You may have a preferred, repeating (and perhaps unconscious) way of handling sadness, anger, or failure. You may sometimes wonder why an ordinary thing your child does irritates you so much today of all days, or how they learned to deny having done the thing that irritated you. You may wonder what keeps some women in a relationship with a violent partner. Is there a hidden motive behind the work we choose? Are you thinking, right now, about the possibility of losing someone you love? And how do we manage to keep living in a world where bad news arrives from every direction?
Wherever You Turn: Freud
We all know that facing anxiety and tension has clear ground rules: confront what causes it, learn from it, then move on. But sometimes the psyche has other plans. Without any conscious choice on our part, the brain falls back on what are called "psychological defense mechanisms" to handle distress. Freud was the first to describe these unconscious mechanisms, which seek a kind of psychological shelter for the self, protecting it from anxiety and tension in a situation the person cannot yet adapt to. Freud wrote about the three layers of consciousness that make up the human psyche: the id, the biological and instinctual engine that treats pleasure as an urgent need admitting no delay; the superego, the store of moral and social principles and norms that presses the "ego" toward ideal conduct; and the ego, the middle ground that brokers the conflicts between urgent instinctual desires and a person's own principles and norms. When those conflicts grow too intense, the "ego" turns to defense mechanisms so as not to lose control. Put another way, psychological defenses are strategic tricks that work unconsciously to shield a person from the tension and anxiety that arise from negative feelings. People tend to draw on a particular, repeating repertoire of defenses, varying in intensity from one situation to another, and in the end that repertoire can form distinctive traits of personality.
The brain's systems work around the clock to make the world we live in weigh more lightly on the psyche, and to make it more bearable. They alter the real picture: bending its edges a little, adding some colors or taking others away, adjusting how we understand and interpret what happens. Yet for all their importance, and for all they do to help us adapt to situations that threaten our psychological balance, they remain psychological tricks that present reality in a misleading light, and overusing them can produce a range of psychological difficulties.
A Double-Edged Sword: Defenses Between Adaptation and Absence
Many psychological theories are traced back to Freud. He gave the field several foundational concepts, and a number of them stirred wide debate among scholars. His account of defense mechanisms is not among those: there is broad agreement about these mechanisms, and researchers after him confirmed them and added a great deal. Among the most important contributions were those of his daughter, Anna Freud, who drew on her father's theories to set out the core psychological defense mechanisms.
Psychologists today, when discussing psychological defense mechanisms (some 42 of which have been studied), tend to ask how far each one serves adaptation. Less adaptive defenses protect a person from awareness of what is causing their anxiety and tension, and from being exposed to the inner conflicts bound up with it. The cost is psychological flexibility: fewer ways of meeting what is in front of them, and less chance of reaching the best possible outcome. More adaptive defenses, by contrast, widen a person's awareness of the internal and external drives and pressures that threaten their wellbeing, and so make room for expressing desires freely and meeting them, reducing negative consequences and maximizing their sense of control. Some describe these as "coping mechanisms" rather than "defense mechanisms".
Researchers today also tend to arrange psychological defenses hierarchically, according to how they relate to a person's capacity to adapt and to their mental health, beginning with the most adaptive and descending to the least:
- Mature defenses: mechanisms that afford a high level of adaptation.
- Affiliation: distress moves a person to turn to others for support or help, so they can speak about what troubles them and face it without feeling alone.
- Altruism: a person meets inner or outer conflict and pressure by devoting themselves to the needs of others as part of meeting their own. Altruism rests on
- Anticipation: here a person meets distress by thinking through realistic alternatives and anticipating emotional reactions. They live the experience through in their mind before it happens, and so soften its impact when it arrives.
- Humor: a person meets pressure with wit and irony, drawing out what is funny in the conflict. Humor naturally eases tension, and it lets others take part rather than leaving the person to sit with the distress alone.
- Self-assertion: here a person expresses feelings and thoughts clearly and directly, easing tension and anxiety when inner or outer forces are trying to keep them from speaking.
- Self-observation: this gives a person the capacity to face conflict by drawing on their own sense of how an event is affecting their feelings and behavior.
- Sublimation: a mature defense that redirects inner conflict into creative, practical, socially acceptable energy, as when aggressive or combative impulses are channeled into a safe, regulated sport. The same holds for art, for volunteering, and for choosing work that lets a person redirect their feelings and psychological difficulties in positive, mature ways.
- Suppression / conscious holding back: a person meets their difficulties and pressures by avoiding them deliberately, setting them aside until there is time and psychological room to face them.
- Neurotic defenses, chief among them:
- Intellectualization: thinking about conflict in the abstract. A person retreats into the abstract details of an event instead of facing its actual and emotional consequences.
- Repression: a defense that makes a person forget an unbearable memory or fact from the past, such as physical or psychological abuse suffered in childhood. But forgetting does not erase what the event left behind.
- Immature defenses: among them:
- Idealization of self or object images: a person using this defense tends to attribute exaggerated positive qualities to themselves or to others. It protects them from feeling weak or unimportant.
- Denial: the most common defense of all. A person refuses to acknowledge or accept something that has gone beyond what they can bear, and carries on as though nothing had happened. It often follows a death, and is very familiar in the behavior of people struggling with addiction.
- Projection: a defense in which a person redirects negative qualities and feelings from themselves onto others, while denying that those feelings exist within them.
- Passive aggression: a person handles inner conflict by expressing hostility toward others indirectly and unassertively. This indirect hostility usually comes as a reaction to a request, or when the person is disappointed or feels their sense of entitlement has gone unmet.
- Psychotic defenses, chief among them:
- Distortion: a defense that bends and reshapes reality in a person's eyes so they can accept it and deal with it. They come to believe something is true when in fact it is otherwise.
These defense mechanisms, and the many not mentioned here, are not voluntary tools; they work outside our awareness. We do not notice them or think about them as we use them, and we cannot simply stop relying on them. Defense mechanisms do not show us the world as it is. Their purpose is to let us go on living in it. They develop from childhood and stay with us through adult life, and that development sometimes brings overuse, or a use that keeps a particular condition in place. Recognizing and understanding our own defenses makes us more aware of ourselves and of what we do, and helps in understanding difficulties and in working with them.
References:
Cramer, P. (2015). Understanding defense mechanisms. Psychodynamic Psychiatry, 43(4), 523-552.
Cramer, P. (2006). Protecting the self: Defense mechanisms in action. Guilford Press.
Freud, A. (1937). The Ego and the mechanisms of defense, London: Hogarth Press and Institute of Psycho-Analysis.
Strandholm, T., Kiviruusu, O., Karlsson, L., Miettunen, J., & Marttunen, M. (2016). Defense mechanisms in adolescence as predictors of adult personality disorders. The Journal of nervous and mental disease, 204(5), 349-354.
Perry, J. C., Beck, S. M., Constantinides, P., & Foley, J. E. (2009). Studying change in defensive functioning in psychotherapy using the defense mechanism rating scales: Four hypotheses, four cases. In Handbook of evidence-based psychodynamic psychotherapy (pp. 121-153). Humana Press
First published in Sasa Post, 2022
Letters and writing
Short writings on the psyche, attachment, trauma, the body, and the relationship between personal experience and wider context.
