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DEFENSE MECHANISMS. History . Freud began rudimentary investigations into the nature of Ego defense mechanisms in several of his works.
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History • Freud began rudimentary investigations into the nature of Ego defense mechanisms in several of his works. • The first comprehensive study of defense mechanisms was reported by Freud’s daughter Anna Freud in her landmark work, The Ego and the Mechanisms of Defense (1937). • Anna Freud expanded her father’s work by providing detailed descriptions of a number of individual defense mechanisms.
Basic Concepts • In Sigmund Freud’s topographical model of personality, the Ego is the aspect of personality that deals with reality. • While doing this, the Ego also has to cope with the conflicting demands of the Id and the Superego. The Id seeks to fulfill all wants, needs, and impulses, while the Superego tries to get the Ego to act in an idealistic and moral manner. • According to Freud, if you have a healthy Ego, you should be able to balance the Id and Superego without using defense mechanisms. • What happens when the Ego cannot deal with the demands of one’s desires, the constraints of reality, or the demands of one’s own moral standards? Anxiety acts as a signal to the Ego that things are not going right. Anxiety comes in the form of fear or anger (from the Id) or the form of sadness, guilt, or shame (from the Superego).
Basic Concept • According to Freud, anxiety is an unpleasant inner state that people seek to avoid. • 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, the Ego has some tools it can use in its job as the mediator—tools that help defend the Ego from anxiety. These tools are called Ego Defense Mechanisms. • They help shield the Ego from the anxiety-producing conflicts created by the Id, Superego, and reality. • They are mostly involuntary—that is, they operate in the unconscious mind.
Acting Out • Acting out occurs when an individual deals with emotional conflicts or stressors by actions rather than reflections or feelings. • When a person acts out, it can act as a pressure release, and often helps the individual feel calmer and peaceful once again. The Id gets to vent its emotional pressure without Superego’s constraints. • Examples: 1) Instead of saying, “I’m angry with you,” a person who acts out may instead throw a book at the person. 2) 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. 3) Self-injury may also be a form of acting out, expressing in physical pain what one cannot stand to feel emotionally.
Denial • Denial is the process of escaping from unpleasant realities by ignoring their existence. • The Ego makes the unpleasant emotions that occur in response to reality go away by pretending the reality does not exist. These unpleasant emotions come from the Id or the Superego. • Many people use denial in their everyday lives to avoid dealing with painful feelings or areas of their life they cannot accept. • Examples: 1)Patient denies that his physician’s diagnosis of cancer is correct and keeps seeking another opinion. 2) Alcoholics vigorously deny that they have a problem.
Repression • Repressionis the exclusion of unpleasant or unwanted experiences, emotions, or ideas from conscious awareness. • The Ego protects itself by placing the unpleasant or unwanted experiences (reality) or emotions and ideas (from the Id or Superego) in the unconscious mind. • The level of “forgetting” in repression can vary from a temporary dismissal of uncomfortable thoughts to a high level of amnesia, where events that caused the anxiety are consciously forgotten. • Repression is only partially effective, because the unpleasant emotions often will return when the unwanted experience or idea is encountered again.
Repression • Repression is not all bad. If all uncomfortable memories were easily brought to mind we would be faced with the unceasing pain of reliving them. • Examples: 1) A child who is abused by a parent later has no recollection of the events, but has trouble forming relationships. 2) A man has a phobia of snakes but cannot remember the first time he was afraid of them. 3) The cancer victim does not even remember going to the doctor and receiving a cancer diagnosis, but is too afraid to ever visit the doctor again.
Displacement • Displacement is the transfer of emotions associated with a particular person, object, or situation to another person, object, or situation that is nonthreatening. • It occurs when the Id wants to do something which the Superego does not permit. The Ego thus finds some safer way of releasing the psychic energy of the Id(often anger). • Examples: 1) The boss gets angry and shouts at a person. He goes home and shouts at his wife. She then shouts at their son. With nobody left to displace anger onto, the son goes and kicks the dog. 2) A man wins the lottery. He turns to the person next to him and gives the person a big hug.
Rationalization • Justifying illogical or unreasonable ideas, actions, or feelings by developing acceptable explanations that satisfy the teller as well as the listener. • When a person does something of which the moral Superego disapproves (through feelings of guilt or shame), the Ego defends itself by explaining the behavior in a way that the Superego will accept. • Examples: 1) A parent cruelly punishes a child and says that it is for the child’s own good. 2) A person evades paying taxes and then rationalizes it by talking about how the government wastes money (and how it is better for people to keep what they can).
Projection • Projection occurs when an unacceptable feeling, impulse, or idea is attributed to another person or thing. • It is the Ego’s way of dealing with unacceptable feelings, desires, or ideas in a way that allows it to evade the Superego’s judgment (and the feelings of sadness, guilt, or shame). • Neurotic projection is perceiving others as operating in ways one unconsciously finds objectionable in yourself. • Complementary projection is assuming that others behave, think and feel in the same way that you do.
Projection • Projection is a common attribute of paranoia, where people project dislike of themselves onto others, so they believe that most other people dislike them. • Projection helps justify unacceptable behavior. For example, where • Examples: 1) An unfaithful husband suspects his wife of infidelity. 2) A man does not like another person. But he has a value that says he should like everyone. So he projects onto that person that she does not like him. This allows him to avoid her and also to avoid his own feelings of disliking another person. 3) An aggressive person claims that she is only sticking up for herself by claiming that everyone else is being aggressive.
Regression • Regression involves taking on the point of view of a child in some problematic situation, rather than acting in a more adult way. • The Ego is avoiding the unpleasant emotions that the Id or Superego generate in response to a situation. • Examples: 1) A person who suffers a mental breakdown assumes a fetal position, rocking and crying. 2) A child suddenly starts to wet the bed after years of not doing so (a typical response to the arrival of a new sibling). 3) A adult patient makes childish demands and becomes dependent on the nurse for care that he could do for himself.
Reaction Formation • Reaction formation occurs when a person feels an urge to do or say something unacceptable and then does or says the opposite of what they really want. • When a person desires something of which the moral Superego disapproves (through feelings of guilt or shame), the Ego defends itself by channeling the energy of the unacceptable desire into its opposite, so the Superego will accept it. • Examples: 1) A person who is angry with a colleague actually ends up being particularly courteous and friendly towards them. 2) A homosexual whose Superego believes homosexuality is morally wrong become an outspoken, if not violent, homophobe.
Dissociation • Dissociation is the involuntary splitting or suppression of mental functions from rest of the personality. • The Ego avoids unpleasant experiences, desires, or memories that provoke fear or anger (from the Id) or sadness, guilt, and shame (from the Superego) by disconnecting from the personality that is experiencing the painful emotions. • Examples: 1) People who have a history of any kind of childhood abuse often suffer from some form of dissociation. Any situation that might be similar to the original trauma might make them automatically go to their mental happy place.
Dissociation • More Examples: 2) A person’s Ego avoids the fear caused by a traumatic experience by disconnecting from the traumatized personality and living in another personality (“Multiple Personality Disorder”). 3) A man’s Superego provokes such strong feelings of guilt and shame when he want to be a cross-dresser, that his Ego is forced to accommodate the strong desire by creating a separate cross-dresser personality.
Undoing • Undoing is the attempt to take back an unconscious behavior or thought that is unacceptable or hurtful. • A person tries to “undo” an unhealthy, destructive or otherwise threatening thought by engaging in contrary behavior. • For instance, after realizing you just insulted your significant other unintentionally, you might spend then next hour praising their beauty, charm and intellect. • By “undoing” the previous action, the person is attempting to counteract the damage done by the original comment, hoping the two will balance one another out. • A teenager who feels guilty about masturbation ritually touches door knobs a prescribed number of times following each occurrence of the act.
Sublimation • Sublimation is the transformation of unwanted impulses into something less harmful. This can simply be a distracting release or may be a constructive and valuable piece of work. • Sublimation is probably the most useful and constructive of the defense mechanisms as it takes the energy of something that is potentially harmful and turns it to doing something good and useful. • Freud believed that the greatest achievements in civilization were due to the effective sublimation of our sexual and aggressive urges that are sourced in the Id and then channeled by the Ego, as directed by the Superego. • Examples: 1) An angry man does push-ups to work off his temper. 2) A person who has an obsessive need for control and order becomes a successful business entrepreneur.
Intellectualization • Intellectualization is a form of thinking, where a person avoids uncomfortable emotions by focusing on facts and logic. The situation is treated as an interesting problem that engages the person on a rational basis, while the emotional aspects are completely ignored as being irrelevant. • Example: A person who is deeply in debt builds a complex spreadsheet of how long it would take to repay using different payment options and interest rates. • Intellectualization protects against anxiety by repressing the emotions connected with an event.
Splitting • Viewing of self or others as either all good or all bad without considering the whole range of qualities—thinking in extremes. Splitting helps to preserve one’s own “good” self-image by splitting all the bad parts and projecting them onto another (usually weaker) person or group. Splitting accounts for how scapegoating and persecution occur. • Examples: 1) Seeing all people without mustaches as feminine. 2) Believing personalities as the hero is all good and the villain all bad.
Anxiety: When repression proves to be inadequate, previously contained primitive instinctual urges threaten to come to expression and this threat creates the sense of apprehension characteristics of anxiety. • Phobia: Through the mechanism of displacement a phobia replaces anxiety. Regression is inherent as phobia involves return to primitive mode of thought through which child copes with his own threatening impulses. • Mania:Denial is the defense mechanism characteristic of mania. When denial is threatened patient may then resort to Projection - attributing his own anger to others. Regression- return to the magical thinking characteristic of a small child.
OCD: Isolation of affect is responsible for the symptom of obsessional thoughts, Undoing creates compulsive acts (a ritual which magically undoes a forbidden unconscious impulse) and Reaction formation (development of attitudes opposite to the impulses being defended against)accounts for scrupulosity and other exaggerated characteristics of cleanliness. • Depression : In less severe form of depression, that is depression out of proportion to the reality of the loss, the loss produces regression and revives the intense sense of hopelessness and despair that a small child experiences. In extreme depression the effect of identification with the lost object and the use of the mechanism of turning aggression against the self.
Paranoid: Reliance on the defense mechanism of projection characterizes paranoid disorders. Regression is inherent in the production of paranoid delusions. Rationalization is constant companion to projection – ability to give plausible and logical reasons for his irrational beliefs is monumental. • Schizophrenia : Regression- primitive characteristics of patients thought and behavior; return to infantile modes of mental functioning Projection- involved in the formation of delusions of persecution or influence Isolation of affect – is involved in the calm detached way patient thinks or speaks of frightening things
