Basic Concept Expalined -- Defence Mechanisms

Defense mechanism is a tactic developed by the Ego to protect an individual against anxiety induced from the conflicts among the Id, Superego and the reality. Defense mechanisms are employed to protect the mind against feelings, incidents and thought that are too difficult for the conscious mind to cope with. In some instances, defense mechanisms are responsible for keeping inappropriate or unwanted thoughts and impulses, such as unconscious sexual and aggressive wishes that are thought to be either inappropriate or unacceptable, from entering the conscious mind through the process of repression so that the individual may have no idea at all about the repressed contents.

For example, if you are forced to have a date with a person you don't really like, your unconscious mind may choose to forget that particular date and you, I mean your unconscious mind, may have a tendency to fit this slot with another appointment so as to avoid the date.

Forgetting is only one of the many defense mechanisms proposed by Freud and later developed by his daughter, Anna Freud, and there are a number of them.

Before having an overview of various mechanisms, perhaps it is a good idea for us to get to know some of their characteristics and they are outlined as follows:

-  They are always unconscious
-  They are ego functions that serve to protect an individual from anxiety
-  They usually involve distortion of either internal or external reality so as to make things less threatening
-  They use up part of the total energy (libido) available

 Defense mechanisms can be conceptualized as a hierarchy, please see here (Gabbard, 2010, pp.34-36), from the most primitive ones to the most mature ones.



Defense mechanisms are essential for us to ward off anxiety and for the Ego to carry out its functions, yet, if the distortion involved becomes too extreme, they may bring about maladaptation and destruction which prevent our further personal and social growth.

Generally speaking, patients who suffer from serious mental illnesses display a range of primitive defense mechanisms while ordinary people mainly adopt more mature ones to safeguard themselves from intra-psychic threats and anxiety.

References

Engler, B. (2009). Personality theories :An introduction (8th ed.). Belmont, CA: Wadsworth/Cengage Learning.

Gabbard, G. O. (2010). Long-term psychodynamic psychotherapy :A basic text (2nd ed.). Washington, D.C.: American Psychiatric Pub.