Defences Flashcards
What is a defense mechanism?
Aims to protect us from anxiety / psychic pain
What is repression?
What are some examples of regression?
Pushing back of unacceptable wishes from consciousness.
Revert to patterns of behaviour used earlier in development
Examples:
Child starts to wet the bed after arrival of a new sibling
Regression to oral stage, e.g. cigarette smoking
What is reaction formation?
Doing the opposite, commonly to excess
Examples:
Excessive deference to somebody you hate
The anti-pornography crusader
The pacifist who fights for peace
What is denial?
Refusing to accept the truth or reality of a fact or experience
Examples:
“No, I’m just a social smoker / drinker”
Mother who receives news that her son has been killed in war but refuses to believe it
Dying patient
What is displacement?
Taking out our impulses on people or objects that are less threatening
Example of displaced aggression:
“Dressed down” by boss
Id = tear the boss’s head off!
Ego = not a good idea – I want to keep my job
Go home and scream at partner
What is isolation of affect/intellectualization?
Affect rendered unconscious but idea, stripped of feeling, remains conscious
Think about emotionally charged topics in a coldly abstract way
A “flight into reason”
What is rationalisation?
Creating a logical explanation for something unacceptable - trying to explain it away
What is projection?
Projecting unacceptable wishes, impulses or behaviour into another
Allows expression of the desire or impulse in a way that the ego cannot recognise, thereby reducing anxiety
Examples:
An unfaithful husband suspects his wife of infidelity
“I am not angry, you are!”
Racism
What is sublimation?
Act out unacceptable impulses by converting them into a more socially acceptable form
Examples:
“I’m going to write a poem about anger”
Surgeon takes hostile impulses and converts them into “cutting” other people
Freud surgeon example.
What is the paranoid-schizoid position?
Operates from the beginning of life
Persecutory anxieties: danger of annihilation (“nameless dread” – Bion)
Infant uses primitive defences (e.g. splitting, denial and projective identification) to protect itself from the destruction of the self from within or without
Projective Identification
The therapist (mother) needs to be more able to manage being in touch with these feelings than the patient (infant) has been
The previously unmanageable feelings become more manageable and the patient (infant) can take back the now more manageable feelings and something of the therapist’s (mother’s) capacity to tolerate being in touch with difficult feelings
The therapist (mother) provides a container for the processing of the patient’s (infant’s) “split-off”, “undigested” psychic experiences (Bion, 1962)
Be careful of “return to sender”!
Whats the attachment perspective on defenses?
Places the development of defences within the context of the infant’s relationship with the primary caregiver
Disturbances in maternal capacity to represent the infant’s inner state lead the infant to distort self-experience defensively to protect the tie to mother (Fonagy, 2002)
Defences are responses or adaptations to recurring interpersonal conflicts
Internalised procedures for “being with others”
What are some examples of resistance in therapy?
DNA
Lateness
Silence / Lack of silence
Omissions and emphases
The very good patient / the seductive patient
Idealising the therapist
Difficulty in being the patient
Requests for personal information, e.g. “Do you have children?”
Requests for advice
“Chemical imbalance”
IPAF or other formulation as an intellectual defence
No homework!
Why tackle defenses?
Help the patient to understand why and how they protect themselves from painful feelings / states of mind
Help the patient to become aware of how they manage problematic aspects of their relationships through an exploration of defences as they arise in relation to significant others and the therapist
Help the patient to understand the “costs” of the defences they are using
Aim is to help the patient live a more fulfilling life by increasing conscious understanding and finding more healthy ways of coping with anxiety and distress
What is Malan’s triangle?
When interpreting defenses we should understand the anxiety, the hidden feeling/impulse to alongside the presence of the defence. Defence and anxiety should be worked with first before getting to the underlying feeling.
