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Level four defence mechanisms serve the purpose of protecting an individual's self-esteem. There are several processes that people may use, such as devaluation and idealization of self-image and others-image, as well as omnipotence. These mechanisms assist in preserving a healthy self-perception during times of psychological instability.
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 ...
Schizoid refers to the central defense mechanism: splitting, the vigilant separation of the good object from the bad object. Klein posited that a healthy development implies that the infant has to split its external world, its objects and itself into two categories: good (i.e., gratifying, loved, loving) and bad (i.e. frustrating, hated ...
Compartmentalization may lead to hidden vulnerabilities related to self-organization and self-esteem [10] in those who use it as a major defense mechanism. [11] When a negative self-aspect is activated, it may cause a drop in self-esteem and mood. [9] This drop in self-esteem and mood is what the observed vulnerability is attributed to. [9]
This process ranges from fully conscious (e.g. to present an external defense against ridicule from others) to mostly unconscious (e.g. to create a block against internal feelings of guilt or shame). People rationalize for various reasons—sometimes when we think we know ourselves better than we do. Rationalization may differentiate the ...
Undoing is a defense mechanism in which a person tries to cancel out or remove an unhealthy, destructive or otherwise threatening thought or action by engaging in contrary behavior. For example, after thinking about being violent with someone, one would then be overly nice or accommodating to them.
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]
Freud considered that there was "reason to assume that there is a primal repression, a first phase of repression, which consists in the psychical (ideational) representative of the instinct being denied entrance into the conscious", as well as a second stage of repression, repression proper (an "after-pressure"), which affects mental derivatives of the repressed representative.