Defense Mechanisms
Defense mechanisms are coping mechanisms, they are healthy. When the defense
system is not working for people, they need hospitalization as they fail to
cope. However, if we utilize them to the extreme they also become unhealthy.
Defense mechanisms help us cope with unpleasant aspects of reality, but over
reliance on them can create serious problems.
1) Denial - We are protecting self from unpleasant
reality by refusal to face or accept the problems of a certain unpleasant
reality, like addiction problems. We see it in co-dependency, physical abuse,
domestic violence, and so forth.
2) Fantasy - Gratifying frustrated desires by
imaginary achievement.
3) Repression - Preventing painful/dangerous
thoughts from entering our consciousness. Repression is unconscious. Suppression
is conscious. When we prevent painful thoughts, we stop ourselves from thinking,
we are suppressing our thoughts.
4) Rationalization - Proving one's behavior is
justifiable, rational and thus worthy of self and social approval. We are
attempting to prove our behavior is justifiable.
5) Projection - We are projecting our feelings onto
someone else. Placing blame onto others, or attributing our own unethical
desires onto others. (Like one spouse blaming the other for having an affair,
while they really are the culpable ones!)
6) Reaction formation - Preventing dangerous
desires from being expressed by exaggerating opposed attitudes or types of
behavior. (ex.: Gay bashing)
7) Displacement - Discharging pent up feelings,
usually of hostility, onto less threatening subjects. (Our boss yells at us and
we go home and kick the cat.)
8) Emotional Insulation - Reducing ego involvement
and withdrawal into passivity to protect self from hurt. (The widow who mourns
her late husband for years...)
9) Intellectualization - happens with bright,
educated people; they use logic, cutting off affective/emotional charge from
hurtful situations by logic type compartments. By using logic they avoid
connecting up with their feelings.
10) Undoing - atoning for and thus counteracting
immoral desires and acts.
11) Regression - Retreating to an earlier
developmental level, involving less mature response, and usually a lower level
of aspiration.
12) Identification - Increasing the feeling of
worth by identifying self with a person or an institution of illustrious
standing. We are losing our own identity in the process, and identifying with
that person or entity.
13) Introjection - Incorporating external values
and standards into the ego so that the individual is not at the mercy of
external threat. Ex.: Joining a gang, becoming a police officer if you really
wanted to be a criminal. (If we don't incorporate their values/standards into
our ego structure we are going to be at their mercy.)
14) Compensation - Covering up weakness by
emphasizing desirable traits or making up for frustrations in one area by over
gratification in another area. (Ex.: Short men becoming muscle builders to order
to compensate. Or a person who is not good athletically but becomes very
brainy.)
15) Acting out - reducing anxiety aroused by
forbidden desires by permitting their expressions. Sublimation is the opposite
of acting out, we don't act out. (Hockey players who sublimate their desires for
physical violence into a game. Expressing the desire, but doing it in a socially
acceptable way like being a hockey player or a boxer.)
The Defense mechanisms are healthy unless we use them to the extreme, or we lose
the ability to cope completely.