Search results
Results From The WOW.Com Content Network
Anna Freud (1936) ranked regression first in her enumeration of the defense mechanisms', [16] and similarly suggested that people act out behaviors from the stage of psychosexual development in which they are fixated. For example, an individual fixated at an earlier developmental stage might cry or sulk upon hearing unpleasant news.
In the first definitive book on defence mechanisms, The Ego and the Mechanisms of Defence (1936), [7] Anna Freud enumerated the ten defence mechanisms that appear in the works of her father, Sigmund Freud: repression, regression, reaction formation, isolation, undoing, projection, introjection, turning against one's own person, reversal into the opposite, and sublimation or displacement.
The defense that effects (brings about) this process is called splitting. Splitting is the tendency to view events or people as either all bad or all good. [ 1 ] When viewing people as all good, the individual is said to be using the defense mechanism idealization : a mental mechanism in which the person attributes exaggeratedly positive ...
For example, if feelings of hate towards another person make one anxious, the ego can facilitate the flow of love to conceal the hostility." [ 2 ] Where reaction-formation takes place, it is usually assumed that the original, rejected impulse does not vanish, but persists, unconscious, in its original infantile form. [ 1 ]
For example: "When a child envelops representational images of his absent parents into himself, simultaneously fusing them with his own personality." "Individuals with weak ego boundaries are more prone to use introjection as a defense mechanism."
Narcissistic defenses are among the earliest defense mechanisms to emerge, and include denial, distortion, and projection. [4] Splitting is another defense mechanism prevalent among individuals with narcissistic personality disorder, borderline personality disorder, and antisocial personality disorder—seeing people and situations in black and white terms, either as all bad or all good.
Rationalization is a defense mechanism (ego defense) in which apparent logical reasons are given to justify behavior that is motivated by unconscious instinctual impulses. [1] It is an attempt to find reasons for behaviors, especially one's own. [2]
George Vaillant divided defense mechanisms into a hierarchy of defenses ranging from immature through neurotic to healthy defenses, [12] and placed intellectualization – imagining an act of violence without feeling the accompanying emotions, for example – in the mid-range, neurotic defenses. [13]