Home        Biography        Theories        Picture Gallery        Personality Quiz        Links

Defense Mechanisms

Freud knew that unethical wishes came up in the unconscious mind, but the mind's ego had to block these wishes because they were not accepted by society.  Freud claimed the ego uses defense mechanisms to battle these demands.  Freud and his daughter Anna Freud established nine different mechanisms: repression, displacement, reaction formation, isolation of affect, undoing, splitting, projective identification, introjection, and denial.  Repression is the prevailing defense mechanism of all.  Repression banishes the unacceptable feelings or wishes from the conscious and does not acknowledge the fact that they even exist.  Displacement is the unconscious process of taking charged emotions for one object and transferring the emotions to another object.  Reaction formation occurs when a person develops certain personality traits that completely contrast with the desire he or she may unconsciously have.  Isolation of affect detaches the charged emotions that are connected with a figure from the figure itself and the person does not claim to have any feelings about the manner.  Undoing is the act of repeating an action in order to "magically" reverse the effects caused by the "incorrect" first attempt.  Undoing is common in obsessive-compulsive patients.  Splitting is a mechanism in which the unconscious splits up the positive and negative feelings attributed to a certain object or person.  In splitting, only the positive or negative feelings can come to the conscious, leaving the person with an extremely biased opinion on the subject.  The person may switch back and forth between the two extremes within a short time and when confronted will not acknowledge the fact that he or she was making such opposing comments about the same subject.  Projective identification is the next defense mechanism.  The unconscious projects feelings attached to the person or another object onto a completely different subject.  Introjection is the "internalization of psychic representation of a hated or loved external object with the goal of establishing closeness" (Kaplan and Saddock, Glossary 100).  A person in denial unconsciously shuns any painful       memories or feelings he or she has about a certain matter and thus moves away from reality.