childhood. another way to sum up how regression is to use commonly known phrase "to ventilate one's feelings' or "to vent". What we do to achieve that, are not planned, rational actions, they are old childhood habits that return automatically .When a 2-year -old throws a tantrum, he/she may throw toys against the wall, when he/she grows up and has a fight with the spouse, they throw dishes against the wall.

Repression/Suppression

Repression and suppression are very similar, they both are the process of pulling thoughts into the unconscious and preventing painful or dangerous thoughts from entering consciousness. The difference is :repression is an unconscious forces, suppression is conscious process, when you consciously make a choice not to think about something.

'Psychological repression', or simply repression, is the psychological act of excluding desires and impulses (wishes, fantasies or feelings) from one's consciousness and attempting to hold or subdue them in the subconscious. Since the popularization of Sigmund Freud's work in psychoanalysis, repression is popularly known to be a common defense mechanism.

Repression is considered unconscious and can often be detrimental. It may be contrasted with suppression, which is entirely conscious and thus can be managed. Because repression is unconscious, it manifests itself through a symptom or series of symptoms, sometimes called the "return of the repressed." A repressed sexual desire, for example, might re-surface in the form of a nervous cough or a slip of the tongue. In this way, although the subject is not conscious of the desire and so cannot speak it out loud, the subject's body can still articulate the forbidden desire through the symptom.

A person can suppress the impulse to "choke the life out of some idiot who desperately needs it" for higher reasons, such as sociability, or more mundane reasons, like keeping a job - especially if it's a co-worker or boss being considered for the assault. The desire remains conscious, but is thwarted by the exercise of willpower due to a rational decision to avoid the action.

It is often claimed that traumatic events are "repressed," yet it appears that it is more likely, not less, that the occurrence of these events is remembered, if in a distorted manner. One problem from an objective research point of view is that a "memory" is usually defined as what someone says or does, that can measured and recorded, since we have no way to verify the existence and/or accuracy of a memory except by the correspondence of what someone clearly expresses with some other representation of past events (written records, photographs; reports of others, etc).

Normal repression is sometimes considered to have two stages, which are progressively involved in the creation of the individual's sense of "self" and "other", of "good" and "bad", and of the aspects of personality called "ego" and "superego".

In the Primary Repression phase, the infant learns that some aspects of reality are pleasant, and others are unpleasant, and that some are controllable, and others not. In order to define the "self", the infant must repress the natural assumption that all things are equal. Primary Repression then is the process of determining what is self, what is other, what is good and what is bad. Once done, the child can now distinguish between desires, fears, self, and mother/other.

Secondary Repression begins once the child realizes that acting on some desires may bring anxiety. For example, the child who desires the mother's breast may be denied and feel threatened with punishment, perhaps by the father. This anxiety leads to repression of the desire for the mother's breast. The threat of punishment related to this form of anxiety, when internalized becomes the "superego", which intercedes against the desires of the "ego" without the need for any identifiable external threat.

Abnormal repression, or complex neurotic behavior involving repression and the superego, occur when repression develops, or continues to develop due to the internalized feelings of anxiety, in ways leading to behavior that is illogical, self-destructive, or anti-social.

A psychotherapist may try to reduce this behavior by revealing and re-introducing the repressed aspects of the patient's mental process to his conscious awareness, and then teaching the patient how to reduce any anxieties felt in relation to these feelings and impulses.

Out of these two suppression seems to have more positive effect that repression. First of all, it deals with unpleasant but not totally despicable actions or thoughts. It actually may be even useful and rational to focus on one thing at a time, suppressing other problems until that one is solved. Counting to 10 when you are angry before acting on it is not only an example of suppression, it's also a technique very useful in everyday life.

The problem with repression is that whatever we are trying to push away into subconscious, doesn't go away. Subconscious tends to give it a life of its own, thus empowering it even more. and the more we are trying to repress it, the more powerful it becomes ("forbidden fruit" is the most attractive one) to the point, that it starts to manifest itself in our actions, slips of tongue etc in ways not noticeable to ourselves but noticeable for others.

Sublimation

The refocusing of psychic energy (which Sigmund Freud believed was limited) away from negative outlets to more positive outlets. These drives which cannot find an outlet are rechanneled. For example, a student who has a major upcoming test, rather than spending time and energy worrying about it, would rechannel that time and energy into studying. In Freud's classic theory, erotic energy is only allowed limited expression due to repression, and much of the remainder of a given group's erotic energy is used to develop its culture and civilization. Freud considered this defense mechanism the most productive compared to the others that he identified. Sublimation is the process of transforming libido into ‘social useful’ achievements, mainly art. Psychoanalysts often refer to sublimation as the only truly successful defense mechanism.

In psychology, sublimation is a coping mechanism. It has its roots in the psychoanalytical approach, and is often also referred to as a type of defense mechanism.

Freud considered this defense mechanism the most productive compared to the others that he identified (ie., repression, displacement, denial, reaction formation, intellectualization and projection). Sublimation is the process of transforming libido into "social useful" achievements, mainly art. Psychoanalysts often refer to sublimation as the only truly successful defense mechanism.

Fantasy

Fantasy (daydreams, TV soaps, literature, Internet) is a way to escape our real problems. When we imagine ourselves successfull, we may actually feel successful, especially so, when reality is opposite of success. Actually, it may often be good for us: fantasy acts as a rehearsal of our future success, like highschoolers writhing their Nobel Prize or Oscar acceptance speeches. Sometimes, fantasies may provide a way to vent our feelings. Many self-help methods are based on fantasy:covert rehearsal, covert sensitization/desensitization, empathy etc.

But, as fantasy may be part of solution , it may become part of the problem: imagening the worst consequences may lead to fear, relieving a bad situation may lead to anger and depression.

Identification

Identification (sometimes also called introjection) is identifying with someone else, taking on their personality characteristcs, in order to solve some emotional difficulty and avoid anxiety. That was original Freud's solution to Oedipus and Electra complexes: identify with same sex parent, try to become like him/her.

Identification at work is best observable in the teenagers' peer pressuere. When you identify with a group (dress like them, listen to the same music etc)youranxiety gets reduced through feeling included.

Dissociation

Dissociation usually stems from a really strong trauma, intense pain or a major identity crisis. It may manifest itself as Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, memory losses,Multiple Personality Disorder, Dissosiative Amnesia, as well as more common phenomena, such as flashbacks, "spacing out", quickly forgetting something embarrassing. But the memories are not just lost in the subconsciuos (as in repression) but splintered and distorted. It is as if under intense stress the ability of our consciousness to include all our thoughts, emotions, somatic sensations etc fails, ans some parts of what happened get forgotten.So, a person may remember what happened, but forget how it felt. Or, a person may feel depersonalized, like a robot: "I know, what is happening, but doesn't seem like me."

There is also an "everyday life level" of the dissociation: our assumptions about things and people. We tend to discard some parts of reality that contradict a belief that we hold as true. This is called black /white thinking or right/wrong thinking. Once we select a point of view as "right", every other view point or opinion becomes "wrong", even though it may not be so, or even if it doesn't completely contradict our view point. Basically, we lose track, or discount some parts of reality in order to hold on to a particular idea or a belief system, that we know and feel as true.

References

ISBN links support NWE through referral fees

• Fonagy, P. and Target, M. (2003). Psychoanalytic Theories: Perspectives from Developmental Psychopathology. London: Whurr Publishers.
• Freud, A. (1967). The Ego and the Mechanisms of Defense. New York: International Universities Press.
• Columbia Encyclopedia (2003).
• "When your patient uses denial", Journal of Practical Nursing, 48, 10-14.

Online papers

• Garrett, F. (2002). Addiction and Its Mechanisms of Defense.
• Heffner, C.L. (2001). Psychology 101.
• Niolon, R. (1999). PsychPage: Defenses.
• Stanescu, C. and Morosanu, P. (2005). Neuroticism, Ego Defense Mechanisms and Valoric Types: a Correlative Study.
• Tucker-Ladd, C.E. (1996-2000). Psychological Self-Help.
• Wagner, K., van (2006). Psychology About.

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