Common Defense Mechanisms
Psychoanalytic defense mechanisms are unconscious psychological strategies that individuals use to protect themselves from unpleasant emotions and memories. Sigmund Freud first proposed the concept of defense mechanisms in the late 19th century as part of his theory of psychoanalysis.
Some of the most common psychoanalytic defense mechanisms include:
Repression: unconsciously pushing uncomfortable thoughts, feelings, or experiences out of one's awareness
Denial: refusing to acknowledge or accept reality, often as a way of avoiding painful emotions or memories
Projection: redirecting one's own undesirable thoughts, feelings, or impulses onto others
Projective identification: projecting qualities that are unacceptable to the self onto another person, and that person takes in the projected qualities and believes him/herself to be characterized by them
Displacement: redirecting emotions from their original source to a less threatening target
Regression: reverting to a more childlike behaviour or way of coping in response to stress or anxiety
Rationalization: providing plausible but false or lacking explanations for one's behaviour or emotions
Sublimation: channeling unacceptable impulses into socially acceptable behaviors
Reaction formation: expressing the opposite of one's true feelings, often to conceal or counteract unacceptable impulses or desires
Identification: adopting the attitudes and values of someone else as a way of coping with one's own feelings of insecurity or inadequacy
Intellectualization: using logic and reason to avoid emotions
Fantasy: escaping into a world of imagination as a way of avoiding reality
Humor: using humor to deflect from or diffuse difficult emotions
Altruism: distracting from one's own emotional struggles by focusing on helping others
Introjection: unconsciously internalizing the values, beliefs, or expectations of others as a way of regulating one's own emotions
Splitting: seeing others and the world as either all good or all bad, with no shades of gray
Idealization/devaluation of others
Undoing: attempting to "undo" or cancel out negative thoughts or actions through compensatory behaviors
Isolation of affect: the individual blocks out painful feelings by recalling a traumatic event without experiencing the emotions associated with it
Somatization: expressing emotional distress through physical symptoms
These defense mechanisms are not inherently negative or positive, but they can become problematic if they interfere with an individual's ability to face and process their emotions in a healthy way. Psychodynamic/psychoanalytic therapy can help people in becoming more aware of their defense mechanisms and finding alternative ways of experiencing their emotions without disavowal or suppression.