Defense mechanisms

What it says

A defense, in this account, is an automatic move that lowers discomfort without dealing with the thing causing it. Sigmund Freud described a handful across his writing. His daughter Anna Freud wrote the first proper catalog in 1936.

The useful part is the vocabulary. Each name points at a pattern you can recognize in an afternoon, in yourself more easily than in anybody else.

George Vaillant later ranked them. Some moves cost very little and work well, such as humor or turning a difficult feeling into work. Others, such as denial, hold for a while and then fail. He followed a group of men for decades and rated what they used, which is the closest thing this area has to long evidence.

Eight common ones

One line each, with the sort of thing it sounds like.

1. Denial

   Refusing the fact. The bill is not opened, so the number is not real yet.

2. Projection

   Putting your own feeling onto somebody else. You are the one who is angry, not me.

3. Rationalization

   A reasonable story for a decision made another way. I did not want the job anyway.

4. Displacement

   Aiming the feeling at a safer target. Nothing can be said at work, so the door gets slammed at home.

5. Reaction formation

   Acting the opposite of what you feel, often loudly.

6. Intellectualization

   Moving a painful thing into facts and arguments where it cannot be felt.

7. Regression

   Falling back on a way of coping that belonged to an earlier age.

8. Sublimation

   Putting the energy into something that works. Vaillant rated this one of the useful ones.

Where it came from

Freud introduced defense early and used it across his work. Anna Freud's book, The Ego and the Mechanisms of Defense, organized the list in 1936 and is the source most later writing draws on.

Vaillant brought measurement to it. In Adaptation to Life, in 1977, he used decades of follow up on one group of men. His argument was that defenses can be ranked by how well they work over a life. He kept developing that scheme into the 1990s.

What holds up, and what does not

The concept outlived its parent theory. Measuring defenses reliably is hard, since the whole claim is that the person using one cannot see it. The psychoanalytic framework around it is not testable as a whole.

Several of the patterns do have modern counterparts under other names. Avoidance, reappraisal and self serving attribution are all studied with ordinary experimental methods, and all of them cover ground the old list claimed. Phebe Cramer argued in 2000 that the construct is worth keeping precisely for that reason, with better measurement under it.

What it does not mean

This is not a set of labels to put on other people. Naming a defense in somebody else is a guess about a mind you cannot see. It is used far more often to win an argument than to understand anybody. Nothing here describes a condition or what anybody should do.

Check yourself

Three questions on what is above. Each answer says why.

1. Somebody who is furious at their manager says nothing at work and then shouts at a parking attendant. Which pattern is that?

   1. Displacement
   2. Projection
   3. Reaction formation
   Show the answer

   Answer: A. Displacement aims the feeling at a safer target. Projection would be insisting the manager is the angry one.

2. Pick the statement that describes what Vaillant added.

   1. He wrote the first catalog of defenses
   2. He ranked defenses by how well they work over a life, using decades of follow up
   3. He showed that defenses do not exist
   Show the answer

   Answer: B. Anna Freud wrote the catalog in 1936. Vaillant's contribution was the ranking and the long follow up behind it.

3. What is the main measurement problem with defenses?

   1. They happen too quickly to time
   2. The claim is that the person using one cannot see it, so self report is weak
   3. They only occur in laboratories
   Show the answer

   Answer: B. A process defined as outside awareness is hard to ask anybody about, which is why reliable measurement is the long standing difficulty.

Sources

1. Freud, A. (1936, English edition 1946). The Ego and the Mechanisms of Defense. International Universities Press.
2. Vaillant, G. E. (1977). Adaptation to Life. Little, Brown.
3. Vaillant, G. E. (1992). Ego Mechanisms of Defense: A Guide for Clinicians and Researchers. American Psychiatric Press.
4. Cramer, P. (2000). Defense mechanisms in psychology today: Further processes for adaptation. American Psychologist, 55(6).

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