Defence mechanism
Concept · Sigmund Freud · Psychology, stage 1: Learn the vocabulary
A defence mechanism is an unconscious strategy that protects a person from anxiety by distorting how a threatening fact is registered. The familiar examples come from Freud and were catalogued and named systematically by his daughter Anna Freud: repression pushes the thought out of awareness, denial refuses the fact, projection attributes one's own unwanted impulse to somebody else, rationalisation supplies a respectable reason for an unrespectable motive, and displacement redirects a feeling onto a safer target. The list is clinically vivid and has entered ordinary speech, but it grew out of case observation rather than controlled study, and demonstrating that a particular defence is operating in a particular person is notoriously difficult.
Why it matters
The vocabulary is unavoidable when reading anything psychoanalytic or clinical, and knowing where it came from tells you how much weight it can carry.
Part of
Defence mechanism in the glossary
Sources
- Defence mechanism Wikipedia
- Psychoanalysis Wikipedia
- Sigmund Freud Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
