Figure 7-1: Defense Mechanisms

• Denial. Pretending that a threatening situation does not exist because the situation is too distressing to cope with. A child comes home, and no one is there. He says to himself, "They are here. I'll find them soon."
• Displacement. Feelings and thoughts directed toward one person or object are directed toward another person. For example, an employee has feelings of anger toward his boss but is unaware of these feelings because of his internal conflict over acknowledging them. Instead he becomes disproportionately angry at his wife over a minor problem at home.
• Grandiosity. Although not one of the originally identified analytic defenses, grandiosity is frequently employed by substance abusers (Mark and Luborsky, 1992). Grandiosity defends against unconscious low self-esteem by invoking self-deceptive, overly positive opinions about oneself. An example of grandiosity in a substance-abusing client is the client who insists that he can maintain control of drug use despite the fact that he was using an increasingly large amount of drugs with increasing frequency. This example can be seen as denial as well because denial involves denying or minimizing the consequences of the addiction. However, the grandiosity is evident in the user's unrealistic belief that he is in control of his drug use when it would seem that his use is compulsive and clearly out of control at this point.
• Identification with the aggressor. The activity of doing unto someone else what aroused anxiety when it was done to oneself. A child has a tonsillectomy. She then puts on a toy stethoscope and goes around pretending to take out the tonsils of her playmates.
• Introjection. The individual "takes inside" himself what is threatening. For example, a child feels strong anxiety about losing a parent's love when the latter admonishes her for not cleaning her room. To cope with the anxiety she tells herself, "You are a bad girl."
• Isolation. Painful ideas are separated from feelings associated with them. To face the full impact of sexual or aggressive thoughts and feelings, the ideas and affects are kept apart. For example, the thought of shouting obscenities in a church is kept separate from all the rage about being in church. Thus, in isolation the individual may have fleeting thoughts of an aggressive or sexual nature without any emotional accompaniment.
• Projection. This is the opposite of introjection; an intolerable idea or feeling is ascribed to someone else. For example, it could be hypothesized that because the late Senator Joseph McCarthy could not tolerate his own homosexual wishes, he spent much time compiling lists of men in the State Department who, according to McCarthy, were hiding their homosexuality.
• Reaction formation. A painful idea or feeling is replaced by its opposite. A young girl, for example, who cannot tolerate her hateful feelings toward her new baby brother keeps saying, "I love my new brother!"
• Regression. A retreat to an earlier form of behavior and psychic organization because of anxiety in the present. For example, under the impact of anxiety stirred up by wishes to masturbate, a teenager returns to an earlier form of behavior and resumes sucking his thumb.
• Repression. An attempt to exclude from awareness feelings and thoughts that evoke anxiety. In repression, the feelings and thoughts may have been experienced consciously at one time, or the repressive work may have stopped ideas and feelings from ever reaching consciousness. For example, an individual may have consciously experienced hateful feelings toward a parent or sibling but, because of the anxiety evoked, blocked the feelings from awareness. Or to protect herself from feeling the unpleasantness and dread of hate and anger, a woman never allows any hostile thoughts or feelings to reach consciousness.
• Undoing. Trying to remove an offensive act, either by pretending it was not done or by atoning for it. For example, a boss hates an employee and wishes to fire him. Instead he promotes the employee, thereby diminishing in his mind what he thinks he has done.