Mr Sigmund Freud is perhaps the one of the most well known people in the world....not bcoz everyone knows what he has actually said...because people think that Freud only believed in one thing...libido......and so people laugh about him....quote him (without knowing the actual quotation)....and perhaps comment on him too!They think quoting or saying something about Freud is pretty cool...and Psychology is so easy to understand.Naye my friends !all these 3yrs I've been trying to study Psycholgy..and it's indeed a complicated as one can be...after all it deals mainly with the ever mysterious Human Mind!So let me tell you all that if you try and understand Freud you'll see that many of his works are rather laudable...after all he was a man who had the courage to talk about sexual instincts in the Victorian age!So I'm writing to provide certain interesting parts from his work...Defense mechanisms.
The defense mechanisms are the methods by which the ego can solve the conflicts between the super-ego and the id. The use of defense mechanisms may attenuate the conflict between the id and super-ego, but their overuse or reuse rather than confrontation can lead to either anxiety or guilt which may result in psychological disorders such as depression. His daughter Anna Freud had done the most significant work on this field, yet she credited Sigmund with defense mechanisms as he began the work. The defense mechanisms include denial, reaction formation, displacement, repression/suppression (the proper term), projection, intellectualization, rationalization, compensation, sublimation and regressive emotionality.
- Denial occurs when someone fends off awareness of an unpleasant truth or of a reality that is a threat to the ego. For example, a student may have received a bad grade on a report card but tells himself that grades don't matter. (Some early writers argued for a striking parallel between Freudian denial and Nietzsche's ideas of ressentiment and the revaluation of values that he attributed to "herd" or "slave" morality.)
- Reaction formation takes place when a person takes the opposite approach consciously compared to what that person wants unconsciously. For example, someone may engage in violence against another race because, that person claims, the members of the race are inferior, when unconsciously it is that very person who feels inferior.
- Displacement takes place when someone redirects emotion from a "dangerous" object to a "safe" one, such as punching a pillow when one is angry at a friend.
- Repression occurs when an experience is so painful (such as war trauma) that it is unconsciously forced from consciousness, while suppression is a conscious effort to do the same.
- Psychological projection occurs when a person "projects" his or her own undesirable thoughts, motivations, desires, feelings — basically parts of oneself — onto someone or something else. Since the person is experiencing particular desires, feelings, thoughts, or anxieties, s/he is more prone to attribute those same characteristics to the thoughts, feelings, and motivations of others.
- Intellectualization involves removing one's self, emotionally, from a stressful event, by focusing on rational and factual components of the situation.
- Rationalization involves constructing a logical justification for a decision that was originally arrived at through a different mental process. For example, Jim may drink red wine because he is an alcoholic, but he tells himself he drinks it because it has some health benefits, in order to avoid facing his alcoholism.
- Compensation occurs when someone takes up one behaviour because one cannot accomplish another behaviour. For example, the second born child may clown around to get attention since the older child is already an accomplished scholar.
- Sublimation is the channeling of impulses to socially accepted behaviours. For instance, an aggressive or homicidal person may join the military as a cover for their violent behavior.
These are some of the important Defense Mechanisms.See if you find something which you may use in your own life!!
