013 Defense Mechanisms

Defense Mechanisms:

1. Compensation - Defenses against feelings of inferiority and inadequacy growing out of real or imagined personal defects or weaknesses.

2. Conversion - Somatic changes expressed in symbolic body language. Psychic pain is given a location in some body part.

3. Denial - Avoidance of awareness of some painful aspect of reality.

4. Displacement - Investment of repressed feelings in a substitute object.

5. Association - Anna Freud’s altruism; obtaining gratification through association with, and helping, another person who is gratifying the same instincts.

6. Identification - Process whereby an individual becomes like another person in one or several respects. A more elaborate process than introjection.

7. Introjection - Taking in of an idea or image so that it becomes part of oneself. An assimilation of object representations into the self representation whenever the boundaries between self and object are blurred.

8. Inversion (turning against the self) - Object of the aggressive drive or impulse is changed from another person to the self. Operative especially in depression and masochism.

9. Isolation of Affect - A splitting off of ideas from the feelings originally associated with them. The idea which remains in consciousness is therefore deprived of its motivational force so that action is thwarted and guilt avoided.

10. Intellectualization - The psychological binding of instinctual drives in intellectual activities. Adolescent preoccupation with philosophy and religion is one common example.

11. Projection - Attributing a painful impulse or idea to the external world.

12. Rationalization - An attempt to give a logical explanation for painful unconscious material to avoid such feelings as guilt and shame.

13. Reaction Formation - Replacement in conscious awareness of a painful idea or feeling by its opposite. The unconscious material remains along with the conscious presence of its opposite.

14. Regression - A retreat to an earlier phase of psychosexual development.

15. Repression - The act of obliterating material from conscious awareness. A special, unique defense, capable of mastering powerful impulses.

16. Reversal - A form of reaction formation aimed at protecting oneself from painful effects.

17. Splitting - External objects are either “all good” or “all bad. “ Sudden shifts of feelings and conceptualizations about an object may occur from one category to the other.

18. Sublimation - The deflection of the energies of instinctual drives to aims that are more acceptable to the ego and superego.

19. Substitution - The substitution of one affect for another; e. g. rage used to mask fear.

20. Undoing - A ritualistic performance of the opposite of an act a person has recently committed in order to cancel out or balance the evil that may have lurked in the act.

21. Identification With the Aggressor- Child introjects some characteristic of an anxiety-evoking object and so assimilates an anxiety experience which he has just undergone. Child is thus able to transform himself from person threatened to person who makes threat.

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