DEFENSE MECHANISMS

FOR PROTECTING THE SELF

From "Encounters With The Self"

by

Don E. Hamachek

Study Notes

1. Whether we are always aware of it or not, each of us uses certain "defense" mechanisms to help us "preserve" or "protect" our self-systems (Ego). Indeed, our effectiveness in using certain defenses has a lot to do with how successful we are in meeting the daily stresses and strains of living.

2. Although defense mechanisms are necessary, they can prove debilitating if we use them, however consciously or unconsciously, to avoid assuming responsibility, to abstain from taking risks now and then, or to manufacture excuses for persisting in behavior that may be immature and self- defeating.

3.The use of defense mechanisms is a normal human reaction, unless they are used to such an extreme that they begin to interfere with our ability to cope realistically with problems. For example,

people who continually rationalize away their blunders are not likely to profit on subsequent occasions from their mistakes. Defense mechanisms involve a fair degree of self-deception and reality distortion. Furthermore, they function on relatively unconscious levels and therefore are not subject to the usual checks and balances of more conscious processes. In fact, we usually resent having someone call our attention to them because once they become conscious they do not serve their purposes as well.

4.Defense mechanisms can be best understood in view of the objective they serve, which is to safeguard the integrity and worth of the self. Thus, it is only as we conceive of an active, dynamic self that struggles to maintain a certain stability that they make sense. Once we view the "self" in this framework, we may be better able to understand our ability to protect it by utilizing defense mechanisms to change the so-called "facts" so that they fit our personal needs.

5. Knowledge about what these defense mechanisms are and how they work may help us to be aware of those times when we may be using them in self-defeating ways and thus stop the process before it goes too far. With this small introduction, let us now turn to a consideration of the more important of these defense mechanisms along with a brief discussion of how each functions.

Compensation (Making up for Perceived Deficiencies)

6. Compensation is an attempt to disguise or overcome the existence of what is perceived as a weak or undesirable characteristic by emphasizing a particular strength or by becoming unusually adept in one or two other areas.

This defensive reaction takes many forms. For example, physically handicapped individuals may attempt to overcome their handicaps directly through increased effort and persistence. The heroic and successful efforts of the fine actress Patricia Neal following her stroke is an example of what sheer effort, persistence, practice, and determination can accomplish.

Tom Dempsey, whose genetically deformed foot set a National Football League field goal record of 63 yards, and Jerry Traylor, crippled at birth by cerebral palsy, who completed a 12-mile marathon in a little over seven hours on special arm crutches, are other examples of how it is possible to compensate for a shortcoming through extra effort and hard work.

7. Usually, however, compensatory reactions are more indirect. That is, there an effort either to substitute for the defect or to draw attention away from it:

the girl who regards herself as unattractive may develop an exceptionally winning personality; the uncoordinated boy may turn from athletics to scholastics.

8. Indeed, a whole science of cosmetics and dress has developed that seems to have as its major objectives the modification or alteration of the human anatomy, its features, expressions, and protrusions. The short man is made to look tall, the fat woman thin, the colorless one glamorous, the flat one curvaceous, and so on, each of which is designed to compensate for having too much or too little, as the case may be.

9. Not all compensatory behaviors are desirable or useful.

For example, a person who feels unloved may become sexually promiscuous; the boy who feels inferior may become the neighborhood bully; the person who feels insecure may eat or drink too much; the individual who feels inadequate may brag endlessly.

10. We constantly compare ourselves with others and frequently gauge our worth by how we see ourselves in relation to other people's status, achievements, and possessions. This can lead to strong motivation toward at least average, and if possible, superior achievement. In meeting these conditions, compensating behaviors may help, but where they become exaggerated or take antisocial forms, they hinder rather than assist people who are trying to express their potential.

Denial (Ignoring the Unpleasant)

11. Sometimes we manage to avoid disagreeable realities by ignoring or refusing to acknowledge them. This inclination is exemplified in a great many of our everyday behaviors.

We turn away from unpleasant sights; we refuse to discuss unpleasant topics; we ignore or disclaim criticism; and sometimes we refuse to face our real problems.

A vain woman may deny a vision problem to avoid wearing glasses; an insecure middle-aged man may deny his years by pursuing younger women; or a student with low self-esteem may deny his competency by attributing a high grade on a test to "luck."

12. Parents, for example, are notoriously blind when it comes to the defects of their offspring. I recall one mother, whose ten-year-old boy had been diagnosed as brain-damaged by a team of experts, who asserted that his "head was just developing slower than the rest of him, that's all."

13. The common adages "None is so blind as he who will not see" and "Love is blind" perhaps illustrate even more clearly our tendency to look away from those things that are incompatible with our desires and needs. This mechanism does, indeed, guard us from painful experiences. However, like the proverbial ostrich who buries his head in the sand, denial may also get in the way of our "seeing" things that might otherwise facilitate progress toward more effective living and greater maturity.greater maturity.

Displacement (Shifting Negative Feeling to Someone Safer)

14. Displacement refers to the shift of emotion or fantasy away from the person or object toward which it was originally directed to a more neutral or less dangerous person or object.

For example, the man upbraided by his boss may suppress the anger he feels toward the boss because he knows he would be in deep trouble if he expressed his feelings. So he comes home and yells at his wife for not having dinner ready and at the children for being too noisy. Not infrequently the smallest incident may serve as the trigger that releases pent-up emotional feelings in a torrent of displaced anger and abuse.

A young housewife had been admonished by her husband for not being more efficient and later in the same day lost her purse while shopping. On her way home she was halted by a police officer for speeding. That was the final straw. She exploded with a volley of abuse on the startled officer, ranging all the way from "Haven't you anything better to do than chase women?" to blaming him generally for the city's traffic condition, which he should have been working on rather than harassing busy, civic-minded citizens for barely exceeding the speed limit.

15. Through a process of symbolic association, displacement can be extremely indirect and complex. For example,

"beating" a disliked rival at a game or in an athletic match may symbolically represent that person's destruction. Under the guise of "I just want to help," many a next-door neighbor has indulged in destructive and vindictive gossip as a means of expressing anger, resentment, and hostility.

16. Displacement is a valuable mechanism because it enables us to vent dangerous emotional impulses without risking loss of love and possible retaliation, and without the necessity of even recognizing the person for whom such feelings were originally intended. By displacing his bottled-up anger on his wife and children, the man maintains his feelings of respect and cordiality toward his domineering boss. The wife who released her rage on the police officer can more easily avoid ambivalent feelings toward a husband who demands that she be more tidy.

17. Unfortunately, displacements can become too deviant and can result in continual avoidance of situations that could be more efficiently handled by a more direct approach. On the whole, we are psychologically better off when we learn to express and discuss our feelings with the person for whom the feelings are intended in the first place.

Emotional Insulation (Putting up a Wall of Armor)

18. When we emotionally insulate ourselves, we attempt to reduce our needs and fears by withdrawing into a sort of shell of passivity. As a consequence of Getting emotionally involved in the business of living does, indeed, involve certain "calculated risks."

For example, there is always the possibility that the person we give our affection to may reject us or be taken from us by death. Healthy people operate on the assumption that the rewards of emotional involvement are worth the risks, even though they also know that they shall inevitably feel pain and disappointment in life, too.

19. Used in mild dosages, emotional insulation is an important defense against too much hurt and disappointment. However, when used to the extent that one becomes "an island unto oneself," it can curtail a person's healthy and active participation in life and lead to eventual shallowness and blunting of emotional involvement. When we dare not hope, we cease to grow.

Fantasy (Imagining Something Better)

20. Not only do we frequently deny unpleasant reality, but we are also inclined to "embellish" our perceptions so that the world is seen more as we would like it to be.

Fantasy is stimulated by frustrated desires and grows primarily out of mental images associated with need gratification.

It can be productive or nonproductive.

21. Productive fantasy can be used constructively in solving problems, as in creative imagination, or it can be a kind of nonproductive wish--fulfilling activity that compensates for a lack of achievement rather than stimulating or promoting it. James Thurber's The Secret Life of Walter Mitty is a classic example of how we can achieve wished-for status by imaging that we are rich, powerful, and respected. Albert Einstein, on the other hand, had mental pictures, or "fantasies," that led to productive hypotheses, formulas, and solutions.

22. Fantasies are likely to get out of hand. During times of this sort we would be well advised to be wary of solutions conjured up by fantasies.

For example, Bettelheim (1990) found that at the concentration camps of Dachau and Buchenwald, "the longer the time a prisoner had spent in camp, the less true to reality were his daydreams; so much so that the hopes there is no risk, there is no loss; but there is no gain either.

23. Many of our fantasies are ready-made for us in the form of magazines, books, movies, and soap operas. In these we escape from our own problems by identifying ourselves, fantasy fashion, with the hero or heroine, bravely facing and surmounting their problems with them and sharing in their adventures and triumphs. Soap operas especially, invite this sort of fantasy identification.

24. The capacity to remove ourselves temporarily from unpleasant reality into a more affable world of fantasy has considerable therapeutic value. Fantasy may, for example, add the dash of excitement and interest we need to motivate us to greater efforts toward our goals in real life. However, the individual who consistently turns to fantasy as a solution to a troublesome reality is in danger psychologically. It is particularly under conditions of extreme frustration and deprivation that our and expectations of the old prisoners often took the form of eschatological and messianic hopes."

25. Nonetheless, there is good evidence to suggest that fantasizing and daydreaming are not only normal but also an almost universal activity among people of both sexes.It is when we use it as a permanent and not a temporary escape that we are apt to get ourselves into trouble. It is one thing to build a castle in the sky; it is quite another to try to live in it.

Introjection [Identification] (Appeasing the Other Person)

26. In this mechanism, we introject, or "internalize," the basic qualities or attitudes of a person or persons in our social world who may threaten us. We can see examples of this in the behavior of young children as they gradually learn and accept as their own the various social boundaries, values, and attitudes of their parents. By becoming like their parents, it is then possible for them to regulate their own behavior in terms of internalized values and protect themselves from possible infractions of rules, thus avoiding social retaliation and punishment.

27. The saying "If you can't beat them, join them" reflects the use of this mechanism in everyday life. This "identification with the aggressor" behavior is primarily a defense mechanism of the weak against the strong.

28. Prisoners, for example, often attempt to reduce the threat to their existence by becoming "informers" or otherwise cultivating the favor of guards whom they hate and fear. The dynamics behind a threatened prisoner's frantic efforts to win a guard's favor are basically no different than those of frightened, intimidated students who go out of their way to be friendly to a teacher who terrifies them.

29. Fundamentally the thinking is

"If I'm on his side maybe he won't be harsh on me. Or better still, maybe he won't give me a low grade."

Whether it is the frightened prisoner or the intimidated student, the dynamics are the same, namely, a total effort to incorporate, to "introject," the characteristics of that person who is seen as most threatening.

Projection (Blaming the Other Person)

30. Projection is a means by which we (1) blame our own shortcomings, mistakes, and transgressions on others; and (2) attribute to others our own unacceptable impulses, thoughts, and desires.

31. It is perhaps most commonly apparent in our tendency to blame others for our own mistakes.

The athlete who fails to make the team may feel sure the coach was unfair; an ex-wife may conclude, "It's all his fault"; a bruised seven-year-old may exclaim, "It wasn't me; he hit me first"; the baseball player called out on strikes may suggest that the umpire not delay in consulting an ophthalmologist; and so it goes.

32. Fate and bad luck are particularly overworked targets of projection. Even inanimate objects are not exempt from blame.

The golfer who whiffs his tee shot may examine his driver as if expecting to find a hole in it, or the three-year-old who tumbles from his hobby horse may accuse it of deliberately throwing him off.

33. Sometimes a person may ascribe ethically unacceptable desires and impulses to others while remaining blithely unaware of their internal origins within him- or herself.

For example, the individual with suppressed homosexual leanings may be the first to spot a wide assortment of homosexual tendencies or characteristics in other males. Or the woman who is frightened by her own very strong sexual urges may accuse men of "always being on the make."

34. Such projections help maintain our feelings of adequacy and self-esteem in the face of failure, and they probably develop from the early realization that placing the blame on others for our own mistakes helps us to avoid social rejection and disapproval. This mechanism can, however, be carried to extremes. Some individuals are so busy looking for faults and shortcomings in other people that they never get around to examining their own, which ultimately deprives them of achieving higher levels of maturity.

Rationalization (Inverting excuses)

35. Rationalization has two primary defensive objectives: (1) it helps us invent excuses for doing what we don't think we should do but want to do anyway, and (2) it helps us soften the disappointment connected to not reaching a goal we had set for ourselves.

Typically, it involves thinking up logical, socially acceptable reasons for our past, present, or future behavior. With not too much effort we can soon think of a reason for not getting up for an eight o'clock class ("It'll probably be a dull lecture anyway"), for going to a movie instead of studying ("There really isn't that much to do"), for eating too much (" Tomorrow I'll start my diet"), and on and on.

36. We have endless ways for justifying our behavior and protecting our adequacy and self-esteem. How many parents, for example, are honest enough to admit that the child they just spanked was spanked because they (the parents) were angry, without having to mask it with "It was for his own good" or "It hurt me more than it did him." Or how many students are honest enough to admit they cheated because they didn't know the material rather than cover it with "everyone else does, so I have to in order to pass." If parents had to face their anger or if students had to face their lack of knowledge, each would probably feel ashamed and guilty-hence, the rationalizations, the excuses.

37. Sometimes, of course, it is difficult to know where an objective consideration of facts leaves off and rationalization begins.

Two behavioral symptom. of excessive rationalization are (1) hunting for reasons to justify behavior and beliefs and (2) getting emotional (angry, reactive) when someone questions the reasons we offer. Should these reactions occur, it is usually a good time to pause and examine how factual our reasons really are. The price of excessive rationalization, of course, is self-deception, for if we accept reasons for our behavior that are not true, we are less likely to profit from our errors. Carried to extremes this could lead eventually to the development of false beliefs or delusions sustained in the face of contradictory evidence.

Reaction Formation (Feeling One Way But Behaving in Another)

38. Reaction formation refers to the development of conscious attitudes and behavior patterns that are opposite to what one really feels and would like to do.

It is a way of suppressing impulses and desires that we think might get us into trouble if we actually carried them out. Reaction formation can be recognized by its extreme and intolerant attitudes, which are usually far out of proportion to the importance of the situation.

For example, self-appointed guardians of the public's morals, who voluntarily devote their time to reading "dirty" books and magazines and investigating burlesque shows, and who are generally obsessed with censoring all things related to sex, alcohol, and other alleged vices, are frequently found to have unusually high impulses in the same direction themselves. Indeed, the most aggressive crusaders are very often fighting their own suppressed impulses as well as condemning the expression of such impulses in others.

39. In everyday behavior, reaction formation may take the form of being excessively kind to a person we do not like, of developing a "Who cares how other people feel" attitude to conceal feelings of loneliness and a craving for acceptance, or of assuming an air of bravado when our adequacy is threatened, for example, "That test tomorrow doesn't frighten me . . . much."

40. Reaction formation has adjustive value insofar as it helps us to maintain socially approved behavior and to control unacceptable impulses. On the other hand, this mechanism, too, is self-deceptive and can lead to exaggerated and rigid fears or beliefs, which could lead to excessive harshness or severity in dealing with the values of others and ourselves.

Regression (Returning to Younger Behaviors)

41. Regression involves a retreat, in the face of stress, to the use of behavioral patterns appropriate at earlier levels of development. It usually involves modification of behavior in the direction of more primitive, infantile expressions.

For example, when a new addition to the family is brought home from the hospital, it is not uncommon for the older child, who may feel that her status is threatened, to regress, or "go back," to bedwetting, baby talk, thumb- sucking, demands for her mother's attention, and other infantile behaviors. We may, when frustrated, return to the temper tantrums or sulks that got us our way when growing up, we may pout when we don't get our own way, or we may "cry like a baby" when feeling great emotional pain.

42. Regression can perhaps be better understood if we remember a child's gradual shift from helplessness and dependency on parents to increasingly independent behavior and responsibility. This developmental process from dependency to independency is an arduous task, and it is common for all of us, confronting a harsher and more demanding adult world, to yearn now and then for the carefree and sheltered days of infancy and childhood. Consequently it is not surprising that in the face of severe stress we may retreat periodically from our adult status to an earlier level of growth and adjustment.

43. Regression is, however, more comprehensive than merely resorting to earlier behavior patterns when new ones have failed. In regression a person retreats to a less demanding personal status-one that involves lower personal goals and expectations and more readily accomplished satisfaction.

44. Regression may help us find some temporary relief from the demands and responsibilities of our adult worlds, but as with other defense mechanisms, when used as a primary mode of adjustment, it can serve as a giant roadblock to more mature behavior.

Repression (Forgetting The Unpleasant)

45. Repression is a defensive reaction through which painful or dangerous thoughts and desires are excluded from consciousness.

It has often been labeled as selective forgetting, but it is more in the nature of selective remembering. It is a way of protecting one's personal equilibrium by forgetting experiences that are upsetting.

46. Repression is by no means always complete. Vague feelings of unworthiness, insecurity, and guilt often are signs of incomplete repression.

Along this line I recall a client of mine who struggled for several months working through the nagging guilt feelings he always had whenever he felt sexually attracted to a woman. He knew it was in some way related to his childhood and his mother's attitudes, but he didn't know exactly how. During one of our sessions, as he was sorting through his buried file of memories, he recalled a time when he was eight years old and his mother caught him and a seven-year-old girl in the basement, both with pants down, exploring each other. He was spanked, admonished for being a bad, nasty boy, and sent directly to bed. So painful was that experience that, with time, he "forgot" it, but it served nonetheless as an unconscious hatchery from which guilt was spawned whenever he had any kind of sexual feeling about a woman. It was the key to insight, and once he had unlocked that memory and was able to look at it in connection with a mother who had neurotic fears about sex, he was in a better position to examine his own fears, which, with this new understanding, he was able to overcome.

47. The repression of undesirable impulses and experiences not only demands considerable energy but also hinders healthy personality integration. A realistic confrontation of problems is always more conducive to good mental health and positive self-development.

Sublimation (Substituting One Goal for Another)

49. Sublimation involves the acceptance of a socially approved substitute goal for a drive whose normal channel of expression is blocked. There are many ways in which motives can be sublimated.

As an illustration, curiosity about people, which can express itself in undesirable ways (voyeurism, sexual conversation, gossip, nosiness about the affairs of others) and which may lead to feelings of guilt, can be sublimated into art and medicine, in which the human body can be viewed without conflict or reprisal, or it can be sublimated into counseling or psychology, in which behavior and motives can be discussed at will. Individuals with strong aggressive impulses may find suitable expression for those impulses in competitive sports or vigorous physical outlets, which range from karate to judo to aerobic dancing.

50. The defensive functions of sublimation are somewhat different from those of compensation because the motivation is different. Whereas compensation is founded on some kind of inadequacy, sublimation is directed more toward the reduction of guilt associated with such motives as aggression, sex, curiosity, cruelty, and the paternal or maternal drive. A classical illustration of sublimation is the redirection of the maternal or paternal drive of the childless woman or man through teaching, social work, recreation work, or pediatric medicine, all of which provide opportunities for a wholesome expression of the desire for and love of children.