Transcript of Audio Lecture
In this lesson, we will explore defense mechanisms.
Defense mechanisms play an important role in the psychoanalytic model.
To understand defense mechanisms better, consider the example from the
introduction to this section. In that example, John, a married male, was
raised to believe homosexuality is wrong. While talking to Bob in the
steamy locker room one day, John and Bob are alone and both have just
taken a shower and John’s ID has a lustful impulse towards Bob. If he
becomes aware of these impulses and thinks “these homosexual desires
could undermine my stable married life”, he may experience reality
anxiety. Even with little or no awareness of these impulses, they could
begin to trigger moral anxiety—anxiety about internal reactions from the
moralistic superego. Finally, if John’s ego worries that these desires
make escape, may begin to pervade his conscious fantasies or cause him
to do something like make a pass at Bob, neurotic anxiety can occur. Now
to protect himself from these anxious feelings, John’s ego may engage in
a wide variety of defense mechanisms.
Slide two. The first most basic
and pervasive defense mechanism is repression. Repression involves
unconsciously barring from awareness anxiety producing inner thoughts
and urges. In this case, for John it would be feelings of lust towards
Bob. To ensure sure that these thoughts and feelings don’t enter
awareness in the first place, to keep them in the unconscious, John’s
ego engages in the defense mechanism of repression. But sometimes
repression is not enough. If the unresolved urges and thoughts or
feelings begin to or threaten to escape from the unconscious, further
defenses may need to be used. A second defense, then, is denial. Denial
is when you deny something observable. For example, in this case, if we
were actually taking a video of John and Bob’s interaction, we may find
that John was staring lustfully at Bob’s body, his mouth hanging open,
his breathing heavy. Now if you said: “John, I think you were staring at
and having lustful impulses towards Bob” and John was using denial he
might say “No way. I didn’t even notice there was another person in the
showers.” So John is denying that some observable behaviors ever
happened. Denial is a common defense. For example, people often deny
mistakes. During a game they might have missed a ball and now after the
game, they claim the ball never came near them. Sometimes in the world
of addiction you’ll hear this phrase "they’re in denial" and this means
that an alcohol or drug addiction might be clearly ruining a person’s
life, causing them to lose their job, their marriage, and so on, but
they remain in denial that their addiction is causing these problems.
They might insist they are just a social user, even though the problem
is observable to everybody else. Finally, later in the course we will
discuss how the existentialists suggest that most of the time most of us
are in denial about our own inevitable death.
Slide three. Another defense mechanism is regression.
When under stress, we retreat to a stage of psychosexual development in
which we felt less stressed and more gratified. So for example a person
who might have been particularly gratified during the oral stage might
engage in oral stimulation, such as biting their nails, or act more
helpless and infantile. Someone who felt particularly secure during the
anal stage might act like a messy toddler, or, alternatively, start
cleaning compulsively. Going back to John in the showers, if John tends
to regress to oral stage, he might start feeling silly and giggly. Or he
tends to regress to the phallic stage, he might start feeling
competitive with Bob.
Another defense mechanism is projection. In this
case, there are thoughts and feelings and impulses (that the superego
considers unacceptable) are projected out from the self onto another
person. So in John’s case, John may start thinking: "you know, I feel a
strange tension here in the locker room. I wonder if Bob is having
homosexual feelings towards me." So these homosexual desires aren’t
coming from inside of me, they’re coming from Bob. Thus, the
unacceptable impulses leaking into awareness are quickly projected
outward. Psychoanalysts suggest that paranoia is a consequence of the
overuse of the defense mechanism of projection. For example, a person
may project unacceptable aggressive impulses, and so instead of
recognizing how they want to harm others, they think others want to harm
to them; and then when they do feel aggression towards others, they can
think “the reason I feel aggressive is towards them is because they were
feeling aggressive towards me first!”.
Slide four. Another defense
mechanism is reaction formation. In this case, what one does is to
replace an unacceptable feeling or impulse with an acceptable one. An
example might be that whenever you meet a relative with whom you’ve
always had somewhat an awkward or conflictual relationship, they hug you
real right and say how much they’ve missed you and how glad they are to
see you again. You might sense it’s not totally genuine and in fact it
might not be totally genuine. All of the extremely positive feelings
might be a reaction formation. What they really feel is irritation but
if those are unacceptable feelings to have and express towards a
relative they instead they take all that emotional energy and flip it
around. They haven’t actually changed their underlying feelings, but
sometimes the best defense is an offense, so they defend against the
negative feelings with an effusive display of positive feelings. It can
also work the other way around. In fact, a staple plot of romantic
comedies is that initially the individuals who we know are very
attracted to each other and are gonna get together in the end are going
to initially say “yuck, I can’t stand that person”. (And of course this
is largely in order to drag the plot out for a couple of hours; if they
simply acknowledged and acted on their attraction it would be a very
short movie; so in order to drag it out writers make the characters
engage in reaction formation). But this does happen in real life too: If
a person is feeling uncomfortable with an attraction, they may use the
opposite feelings to help defend against it. In the case of John, John
may insist: “Not only am I not having homosexual impulses, I cannot
stand homosexuality!” This is the psychoanalytic explanation for
homophobia or strong anti-homosexual prejudice. Psychoanalysts suggests
that when a person has, not just have an attitude, but an extreme
emotional reaction such that they feel hatred or the desire to harm
another person, that they may be defending against that very thing in
themselves. So it may be that individuals who have extremely negative
reaction towards homosexuality might be having a reaction formation
against their own homosexual impulses. Indeed some interesting research
showed that the strongest physiological arousal to pictures of naked men
were from men who reported to have the most negative attitudes towards
homosexuality. More generally, extreme levels of moral outrage might
reflect an attempt to defend against a what could be perceived by the
individual as their own failings. Perhaps this is why we see so often
hear of cases in which clergy who expressed strong moral outrage against
certain activities—such as gambling, homosexuality, or prostitution—had
in fact been engaging in those very behaviors.
This brings us to another
defense mechanism--displacement. In this case, we’re replacing an
unacceptable object with an acceptable one. So for example, let’s say
that your boss is mistreating you and you’re very mad about that, but
you can’t take it out on your boss without getting in trouble, so you
leave work, you get in your car and the first person that does anything
wrong on the road you go nuts—you yell at that other driver, you lean on
the horn—but the anger really isn’t coming from what the other driver
did. You have residual anger at your boss and you displace that anger
onto that other driver. Sometimes people take it home with them. They
weren’t able to vent it out on another driver, so when they get home,
they yell at their dog or yell at their spouse. In the case of Bob and
John, when John gets home he may sweep his wife off her feet and carry
her to the bedroom for some passionate lovemaking. John’s wife may think
it has to do with how desirable she is, but unbeknownst to John or his
wife, it may actually have to do with how desirable Bob is, and John was
bringing home all of that libido he had repressed back at the gym. That
sometimes the sources of our initial feelings will not be acceptable to
us and we displace those feelings is, in Freud’s view, completely
acceptable, nothing to be ashamed of or embarrassed about.
Slide 5.
Another extremely common defense mechanism is rationalization. In this
case, one is putting a positive frame or spin on something. Whenever
you’re making an excuse, or blaming, you’re engaging in rationalization.
You’re trying to tell a story that makes things look a little better…for
you. People do this all the time. When people fail, they tend to look
for excuses. I didn’t do well on the test because: I didn’t sleep well,
my roommate was distracting me, the test was unfair and so forth. These
types of defenses are so everyday and ordinary that we oftentimes don’t
even notice that we’re doing this. So in John’s case, if someone pointed
out that John was drooling over Bob’s body, John might to say “um, well
the reason why I was staring at Bob that way is because well I was
noticing that Bob has really fine in muscle definition and I’ve been
working out and I was wondering just how Bob was able to get that muscle
definition. I was gonna ask Bob a little bit about the types of
exercises that he was doing…” This is not the true story, but it’s a
story that makes John feel better.
Another defense is isolation, which
involves disassociating feelings from events and memories, so one is
experiences only the facts and not the feelings. For example, when
someone is exposed to an extreme stress they sometimes develop
post-traumatic stress disorder or PTSD. When I was going through my
clinical training, I worked for a year with Vietnam combat veterans at a
Veteran Administration hospital, and consequently met a number of
individuals who showed PTSD symptoms. For example, they could tell me in
graphic detail about some very horrible and terrifying experiences, but
do so in an emotionless manner. So it may be that John would tell us
accurately and precisely what was going on between himself and Bob, but
without actually experiencing any of those feelings or desires towards
Bob which were the most threatening aspects of the experience. Sometimes
isolation goes along with intellectualization, which involves framing
the experience in intellectualized terms. A classic example would be
what we’re doing right now. What psychologists often do is to take their
own personal experiences and put a theoretical framework on it and
analyze it and this essentially isolates or disassociates it from the
raw experience itself… hmmm, this make me wonder if this example I keep
using is in fact an example of intellectualization, and perhaps my way
of dealing with having had feelings towards another guy in the locker
room this morning? Sigh, self-analysis, one of the risks of being a
psychologist…
Slide six. The defenses we’ve examined so far are all
considered to be immature defenses in that they distort the person’s
experience. Freud felt that defenses were inevitable, but that some
defenses were better than others and the ones that did the least amount
of distorting were the most mature. Let’s turn our attention to these.
One is suppression. Suppression is the conscious and active choice not
to think about or do something. Whereas repression and denial are done
unconsciously, suppression is being done consciously and openly, so John
might think "I just felt some homosexual urges toward Bob. I am now
going to choose not to dwell on or act on those impulses. But I’m not
going to deny that I had those feelings". Another mature defense is
humor—laughing it off. Psychoanalysis notes that much humor is sexual or
aggressive. By aggression, I mean well if you’ve ever been to a comedy
club and sat in the front row and had a comedian start to grill you or
the people around you, you know that there can be an aggressive element
to humor; the trick is to create tension by creating an aggressive
atmosphere, or raising sexual issues, but not to go too far, and then
allow that tension to be released with laughter. Interestingly the types
of things that produce tension and thus laughter change with age. When
young kids have just learned how to use the potty and just overcome that
source of stress, potty humor is particularly funny to them. I noticed
with my own that shortly after they were toilet trained--maybe four,
five, six years old—any talk about peeing and pooping was sure to elicit
giggles and snickering. Why? Because they are still close enough to
those issues for it to create tension and embarrassment, but too much.
(Why potty humor seems to appeal to some adults as well and often
appears in adult movies is more of a mystery to me…) So, anyway, John in
the locker room might suddenly find a sexual joke that Bob was telling
him to be particularly funny, not because it was a particularly good
joke, but because the sex joke was allowing some of the tension John was
feeling in that situation to be released in a safe way.
The final
defense is sublimation. Freud considered this the most, well, sublime of
the defenses. Sublimation involves taking your libido and transforming
it in a positive and creative way. Remember, frustrated desires are the
source of all psychic energy, but the wonder of the human mind is the
ability to take that psychic energy and channel it into an indefinite
variety of different activities that have no relationship to the
underlying frustrated desires. So, we can take that libido and turn it
into love for another person, turn it into passionate work, turn it into
artistic creation and so on. Indeed, we might find that if John is in
fact a college professor, that John could take that energy that was
created through frustrated desires towards Bob, and go back to his
office and try to make a really interesting, creative and effective
lecture explaining Freud’s defense mechanisms. According to Freud this
ability to sublimate, to transform the libido into all these different
forms is the source of all of humanity’s striving and achievements.
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