Concept
Defence mechanism
Overview
In psychoanalytic theory, defense mechanisms are unconscious psychological processes that protect the self from anxiety-producing thoughts and feelings related to internal conflicts and external stressors. Defences are automatically used to protect ourselves from threats and affects to maintain psychological balance and homeostasis. Defenses are automatic responses to external stressors or internal conflicts.
Healthy people have a fully developed sense of "object constancy", knowing that bad and good can exist at the same time in the same person. A defense mechanism can become pathological when its persistent use leads to maladaptive behaviour such that the physical or mental health of the individual is adversely affected. Among the purposes of defense mechanisms is to protect the mind/self/ego from anxiety or to provide a refuge from a situation with which one cannot cope at that moment.
Overview adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0; see the article history for authors).
Possible passages
Found by search and not yet checked by a person; they may only mention the idea in passing.
We then see that this can be dissected into three components, and that the whole reaction is not appropriate and useful as is commonly assumed. The reaction to external danger consists normally of a mental state of fear, which will be examined further in a moment, and in various activities suited to the occasion—flight, concealment, defence by fighting, or even sometimes by attacking. On the affective side there is…
Sándor Ferenczi, Psycho-Analysis and the War Neuroses
Close in meaning to Defence mechanism; the term itself is not named.
These are never primary, they never contain anything else but a defense, never an aggression. Psychic analysis shows that despite their peculiarity they can always be fully explained by reduction to the compulsive reminiscence which they oppose.[51]
Sigmund Freud, Selected papers on hysteria and other psychoneuroses
Close in meaning to Defence mechanism; the term itself is not named.
The high-sounding phrase, ‘Every fear is ultimately the fear of death’, has hardly any meaning; at any rate it cannot be justified. It seems to me, on the contrary, perfectly correct to distinguish the fear of death from dread of an external object (objective anxiety) and from neurotic libidinal anxiety. It presents a difficult problem to psycho-analysis, for death is an abstract concept with a negative content for…
Sigmund Freud, The ego and the id
Close in meaning to Defence mechanism; the term itself is not named.
Related ideas
- Emotion
- Psychoanalytic theory
- Anna Freud
- Psychosis
- Sigmund Freud
- Psychological projection
- Altruism
- Unconscious mind
- Sublimation (psychology)
- Depression (mood)
- Anxiety
- Adaptation
- Certainty
- Personality disorder
- Balance (metaphysics)
- Insanity
- Humour
- Reality testing
Place in the tradition
Part of Absurdism.