A Primer on Psychological Defenses

We all use psychological defenses to avoid unwanted awareness. The defenses a mentally healthy person uses distort reality only slightly. But a mentally compromised person relies on defenses to dramatically reshape their experience of reality. When someone presents obviously distorted reality and insists it is not distorted, we wonder whether they are trying to deceive us or they are mentally unbalanced. Perhaps it is in our best interest to examine the pandemic of deception and mental disorder mixed into the world we live in today.

Defenses Are Necessarily Unconscious

For our psychological defenses to work, they must operate without our knowing it. If a person were to become aware of their defenses and recognize why they were altering reality, they would no longer believe the altered reality.

In some forms of psychotherapy, the therapist goes about methodically dismantling the client's defenses so the client is less able to keep reality out. Therapists use caution when doing this kind of therapy. Before slamming a client with more reality than they can deal with, the therapist strengthens the client's ability to accommodate reality.

This needs to be kept in mind when having a political discussion. The person we want to influence may be unable to tolerate a more accurate reality. Or, we may be intolerant to reality. After all, since psychological defenses are invisible to the person using them, we may not know how tolerant we are to reality.

The way we are psychologically organized is based on our experiences. The experiences that shape us most are the relationships we had when we depended on others for our physical needs and for physical and emotional safety. Trauma, distrust, betrayal, and punishment when at the tender mercies of others can scar us in ways that force us to employ reality-altering defenses without which we would be unable to function.

The Greek Philosopher Plato

Source: Marie-Lan Nguyen/Wikimedia Commons

In general, the less safe we feel, the more we need to be in control, and the greater we need defenses that make us feel in control. The more trauma we experienced, the more we must ignore our feelings, control what we think, and depend on psychological defenses to get through every moment. It has long been known that we humans defend ourselves against reality. Plato addressed this over two thousand years ago in his "Allegory of the Cave." It is not a question of whether we distort reality. We all do. It is a question of how much. As a therapist, I have yet to meet anyone who is totally "sane." So, what I propose here is we be open to how defended from reality we - and others - might be.

There are different levels of psychological defense. Psychiatrist George Valliant, professor at the Harvard Medical School, classifies defenses into pathological, immature, neurotic, and mature in his paper titled "Ego Mechanisms of Defense and Personality Disorder."

Pathological Defenses

A person who uses pathological defenses is unaware their reality is distorted in any way and may engage in:

• Denial of reality: what cannot be tolerated is alleged to not exist.
• Distortion of reality: altered reality protects the person's status (external) or self-esteem (internal).
• Conversion: psychological conflict blocked from awareness becomes a physical disorder.
• Splitting: compartmentalization prevents simultaneous awareness of thoughts/urges/fears that conflict.
• Concrete thinking: simplistic black-and-white thinking (good and evil; right and wrong; heaven and hell; safe and dangerous; male and female; clean and dirty; normal and perverted; racially superior and racially inferior) avoids stress due to inability to tolerate ambiguity.
• Devaluation: seeing others as inferior and unworthy while regarding one's self as superior and entitled.
• Denial with delusional projection: devaluing others while claiming to be devalued by them; persecuting others while claiming to be persecuted by them; aggressing against others while claiming to be victimized by them.

Immature Defenses

These anxiety-reducing defenses are typical of a child whose caregiver is both intolerable and essential, hated and loved, or aggressor and protector. These are also used by personality-disordered adults.

• Fantasy: retreat into fantasy to avoid awareness of conflict or to alleviate loneliness.
• Projection: disowning a feeling by attributing it to someone else.
• Introjection: the reverse of projection: adopting another person's feelings as one's own.
• Passive aggression: indirect expression of hostility.
• Acting out: behavior that expresses feelings the person is unaware of.
• Projective identification: behavior that causes a disowned feeling or denied urge to be felt by another person.
• Wishful thinking/magical thinking/illusion of control: avoiding anxiety through the belief that superstition, magic, or religious faith will produce a desired outcome.
• Withdrawal: avoidance as a way to escape a situation that leads to feelings of anxiety.

Neurotic Defenses

These defenses are less entrenched and may be recognized by a person using them if clearly pointed out.

• Intellectualization: distancing from emotional factors when making a decision.
• Reaction formation: believing the opposite because what is true causes anxiety; covering up an unacceptable desire by behaving as though the opposite were true.
• Dissociation: disconnecting emotional interest.
• Displacement: redirecting aggressive behavior to a safer target.
• Somatization: like conversion, escaping anxiety by transforming it into a physical symptom.
• Repression: making desire unconscious.
• Obsessive control: having to be in control to avoid anxiety.
• Rationalization: toying with reason to increase or decrease desirability.

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Mature Defenses

Unlike other defenses, mature defenses may be conscious and intentional ways to reduce anxiety; they may provide social benefits.

• Humor: sweetening unpleasant truths through witticism.
• Sublimation: like displacement, except healthier because the aggression is discharged acceptably, such as in sports.
• Suppression: consciously delaying gratification.
• Altruism: bringing pleasure to others for personal satisfaction.
• Anticipation: planned control of a situation to avoid anxiety.

Take Away Points

• Because the purpose of defenses is to distort reality enough to make it tolerable, a heavily defended person is threatened - not enlightened - when confronted with reality.
• A person who uses immature defenses or neurotic defenses may be able to accept carefully and respectfully presented reality.
• If a person who must defend against reality to function is confronted with reality, the crisis calls for increased pathological defense, leading them to "double down. " Attempts to cause a person who depends on pathological defenses to accept reality are futile.