Verified by 
Key points
- Like repression, the manic defense involves blocking out despair.
- This is achieved by distracting the mind with the opposite thoughts and feelings.
- The manic defense can lead to inauthenticity and, in the longer term, to depression.
The manic defense is the tendency, when confronted with threatening thoughts and feelings, to distract the conscious mind with a flurry of activity or with the opposite thoughts and feelings.
A paradigm of the manic defense is the person who spends all their time rushing around from one task to the next, unable to tolerate even short stretches of inactivity.
Other examples include the socialite who attends one event after another, the small and dependent boy who charges around declaiming that he is Superman, and the insecure teenager who laughs “like a maniac” at the slightest intimation of sex.
In Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway (1925), one of several ways in which Clarissa Dalloway prevents herself from thinking about her life is by planning needless events and then fussing over their every detail—in the withering words of Woolf, “always giving parties to cover the silence.”
The Essence of the Manic Defense
The essence of the manic defense is to prevent feelings of despair and helplessness from entering the conscious mind by occupying it with opposite feelings of euphoria, purposeful activity, and omnipotent control.
This might be why people feel driven not only to mark but also celebrate such depressing milestones as entering the workforce (graduation), getting ever older (birthdays, anniversaries, New Year), and even, in more recent times, death and dying (Halloween).
It can be no coincidence that Christmas, originally a pagan solstice festival, is celebrated in the bleak mid-winter, in the shortest and darkest days of the year. Last year, I spent Christmas in New Zealand, where it is summer at that time of year—and people there made much less of a deal of it.
The manic defense may also take on more subtle or covert forms, such as creating a commotion over something trivial; filling every “spare moment” with reading, study, or on the phone to a friend; spending several months preparing for some civic or sporting event; seeking out status or celebrity so as to be a “somebody” rather than a “nobody”; entering into baseless relationships; and even, sometimes, getting married and having children.
When the Manic Defense Becomes a Problem
Everyone uses the manic defense, but some people use it to such an extent that they find it difficult to cope with even short periods of unstructured time such as holidays, weekends, and long-distance travel—which explains why airport shops are so profitable.
Since the advent of smartphones, it can be a struggle to go a few hours, or even the space of a toilet break, without checking our screen. God forbid that we should be left alone, even for five minutes, with our own thoughts.
“To do nothing at all,” observed Oscar Wilde, long before the advent of the smartphone, “is the most difficult thing in the world, the most difficult and the most intellectual.”
People with a strong manic defense are unable to live in the moment, unable to be truly alive. They leave no opportunity in which to integrate their thoughts or process their emotions, that is, no opportunity in which to gather perspective or come to terms with reality.
Because they never let it in, they lose all immunity to despair. And so when it finally hits them, it hits them like a tidal wave.
Read more in Hide and Seek: The Psychology of Self-Deception.
