Defense Mechanisms

[Brendan Kenny]

Hi,
This is a really cool article about Freudian Defense Mechanisms and
how they relate to people in everyday society; how we use defense
mechanisms without really knowing that we do. Moreover, it takes the
defense mechanisms and relates them to Freudian's daughter Ana,
throughout the article; who was the inspiration of the mechanisms.
http://psychology.about.com/od/theoriesofpersonality/ss/defensemech.htm

As we have learned in class Defense Mechanisms are ways of "protecting
ourselves from things that we don't want to think about or deal with."
The defense mechanisms come from an overwhelming sense of anxiety
building up in ourselves. Freud characterized these anxieties as
neurotic anxiety, reality anxiety or moral anxiety. Freud defines
defense mechanisms as a means to "cope with the anxiety provoked by
demands created by the id, superego and reality." These defense
mechanisms include denial, repression, suppression, displacement,
sublimation, projection, intellectualization, rationalization,
regression and reaction formation. My favorite part of the article was
the "regression" part because it was suggested that Ana Freud came up
with this because "people act our behaviors from the stage of
psychosexual development in which they are fixated," showing the
similarities between Ana and her father in their thinking of the
relationship between the development of the mind and the
psychosexual.

I think this article discusses a lot of what we have learned in this
course thus far. Not only have we learned about the defense mechanisms
(and been tested on them) but we can all relate to them because we
have all used them in our everyday lives. (Maybe even today!) It is
second nature for most people to have the need to protect themselves
not just physically but mentally and emotionally too! Moreover they
establish Freud and his daughter as the front runners in our cognitive
thinking and why we do the things we do. Isn't that we take psychology
courses? So that we can learn why people do the things they do?
If you are interested in testing your knowledge on the defense
mechanisms, you can play a little game/quiz that gives different
scenarios and you have to guess the mechanism used!
Enjoy!
Brendan
http://psychology.about.com/library/quiz/bl_defense_quiz.htm