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Defense Mechanisms 

The different ways of dealing with pain are called defense mechanisms, this is when people experience difficulties, they have different ways of handling their pain.

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Originally conceived by Sigmund Freud, much of the development of defense mechanisms was done by his daughter, Anna Freud.

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Defense mechanisms can be healthy or unhealthy depending on the circumstances and how much a person uses them.

Example: If you slam down your briefcase because you are mad at your wife one time, that's not a big deal. But if you frequently take your anger out by throwing or breaking things, there might be a better way of dealing with your anger.

Defense mechanisms This can hide many different feelings from anger to love to sadness. There are a variety of other defense mechanisms such as minimizing, blaming, diversion, withdrawal, mastery, compensation, conversion, disassociation, idealization, identification, incorporation, introjection, substitution, and symbolism.

Name of Defense Mechanism

Description

Burying a painful feeling or thought from your awareness Repression

though it may resurface in symbolic form. Sometimes

Example

You can't remember your father's funeral.

considered a basis of other defense mechanisms.

Denial

Not accepting reality because it is too painful.

You are arrested for drunk driving several times but don't believe you have a problem with alcohol.

Regression

Reverting to an older, less mature way of handling stresses and feelings

You and your roommate have get into an argument so you stomp off into another

room and pout Projection

Attributing your own unacceptable thoughts or feelings to someone or something else

You get really mad at your husband but scream that he's the one mad at you.

Splitting

Everything in the world is seen as all good or all bad with nothing in between.

You think your best friend is absolutely worthless because he forgot a lunch date with you.

Isolation of affect

Attempting to avoid a painful thought or feeling by objectifying and emotionally detaching oneself from the feeling

Acting aloof and indifferent toward someone when you really dislike that person

Displacement

Channeling a feeling or thought from its actual source to something or someone else.

When you get mad at your sister, you break your drinking glass by throwing it against the wall.

Reaction Formation

Adopting beliefs, attitudes, and feelings contrary to what you really believe

When you say you're not angry when you really are.

Rationalization

I always study hard for tests and I know Justifying one's behaviors and motivations by substituting a lot of people who cheat so it's not a big "good", acceptable reasons for these real motivations deal I cheated this time.

Altruism

Handling your own pain by helping others.

After your wife dies, you keep yourself busy by volunteering at your church.

Humor

Focusing on funny aspects of a painful situation.

A person's treatment for cancer makes him lose his hair so he makes jokes about being bald.

Sublimation

Intense rage redirected in the form of Redirecting unacceptable, instinctual drives into personally participation in sports such as boxing or and socially acceptable channels football

Suppression

The effort to hide and control unacceptable thoughts or feelings

Undoing

Trying to reverse or "undo" a thought or feeling by You have feelings of dislike for someone performing an action that signifies an opposite feeling than so you buy them a gift your original thought or feeling

You are attracted to someone but say that you really don't like the person at all

Defense Mechanisms

Explanations > Behaviors > Coping > Defense Mechanisms Anxiety and tension | Defense Mechanisms | So what?

Sigmund Freud describes how the Ego uses a range of mechanisms to handle the conflict between the Id, the Ego and the Super ego. His daughter Anna introduced the principle of

inner mechanisms that defend the ego in her 1936 book 'The Ego and the Mechanisms of Defense'.

Anxiety and tension Freud noted that a major drive for most people is the reduction in tension, and that a major cause of tension was anxiety. He identified three different types of anxiety.

Reality Anxiety This is the most basic form of anxiety and is typically based on fears of real and possible events, such as being bitten by a dog or falling from a ladder. The most common way of reducing tension from Reality Anxiety is taking oneself away from the situation, running away from the dog or simply refusing to go up the ladder.

Neurotic Anxiety This is a form of anxiety which comes from an unconscious fear that the basic impulses of the ID (the primitive part of our personality) will take control of the person, leading to eventual punishment (this is thus a form of Moral Anxiety).

Moral Anxiety This form of anxiety comes from the Superego in the form of a fear of violating values and moral codes, and appears as feelings of guilt or shame.

Defense Mechanisms When anxiety occurs, the mind first responds by an increase in problem-solving thinking, seeking rational ways of escaping the situation. If this is not fruitful (and maybe anyway), a range of defense mechanisms may be triggered. These are tactics which the Ego develops to help deal with the Id and the Super Ego. All Defense Mechanisms share two common properties : 

They often appear unconsciously.

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They tend to distort, transform, or otherwise falsify reality.

In distorting reality, there is a change in perception which allows for a lessening of anxiety, with a corresponding reduction in felt tension. Anna Freud's Defense Mechanisms include: 

Denial: claiming/believing that what is true to be actually false.

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Displacement: redirecting emotions to a substitute target.

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Intellectualization: taking an objective viewpoint.

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Projection: attributing uncomfortable feelings to others.

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Rationalization: creating false but credible justifications.

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Reaction Formation: overacting in the opposite way to the fear.

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Regression: going back to acting as a child.

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Repression: pushing uncomfortable thoughts into the subconscious.

 Sublimation: redirecting 'wrong' urges into socially acceptable actions. After the initial list, many other mechanisms for coping with the difficulties life throws at us have been identified by other analysts and authors.

Defense mechanisms are unconscious psychic processes that provide the ego with relief from the state of psychic conflict between the intruding id, the threatening superego and the powerful influences emanating from the external reality. Due to these forces in the mind opposing and battling against each other, anxiety signals an internal danger. These mechanisms come into play to enable the ego to reach compromise solutions to problems that it is unable to solve, by letting some component of the unwelcome mental contents emerge into consciousness in a disguised form. How efficiently these mechanisms are to strengthen the ego and to what extent they further different forms of compromise formations that may turn out to be

psychoneurotic symptoms, depends on how successfully the ego reaches a higher or lesser degree of integration of these conflicting forces in the mind. The more the ego is blocked in its development for being entangled in its earlier conflicts (fixations), clinging to archaic modes of functioning, the greater is the possibility of succumbing to these forces. Anna Freud, in The Ego and The Mechanisms of Defence (1946), formulates the hypothesis that what the ego fears most is the return to a previous stage of fusion with the id, in case repression fails or instincts are too intense. In order to ensure the maintenance of the level of organization achieved, the ego has to protect itself from the invasion of instinctual demands (drives) of the id and from the return of the repressed contents. In fact, in the chapter "The Ego's Dependent Relations", in The Id and the Ego (1923), Freud says: "psychoanalysis is the instrument to enable the ego to achieve a progressive conquest of the id". Psychoanalysis aims at transforming greater amounts of what once belonged to the id into acceptable possessions of the ego, along with its main purpose of turning unconscious contents into conscious ones. Thus, the mind can find solutions that were previously unattainable to the immature ego.

The major defense mechanisms are the following: 1. Repression - the withdrawal from consciousness of an unwanted idea, affect, or desire by pushing it into the unconscious part of the mind. 2. Reaction formation - the fixation in consciousness of an idea, affect, or desire that is opposite to a feared unconscious impulse. 3. Projection - unwanted feelings are attributed to another person. 4. Regression - a return to forms of gratification belonging to earlier phases, due to conflicts arising at more developed stages. 5. Rationalization - the substitution of the true, but threatening cause of behavior for a safe and reasonable explanation. 6. Denial - the conscious refusal to perceive disturbing facts. It deprives the individual of the necessary awareness to cope with external challenges and the employment of adequate strategies for survival as well. 7. Displacement- the redirection of an urge onto a substitute outlet. 8. Undoing - is achieved through an act, which goal is the cancellation of a prior unpleasant experience. 9. Introjection - intimately related to identification, aims at solving some emotional difficulty of the individual by

means of taking into his personality characteristics of someone else. 10. Sublimation - part of the energy invested in sexual impulses is shifted to the pursuit of socially valuable achievements, such as artistic or scientific endeavors.

Repression This was the first defense mechanism that Freud discovered, and arguably the most important. Repression is an unconscious mechanism employed by the ego to keep disturbing or threatening thoughts from becoming conscious. Thoughts that are often repressed are those that would result in feelings of guilt from the superego. For example, in the Oedipus complex aggressive thoughts about the same sex parents are repressed. This is not a very successful defense in the long term since it involves forcing disturbing wishes, ideas or memories into the unconscious, where, although hidden, they will create anxiety.

* Projection This involves individuals attributing their own thoughts, feeling and motives to another person. Thoughts most commonly projected onto another are ones that would cause guilt such as aggressive and sexual fantasies or thoughts. For instance, you might hate someone, but your superego tells you that such hatred is unacceptable. You can 'solve' the problem by believing that they hate you.

* Displacement Displacement is the redirection of an impulse (usually aggression) onto a powerless substitute target. The target can be a person or an object that can serve as a symbolic substitute. Someone who feels uncomfortable with their sexual desire for a real person may substitute a fetish. Someone who is frustrated by his or her superiors may go home and kick the dog, beat up a family member, or engage in cross-burnings.

* Sublimation This is similar to displacement, but takes place when we manage to displace our emotions into a constructive rather than destructive activity. This might for example be artistic. Many great artists and musicians have had unhappy lives and have used the medium of art of music to express themselves. Sport is another example of putting our emotions (e.g. aggression) into something constructive. For example, fixation at the oral stage of development may later lead to seeking oral pleasure as an adult through sucking ones thumb, pen or cigarette. Also, fixation during the anal stage may cause a person to sublimate their desire to handle faeces with an enjoyment of pottery. Sublimation for Freud was the cornerstone of civilized life, arts and science are all sublimated sexuality. (NB. this is a value laden concept, based on the aspirations of a European society at the end of the 1800 century).

* Denial Denial involves blocking external events from awareness. If some situation is just too much to handle, the person just refuses to experience it. As you might imagine, this is a primitive and dangerous defense - no one disregards reality and gets away with it for long! It can operate by itself or, more commonly, in combination with other, more subtle mechanisms that support it. For example, smokers may refuse to admit to themselves that smoking is bad for their health.

* Regression This is a movement back in psychological time when one is faced with stress. When we are troubled or frightened, our behaviors often become more childish or primitive. A child may begin to suck their thumb again or wet the bed when they need to spend some time in the hospital. Teenagers may giggle uncontrollably when introduced into a social situation involving the opposite sex.

* Rationalization Rationalization is the cognitive distortion of "the facts" to make an event or an impulse less threatening. We do it often enough on a fairly conscious level when we provide ourselves

with excuses. But for many people, with sensitive egos, making excuses comes so easy that they never are truly aware of it. In other words, many of us are quite prepared to believe our lies.

* Reaction Formation This is where a person goes beyond denial and behaves in the opposite way to which he or she thinks or feels. By using the reaction formation the id is satisfied while keeping the ego in ignorance of the true motives. Conscious feelings are the opposite of the unconscious. Love - hate. Shame - disgust and moralizing are reaction formation against sexuality. Usually a reaction formation is marked by showiness and compulsiveness. For example, Freud claimed that men who are prejudice against homosexuals are making a defense against their own homosexual feelings by adopting a harsh anti-homosexual attitude which helps convince them of their heterosexuality. Other examples include: * The dutiful daughter who loves her mother is reacting to her Oedipus hatred of her mother. * Anal fixation usually leads to meanness, but occasionally a person will react against this (unconsciously) leading to over-generosity.

Anxiety and Ego-Defense Mechanisms In Freud's view, the human is driven towards tension reduction, in order to reduce feelings of anxiety. Anxiety :� an aversive inner state that people seek to avoid or escape. Humans seek to reduce anxiety through defense mechanisms

Defense Mechanisms can be psychologically healthy or maladaptive, but tension reduction is the overall goal in both cases. A comprehensive list of Defense Mechanisms was developed by Anna Freud, Sigmund's daughter.� ������ Anna remained with her Father throughout his life, never marrying.� In Freudian terms, she remained trapped in her Oedipus complex, never giving up her longing to possess her father sexually. ������ However, because of a strong ego and super ego, this ID based desires were sublimated into psychological creativity which advanced Freudian theory, her father's greatest love. Freud specified three major types of anxiety : Reality Anxiety �: the most basic form, rooted in reality.� Fear of a dog bite, fear arising from an impending accident.� (Ego Based Anxiety) Most Common Tension Reduction Method : Removing oneself from the harmful situation. Neurotic Anxiety : Anxiety which arises from an unconscious fear that the libidinal impulses of the ID will take control at an in opportune time. This type of anxiety is driven by a fear of punishment that will result from expressing the ID's desires without proper sublimation.

Moral Anxiety : Anxiety which results from fear of violating moral or societal codes, moral anxiety appears as guilt or shame. ������ In this conception of Anxiety, we can see why Freud concentrated on strengthening the Ego through psychoanalysis.

�������������������� Defense Mechanisms When some type of anxiety occurs, the mind responds in two ways : First, problem solving efforts are increases, and Secondly, defense mechanisms are triggered. These are tactics which the Ego develops to help deal with the ID and the Super Ego. All Defense Mechanisms share two common properties : They can operate unconsciously They can distort, transform, or falsify reality is some way.

The changing of perceived reality allows for a lessening of anxiety, reducing the psychological tension felt by an individual. Types of Defense Mechanisms: �������������������� Repressio n The most basic defense mechanism. Sometimes referred to as : defensiveness Repression can be conscious but is most commonly unconscious. Advantages : Can prevent inappropriate ID impulses from becoming behaviors. Can prevent unpleasant thoughts from becoming conscious. Can prevent memories of things we have done wrong from resurfacing.

Repression does not have to be total, partial memories where only the single piece of damaging information is "forgotten" is common. What an individual represses depends upon cultural expectations and the particular development of an individuals super-ego. ��� ���������������� Den ial When people are overwhelmed by the anxiety present within a situation, they can engage an even more severe form of memory repression :��� Denial In Denial, the individual denies that the threatening event even took place ! ������ In war, a mother receives word that her Son has been killed, and yet refuses to believe it, still setting the table for him, keeping his room and clothes current. ������ At school, a student seeing a grade of "C" next to their name, and automatically assuming the professor made a grading error. ������ Alcoholics and other Substance Abusers who refuse to admit they have a problem, despite it being very apparent to everyone around them.

Denial becomes more difficult with age, as the ego matures and understands more about the "objective reality" it must operate within. People engaging in Denial can pay a high cost is terms of cathected psychic energy which is used to maintain the denial state. Repression and Denial are the two main defense mechanisms which everybody uses. �������������������� Projec tion In projection, anxiety is reduced by claiming another person actually has the unpleasant thoughts that you are thinking. You are attributing your own repressed thoughts to someone else. ������ For example, lets say that you do not like someone. Your mother and father always told you to treat other people well, and to be friendly to everyone. ������ These thoughts from your parents become embedded in your super ego. ������ You discover that you do not like this person.

������ ������ If you allow this thought to consciously surface, you will experience moral anxiety in terms of guilt feelings, because this conscious thought goes against the moral prohibitions of your super ego. ������ So, instead of consciously thinking the anxiety provoking thought " I do not like this person" , this defense mechanism allows for the non-anxiety provoking thought ������������� "This person does not like me " Rationalization This is a post-hoc (after the fact) defense mechanism. Rationalization allows to find logical reasons for inexcusable actions. For Example : Cheating on Taxes Possible Rationalization : It is better that I hold onto this money or the government will spend it on weapons of mass destruction. Fail to get into Med school (law school)� :�

Possible Rationalization : I didn't want to pursue that career, anyways. Rationalization helps to protect our sense of self-esteem Rationalization is closely tied to the Self-serving Bias : The tendency to interpret success as inwardly achieved and to ascribe failure to outside factors. �������������������� Intellectua lization� Thinking about events in cold, hard, rational terms. Separating oneself from the emotional content of an event, focusing instead on the facts. ������ Intellectualization protects against anxiety by repressing the emotions connected with an event. ������ For example, a wife who learns her husband is dying tries to learn all she can about the disease, prognosis, treatment options.� By doing this she can help repress the emotional onslaught of feelings of loss and anger which can accompany the death of a loved one.

������ Freud believed that memories could have both conscious and unconscious aspects, and that intellectualization allows for the conscious analysis of nonanxiety provoking information about an event. ������������������������� � Regression Because of partial fixations in any of the psychosexual stages of development, regression can occur when an individual is faced with high levels of stress in their life. Regression is the giving up of mature problem solving methods in favor of child like approaches to fixing problems. Someone with an oral fixation may increase their cigarette smoking of lollipop licking behavior when stressed at work. Someone who is anal retentive might become more detail oriented and fastidiously neater as a result of anxiety. ������ This regression represents a way of relating to the world that was formerly effective. ������ Regression is a way to try to recapture some childhood satisfaction.

�������������������� Displacem ent Displacement is the shifting of intended targets, especially when the initial target is threatening. The classic use of displacement is in the understanding of displaced aggression. ������ An individual is "dressed down" by the supervisor at their job. ������ They feel anger and hostility toward their supervisor. ������ Their ID, driven by aggressive impulses, would like to tear the boss's head off. ������ The Ego, being reality based and very much in favor of continued paychecks, realizes that this is not a good idea and therefore does not remove boss's head. ������ The person goes home, but still has this aggressive impulse. ������ The Ego allows for the individual to scream at the spouse, since it feels this will not threaten future paychecks.

������ The spouse, now angry and upset, displaces their anger on their child, who then becomes angry and kicks their pet dog, a further displacement of anger.

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Repression. Blocking a threatening idea, memory, or emotion from consciousness.

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Reaction formation. Transforming anxiety-producing thoughts into their opposites in consciousness.

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Regression. Returning to more primitive levels of behavior in defense against anxiety or frustration.

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Rationalization. Justifying one’s behavior or failures by plausible or socially acceptable reasons in place of the real reason.

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Denial. Refusing to admit that something unpleasant is happening, or that a taboo emotion in being experienced. Note: Denial distorts the way you perceive events (“I am NOT angry at you”) repression blocks or distorts your memory of events (the socalled “repressed memories” in which a person was molested but up to this point had no memory of it).

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Displacement. Discharging pent-up feelings, usually of hostility, on objects less dangerous than those that initially aroused the emotion.

Examples of Rationalization (taken from an Instructor’s Manual for Intro Psych, but I forget which book): 

After Carla rejected him, Phil told his friends that he didn’t think she was very attractive and interesting, and that he really wasn’t all that crazy about her.

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Jack told his parents that he got a C in his psychology course because all the As and Bs went to students who cheated on tests and had professionals write their papers.

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Bill said that the reason he flunked out of college was because of the poor quality of teaching there. Examples of Reaction Formation:

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George feels that his younger son, Gary, is unattractive and not very smart. He accuses his wife of picking on Gary and favoring their other son.

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Lucy dresses in provocative clothes and uses suggestive language although she fears that she is unattractive and she really isn’t very interested in sex.

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John has a lot of unconscious hostility toward his father but he acts very affectionate toward him and tells other people that he and his father have a wonderful relationship. Examples of Regression:

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After Sue Ann’s baby brother was born, she began to talk baby-talk and suck her thumb.

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Mary was homesick and anxious when she moved into the dormitory and started her first year in college. She began to sleep with her favorite teddy bear again. Examples of Denial

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Sixteen-year-old Tom had started using drugs, and the changes in his behavior made it pretty obvious, but Tom’s parents didn’t believe the school principal when she called to talk with them about the problem.

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Bill, who is 50 years old wears clothes that you would see on teenagers and drives a sports car. He can’t see that he doesn’t look 30, or even 40, anymore.

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Shakespeare: “The lady doth protest too much, me thinks.”

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From Academic Earth: This lecture introduces students to the theories of Sigmund Freud, including a brief biographical description and his contributions to the field of psychology. The limitations of his theories of psychoanalysis are covered in detail, as well as the ways in which his conception of the unconscious mind still operate in mainstream psychology today.

Read more: http://www.thepsychfiles.com/2007/02/episode-5-in-defense-of-defensemechanisms/#ixzz3LPHpj3LD