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Definition: A mental maneuver that one consciously or unconsciously chooses to use to distort or falsify the truth of one’s experience in order to protect oneself from feeling painful emotions like shame, guilt, or anxiety.
How Do Defense Mechanisms Work?
In Sigmund Freud's model of personality, the ego is the aspect of personality that deals with reality. While doing this, the ego also has to cope with the conflicting demands of the id and the superego.
The id: The part of the personality that seeks to fulfil all wants, needs, and impulses. The id is the most basic, primal part of our personalities and does not consider things such as social appropriateness, morality, or even the reality of fulfilling our wants and needs.
The superego: The part of the personality that tries to get the ego to act in an idealistic and moral manner. The superego is made up of all of the internalized morals and values we acquire from our parents, other family members, religious influences, and society.
Defense Mechanisms are unconscious processes that try to reduce the anxiety associated with painful experiences, memories, and instinctive desires. They minimize anxiety to protect the ego from external and even internal attacks and maintain repression.
- Lying
- Rationalization
- Suppression
1. Repression: This is the active forgetting of unpleasant memories or thoughts. It is the unconscious exclusion of painful memories, thoughts, and feelings from conscious awareness.
2. Denial: This is the refusal to accept reality or fact, acting as if a painful event, thought or feeling did not exist.
3. Projection: This is the act of attributing one’s own impulses, feelings or ideas to another person. It is a defense mechanism that involves taking our own unacceptable qualities or feelings and ascribing them to other people.
4. Reaction formation: This is the conversion of unwanted or unacceptable emotions into their opposites. It is a defense mechanism in which emotions and impulses that are anxiety-producing or perceived to be unacceptable are unconsciously transformed into their opposites.
5. Intellectualization: This is the process of thinking about a painful event or feeling in an effort to distance oneself from the emotion of the experience. It is a defense mechanism in which reasoning is used to block confrontation with an unconscious conflict and its associated emotional stress.
6. Displacement: This is the redirection of an impulse from its original object to a substitute target. It is a defense mechanism in which negative emotions, thoughts, or impulses are displaced onto a less threatening or more acceptable object.
7. Suppression: Suppression is a cognitive defense mechanism whereby an individual deliberately pushes an uncomfortable thought or emotion out of their conscious awareness. It is a conscious effort to forget or ignore an unpleasant or stressful thought or feeling. People may suppress thoughts and feelings in order to avoid feeling overwhelmed by emotions or to prevent themselves from dwelling on a particular thought. This type of defense mechanism can be beneficial in the short-term, as it can help to reduce stress, but can be damaging in the long term, as the thought or feeling may resurface unexpectedly, leading to further psychological distress.
8. Rationalization: Rationalization is a cognitive defense mechanism in which an individual attempt to justify their actions or beliefs by providing a logical explanation for them, even when there is no logical basis for the explanation. This is often done to avoid taking responsibility for their actions or beliefs.
