Defenses Used to Manage Individual Emotions

By: Henry Kellerman and Anthony Burry

The varied roles played by defensive operations in the personality require the psychologist to understand and clarify defense syndromes and their diagnostic implications as well as the nature of individual defense mechanisms.

To further this analysis, a consideration of individual defenses is presented in the following section. This exposition is divided into two categories. The first delineates individual defense mechanisms designed to manage individual emotions. The second category presents individual defense mechanisms that become instrumental in the process of character or personality trait formation.

Defensive structure.

• Signal anxiety or inner tension evokes the operation of a defense. • Signal anxiety occurs in response to an internal threat (fantasies or impulses), or an external threat (other people or demands of life).

• Individual defenses include:

Compartmentalization. Different aspects of the personality are kept apart and dissociated instead of remaining integrated. Often seen in histrionic reactions and especially prominent in multiple personality disorder.

Compensation. A focus on positive fantasy used in the management of depression and narcissistic interests to alleviate depression and inflate self-esteem.

Denial. Distortion of aspects of reality used in the management of histrionic and otherwise expressive personalities by screening out negative information about another person or circumstances.

Displacement. Shifting reactions from appropriate targets to less threatening figures. Utilized by passive-aggressive and dependent personalities to manage anger and hostility by expressing such feelings indirectly.

Intellectualization. Emphasis and exaggeration of thoughts over feelings to achieve a dispassionate, objective stance. Obsessional or compulsive types utilize isolation, rationalization, sublimation, and undoing in addition to intellectualization in order to fortify a sense of control over the environment.

Isolation. Ideas are kept separate from any connecting feelings. This defense is seen in obsessional and compulsive disorders.

Projection. Issues of the personality that cannot be accepted, such as self-criticism and feelings of hostility, are attributed to others. The main defense in paranoid functioning.

Rationalization. A justification process in which flaws sensed as threatening are excused. Ubiquitous, although prominent in obsessional disorders.

Reaction Formation. The emotions of attraction and pleasure are reversed. For example, sexual feelings are turned into revulsion, or hostility into solicitousness because of the threatening nature of the pleasure that would otherwise be experienced; one of the defenses utilized in manic states.

Sublimation. Pleasure is transformed into work energy, as frequently seen in obsessional and manic states.

Regression. Reliance on behaviors mastered earlier in development. Observed in the psychopathic, antisocial, and other impulsive and motoric types. May also be seen in depressive withdrawal.

Repression. Expulsion of threatening material from consciousness. Germane to all defenses, repression sustains the unconscious amalgam of memories and feelings and is used extensively by passive, schizoid, and histrionic personalities.

Undoing. Designed to sustain a position of balance by canceling threatening material. Undoing is
seen in obsessive and compulsive states.

• Defenses that form character- or personality-trait patterns include:

Identification. Replicating the persona of an important figure as a way of controlling tension.

Projective Identification. Attributing to others part of the self that is repudiated and identifying with such parts.

Internalization. Introjecting values, standards, or traits of significant others that neutralize conflict with these important figures. The internalized values and attitudes tend to control the individual and powerfully contribute to the shaping of behavior.

Splitting. Contains elements of denial and displacement so that other figures can be seen as purely good or purely bad without a sense of contradictions; or a single figure can be seen at different times in ideal or devalued terms without an awareness of contradiction.

Symbolization. Ideas and fantasies are disguised through external representations.

Turning Against the Self. Hostility is more tolerable toward the self than toward another person, as seen in depression.

In the preceding discussion of defense mechanisms, specific defenses or clusters of defenses are mobilized automatically, unconsciously, and repeatedly as part of an individual’s personality.

This defense calibration of the personality contributes to the consistency of the individual’s functioning so that typical reactions become characteristic of the person. The idea of typical behavior is important because it explains the use of defense mechanisms in the formation and perpetuation of enduring personality or character behavior.

In analyzing and discussing the patient’s system of defense, the psychologist considers both categories— defenses designed to cope with transitory emotion, and those that facilitate and reinforce trait behavior.

References

Henry Kellerman and Anthony Burry, Handbook of Psychodiagnostic Testing, Fourth Edition, 2007, Springer ScienceBusiness Media, LLC.

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