Defense Mechanisms

1. Defense Mechanisms • Defense Mechanisms • the ego’s protective methods of reducing anxiety by unconsciously distorting reality • Repression • the basic defense mechanism that banishes anxiety-arousing thoughts, feelings, and memories from consciousness • This is why we do not remember our sexual feelings for our parent. • It does come out in dream symbols or slips of the tongue.

2. Defense Mechanisms • Regression • defense mechanism in which an individual faced with anxiety retreats to a more infantile psychosexual stage, where some psychic energy remains fixated • A new kindergartner may be nervous and start to suck her thumb. • College students may wish for the comforts of home.

3. Defense Mechanisms • Reaction Formation • defense mechanism by which the ego unconsciously switches unacceptable impulses into their opposites • people may express feelings that are the opposite of their anxiety-arousing unconscious feelings • In situations where you are timid, you may act daring

4. Defense Mechanisms • Projection • defense mechanism by which people disguise their own threatening impulses by attributing them to others • “He doesn’t trust me” means “I don’t trust him” • Rationalization • defense mechanism that offers self-justifying explanations in place of the real, more threatening, unconscious reasons for one’s actions. • People who choose to be drink may say they do it “just to be social”

5. Defense Mechanisms • Displacement • defense mechanism that shifts sexual or aggressive impulses toward a more acceptable or less threatening object or person • as when redirecting anger toward a safer outlet • When a kid is angry at a parent, he may kick the family pet

6. Sublimation- transformation of unacceptable impulses to socially valued motivations. • example- da Vinci’s paintings of Madonna are a sublimation of his longing for an intimate relationship with his mother who left him at an early age.