Different theorists have different categorizations and conceptualizations of defense mechanisms. Large reviews of theories of defense mechanisms are available from Paulhus, Fridhandler and Hayes (1997) and Kramer (1991). The Journal of Personality published a special issue on defense mechanisms (1998). In the first definitive book on defense mechanisms, The Ego and the Mechanisms of Defense (1936), Anna Freud enumerated the ten defense mechanisms that appear in the work of her father, Sigmund Freud, that included: repression, regression, reaction formation, isolation, undoing, projection, introjection, turning against one's own person, reversal into the opposite, and sublimation or displacement. Sigmund Freud posited that defense mechanisms work by distortimg id impulses into acceptable forms, or by unconscious or conscious blockage of these impulses. Anna Freud considered defense mechanisms as intellectual and motor automisms of various degrees of complexity, that arose in the pr...