Defense Mechanisms

• ego’s purpose in establishing defense mechanisms—to avoid dealing directly with sexual and aggressive implosives and to defend itself against the anxiety that accompanies them.
• Whenever the ego is threatened by undesirable id impulses, it protects itself by repressing those impulses; that is, it forces threatening feelings into the unconscious.
• An example of a reaction formation can be seen in a young woman who deeply resents and hates her mother. Because she knows that society demands affection toward parents, such conscious hatred for her mother would produce too much anxiety.
• In displacement, however, people can redirect their unacceptable urges onto a variety of people or objects so that the original impulse is disguised or concealed.
• People who continually derive pleasure from eating, smoking, or talking may have an oral fixation, whereas those who are obsessed with neatness and orderliness may possess an anal fixation.
• For example, a completely weaned child may regress to demanding a bottle or nipple when a baby brother or sister is born. Regressions, however, are usually temporary, whereas fixations demand a more or less permanent expenditure of psychic energy.
• The defense mechanism of projection, which can be defined as seeing in others unacceptable feelings or tendencies that actually reside in one’s own unconscious
• An extreme type of projection is paranoia, a mental disorder characterized by powerful delusions of jealousy and persecution. Instead of saying, “I love him,” the paranoid person says, “I hate him.” Because this also produces too much anxiety, he says, “He hates me.” At this point, the person has disclaimed all responsibility and can say, “I like him fine, but he’s got it in for me.”
• Introjection is a defense mechanism whereby people incorporate positive qualities of another person into their own ego.
• Sublimation is the repression of the genital aim of Eros by substituting a cultural or social aim.