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Defense Mechanisms

 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 process of involuntary and voluntary learning.


Anna Freud introduced the concept of signal anxiety; she stated that it was "not directly a conflicted instinctual tension but a signal occuring in the ego of an anticipated instinctual tension." The signaling function of anxiety was thus seen as crucial, and biologically adapted to warn the organism of danger or a threat to its equilibrium. The anxiety is felt as an increase in bodily or mental tension, and the signal that the organism receives in this way allows for the possibility of taking defensive action regarding the perceived danger.

Both Freuds studied defense mechanisms, but Anna spent more of her time and research on five main mechanisms: repression, regression, projection, reaction formation, and sublimation. All defense mechanisms are responses to anxiety and how the consciousness and unconscious manage the stress of a social situation.
  • Repression: when a feeling is hidden and forced from the consciousness to the unconscious because it is seen as socially unacceptable.
  • Regression: falling back into an early state of mental/physical development seen as "less demanding and safer."
  • Projection: possessing a feeling that is deemed as socially unacceptable and instead of facing it, that feeling or "unconscious urge" is seen in the actions of other people.
  • Reaction formation: acting the opposite way that the unconscious instructs a person to behave, "often exaggerared and obsessive." For example, if a wife is infatuated with a man who is not her husband, reaction formation may cause her to - rather than cheat - become obsessed with showing her husband signs of love and affection.
  • Sublimation: seen as the most acceptable of the mechanisms, an expression of anxiety in socially acceptable ways.
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