Freudian Defense Mechanisms

1. Freudian Defense Mechanisms • Defense Mechanisms are ways we cope with stress.... • ways of deceiving oneself about the causes of a stressful situations so that pressure, frustration, conflict, and anxiety are reduced

2. Freudian Defense Mechanisms • Denial • refusal to acknowledge a painful or threatening reality • Repression • a form of forgetting... means excluding painful thoughts from consciousness (most extreme form is amnesia)

3. Freudian Defense Mechanisms • Projection • projecting the attribution of one’s own repressed motives, ideas, or feelings on to others. We ascribe our feelings to someone else, thus locating the source of our conflict outside ourselves.

4. Freudian Defense Mechanisms • Rationalization • subtle form of denial. We realize that we are threatened but detach ourselves from our problems by analyzing and intellectualizing them. • Regression • people who become fixated are likely to display immature childlike traits

5. Freudian Defense Mechanisms • Reaction Formation • the ego unconsciously makes unacceptable impulses look like their opposite. • Displacement • redirection of repressed motives/emotions from their original objects to substitute objects