Freud’s Most Common Defense Mechanisms

Everyone knows the basics of psychoanalysis and the structure of the human’s personality – the Ego, the Id and the Superego.These are the foundations of Freud’s psychoanalysis.One of the most common theory is the one about the defense mechanisms.When the Ego assumes the impulses, coming from the Id, could possibly cause a situation of threat, the Ego contradicts these impulses.In the psychoanalytic literature such contradiction is called Defense or Ego’s defense response.For the purposes of the defense the Ego uses everything it has “at hand”.

Every attitude, every perception, distraction, neutralizing the energy of the dangerous impulses, creating identifications, triggering the fantasy – all these defenses can be used separately or combined.In addition to these defense responses of the Ego there are several special processes which are specifically designed to contradict the Id.Anna Freud calls them defense mechanisms.The earliest discovered defense mechanism was the expulsion.As a defense mechanism the expulsion is an act of the Ego through which it removes from the mind all Id’s undesired impulses along with their derivatives such as memories, emotions, urges and fantasies.They vanish from the mind as if they never existed.Subjectively viewed the memory expulsed had in fact been forgotten.The expulsion creates constant tension between the Ego and the Id.The Id is entirely unconscious process.Also the material that has been expulsed, as well as the Ego’s action towards this process is also unconscious.
Another mechanism, but this time a conscious one, is the so called suppression (displacement).Each desire that has arisen tends to be realized.Sometimes the Superego doesn’t let the idea emerge and this is where the suppression comes.This mechanism of defense reduces anxiety and all things bothering the mind are being removed.We can talk about suppression in cases where an individual attempts to forget something by not thinking about it anymore.
Within the reaction formation one of two ambivalent feelings, for instance hatred,, becomes constantly unconscious, while the other, in this case love, becomes stronger in the individual’s mind.The attitude that vanished keeps existing in the subconscious.The reaction formation is also an unconscious process.
The isolation as a defense mechanism is called by Freud an affect isolation or an emotion expulsion.In these cases the fantasy related to the desire, or the memory of the past, keep their access to the mind, while the emotion (which is usually painful) is separated from them and cannot reach the mind.The process of expulsing emotions begins by removing from the mind of painful feelings and fears.This means this defense mechanism works coordinately with the principle of pleasure.The process is unconscious.
Another important defense mechanism is denial.Anna Freud used this term to describe the denial of unpleasant facts from reality by fantasizing and acting.
Projection.This process contains projecting individual’s own desires onto the subject of the desire, while these desires are unacceptable for the Superego.By projection the individual assigns their own desires and impulses to people and inanimate objects from the outside world.
Directing against one self.This defense mechanism represents a situation when the individual channels the instinctive impulse towards themselves.
The identification the individual identifies himself/herself with things which are dangerous for them.This can also be a subject who’s shoes the individual would like to be in due to intimate motivations.In this case the identification is related to the altruism.
Another defense mechanism is the introjection.Here the individual assigns other people’s thoughts and desires onto himself/herself.
The regression as a defense mechanism represents a counter development or returning the libido energy from a more mature stage in the sexual development to an earlier one.
The sublimation means developing the sexual drives’ satisfaction and preserving the targets by changing them into socially significant goals or a social priority.The sublimation helps channelizing the sexual drives, instead of blocking or changing them.During the sublimation the desired subject is not displaced from the mind and remained in the Id, therefore the tension and anxiety also remain.
Dreaming is another defense mechanism.During sleeping and dreaming in particular the mind is shut down to a maximum, but the Id never sleeps.Only the Ego is in a state of sleeping.During the process of dreaming Id “invades” the Ego territory and materializes during the individual’s dreams.
Intellectualization as a defense mechanisms manifests itself in several options.The instincts energy swerves not to art, but to science, for example; or it swerves to the issues of ethics and morality; or towards issues which are related to the category of “reasonable justification of individual’s own behavior”, where the individual intellectually assigns to the desired subject a set of qualities which make them unattractive, and vice versa.
In case all the defense mechanisms don’t work, a neurosis occurs.Most commonly the neurosis comes as a result of a continuous suppression.

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