DEFENSE MECHANISMS

NARCISSISTIC DEFENSES IMMATURE DEFENSES NEUROTIC DEFENSES MATURE DEFENSES

Denial: Negates sensory data to avoid awareness of Acting Out: Acts an unconscious impulse or affect to Controlling: Manage or regulate environment Altruism: Experiences vicarious pleasure by serving
painful aspect of reality. Abolishes external reality. avoid affect. Acting gives into the impulse rather than excessively to avoid anxiety. others constructively and instinctually. Reaction
Used in normal and pathological states. prohibiting it. Avoids the tension of postponing formation is benign and constructive. Serving others
expression. does not take the place of meeting own needs.
Distortion: Reshapes external reality to suit inner Blocking: Inhibits thinking temporarily. May include Displacement: Shifts an emotion or drive from one Anticipation: Anticipates, plans for future inner
needs. Beliefs, hallucinations, delusions. Sustains affects and impulses. Resembles repression, except idea or object to another. Permits symbolic discomfort that is goal directed. Careful planning or
feelings of superiority, entitlement. tension felt. representation of less distress. worrying and premature but realistic affective
anticipation of dire and potentially dreadful outcomes.
Primitive Idealization: Endows either “all good, Hypocondriasis: Transforms bereavement, Dissociation: Drastically modifies personal identity or Asceticism: Eliminates pleasurable effects of
omnipotent” or “all bad,” inflated external objects with loneliness, aggressive impulses into self-reproach, character to avoid emotional distress, including fugue experiences. Uses morals to assign values to specific
great power. pain, somatic illness. Avoids responsibility, states, hysterical conversion, DID, drug highs, pleasures. Derives gratification from renunciation of
circumvents guilt. Affliction due to ego-alien nature of religious joy. all consciously-perceived base pleasures.
introjects.
Projection: Perceives and reacts to inner qualities as Identification: Crucial to ego development. But Externalization: Perceives in external objects Humor: Permits overt expression of feelings and
though outside the self. May include frank delusions, person may identify with love object to defend against elements of one’s own personality, including impulses, person may identify with love object to defend.
persecutions, and acting on the perceptions. anxiety or pain. Person adopts quality or symptom conflicts, moods, and styles of thinking.
about whom one feels guilty. Identifies with
aggressor.
Projective Identification: Deposits unwanted Introjection: Although, vital to development, when Repression: Expels or withholds idea from Sublimation: Achieves impulse gratification and
aspects into another person so projector feels at one used as a defense, can obliterate distinction between consciousness. Primary curbs ideas before reaching retention of goals via altering object to one that is
with object. Recipient modifies projections and subject and object. Avoids painful awareness of consciousness; secondary excludes what was once socially acceptable. Channels instincts rather than
projector recovers them. Allows one to distance and separateness of threat of loss. Avoids the anxiety of conscious. Not really forgotten. Symbolic behavior blocking them. Acknowledges, modifies, directs
make self understood by exerting pressure on another feared object as in identification with aggressor. may be present. May lose cherished goals. feelings toward an object or goal, allows modest
to experience similar feelings. gratification of instincts.
Splitting: Divides external objects into “all good” and Passive Aggressive Behavior: Expresses Inhibition: Inhibits or renounces ego functions Suppression: Decision or action to postpone
“all bad.” Abruptly shifts from one extreme to other. aggression indirectly through failures, procrastination, consciously to evade anxiety arising out of conflict aggression indirectly through failures,
Sudden and complete reversals of feeling. Self- illness that affect others more than self. with impulses, superego, environmental forces or
concept may oscillate. figures.
Regression: Attempts to return to earlier functioning Isolation: Splits or separates idea from affect.
to avoid tension at current level. Represses affect. May remove one from object
Necessary for creativity. relationships.
Projection: Attributes own feelings to another due to Intellectualization: Avoids affective expression,
intolerable feelings or painful affects. In psychosis, experience, relationship. Attends to external reality to
becomes frank delusions and persecutions. avoid feelings, and details to avoid whole.
Schizoid Fantasy: Retreats autistically to avoid Rationalization: Offers rational explanations to justify
intimacy, obtain gratification. Eccentricity repels. attitudes, beliefs, behaviors, instinctually based.
Somatization: Converts psychic derivatives into body Reaction Formation (Reversal): Transforms an
symptoms. Desomatization, infantile somatic unacceptable impulse into its opposite. If frequently
responses replaced by thought, affect. used early, can become obsessional character trait.
Sexualization: Endows sexual significance to an
object or function.
NOTE: Those identified by Anna Freud are grayed. She also identified Reversal and Turning Against the Self (Fairbairn’s Moral Defense in Children.) Adapted by Martha Blake 5/02. From Vaillant, Adaptation to Life,
1977.