Lecture
Psychological defense of the personality is largely unconscious in nature and arises, first and foremost, in relation to so-called "difficult" situations that provoke a feeling of dissatisfaction. However, there are viewpoints that regard psychological defense merely as a particular case of behavioral strategy in significant situations.
Psychological defense is a specific reaction of the organism, representing a special regulatory system for stabilizing the personality, aimed at eliminating or minimizing the feeling of psychological discomfort'.
The Russian researcher V. E. Rozhnov identifies various types of psychological defense as forms of response, for example, to pronounced psychological discomfort associated with personality characteristics:
The mechanisms of psychological defense were already described in the works of
3. Freud and are used to explain human behavior in various situations .
Hypercompensation — a reaction of the organism and psyche that counteracts frustrating excitations by withdrawing active energy from all mental systems and creating a corresponding energetic charge around the frustrating elements.
Displacement — the process and result of replacing a repressed, frustrating element of influence on the psyche by representing it through some other tendency or symbol. The results and indicators of displacement include slips of action, witticisms, certain components of dreams, neurotic symptoms, and so on. As a rule, the frustrating object, the frustrating need, or the frustrating activity is displaced.
Flight into work, escape into work, workaholism — a form of hypercompensation or displacement.
High volitional activity — the intrinsic dynamics of mental manifestations as a source and means of transforming or maintaining environmental conditions. It can be supra-situational, capable of rising above the level of the situation's demands and setting goals, including ones that exceed the original task. It is used to overcome external and internal constraints on activity.
The mechanisms of psychological defense, as a rule, are little recognized by the subject and occur automatically; the following are distinguished among them.
Repression — a process whereby experiences, thoughts, and memories unacceptable to the individual are banished from consciousness and transferred into the sphere of the unconscious. As a rule, they continue to influence a person's behavior, giving rise to a feeling of psychological discomfort.
Denial — a particular case of repression, a refusal by the subject to acknowledge the presence of threatening external factors — that is, a person overcomes a threat or danger simply by denying its existence. For example, a physician who informs a patient with a severe heart attack about the seriousness of the illness may, from the standpoint of denial, be discredited in the patient's eyes, and the physician's information will not be taken into account.
Displacement of censorship — the process of weakening censorship and the emergence of compromise, the process of transforming affects.
Fixation — the tendency to preserve tried and effective behavioral stereotypes.
Intellectualization — a specific analysis of the problems facing the individual. A method of defense in which a person reacts to a threatening danger dispassionately, evaluating it as an interesting phenomenon or an object of study. It is characterized by an excessive exaggeration of the role of rational components with a complete disregard for the emotional, affective, and sensory components of the analysis. Vitally important events and facts thus become the object of inadequately calm and cool-headed examination and discussion, which causes surprise and incomprehension among others. As a rule, such analysis does not lead to a complete overcoming of the frustrating experiences, since the emotional component, being separated from the frustrating event, remains in the person's consciousness, manifesting itself in the form of neurotic states.
Projection — this is the mechanism of attributing one's own, usually repressed, impulses and feelings to other people.
Passive behavior of a manipulative kind is:
Rationalization — an unconscious striving for a rational justification and explanation of one's ideas and behavior by the individual, even when they are irrational; the attribution of incorrect but convenient reasons to one's behavior. This is a peculiar disguise, a concealment of one's true thoughts, feelings, and motives of behavior, the acknowledgment of which would threaten a loss of self-respect, and hence — a more acceptable explanation of one's behavior in order to ensure inner comfort.
Somatization, flight into illness — an unconscious striving of the individual toward illness and immersion in illness as a means and method of defense against a frustrating reality, an attempt to restore an infantile state that allows one to go beyond the frustrating situation, requiring heightened attention from those around.
Fantasy — flight into daydreams; the unconscious or conscious illusory fulfillment of ambitious and erotic desires; a form of expression of repressed strivings, drives, and desires; a means by which the individual smooths over the shortcomings of the real world and his or her own failures.
Mechanisms characterized by a refusal to productively resolve a situation manifest themselves in their own specific forms. These are:
Suppression — a peculiar state with characteristic mental conditions, by virtue of which part of the subject's emotional experiences is not recognized.
Blocking — a form of rationalization aimed at inhibiting the recognition of those motives that are socially unacceptable or disapproved of, or individually undesirable owing to a discrepancy with the self-concept (a mismatch with the image of the ideal "self").
Isolation — the process of detaching associative links upon the recognition of a threat of danger; the separation of affect from intellect. Unpleasant emotions are blocked, and the connection between an event or thoughts and their emotional coloring is not recognized.
Regression — a specific form of escape from reality, expressed in a temporary transition, a return to an earlier stage of development, to more primitive forms of behavior or thinking, to a primitive level of mental development. This is a kind of retreat to the psychological period when the person felt most protected. It is usually a return to early, childhood-associated types of behavior. It manifests itself as hysterical reactions, thumb-sucking, excessive sentimentality, a preference for "romantic love," disregard for sexual relations, and so on.
The mechanisms of transforming thoughts, feelings, and behavior are as follows:
Conversion, usually hysterical, — the somatic resolution of an unconscious conflict, a process in the course of which the developed affect was denied its normal outlet. As a result, "pinched affects" find abnormal expression or application, or remain as sources of persistent neurotic states.
Identification — defense against an object that causes frustration by becoming like it; the achievement of symbolic possession of a desired but unattainable object; an unconscious following of models and ideals that allows the individual to overcome his or her own weakness and feeling of inferiority.
The mechanisms for discharging emotional tension are as follows:
Alcohol abuse, substance abuse, drug addiction — forms of addictive (deviant) behavior amid the individual's loss of meaning in life; a way of escaping into a world of illusions and daydreams, an absence of responsibility; forms of passive auto-aggression.
External aggression — an addictive form of relieving tension through verbal or physical aggression directed outward.
Auto-aggression — an addictive form of relieving tension through verbal or physical aggression directed at oneself.
Suicide — the highest, extremely addictive form of relieving tension through the voluntary ending of one's life.
Psychological defense allows one, at least temporarily, to ease one's state and relieve tension, and in specific experiences to distort the meaning of what is happening in such a way as not to damage one's notions of oneself as corresponding to some ideal. Psychological defense serves as an adaptive mechanism of mental self-regulation, by means of which emotional tension, anxiety, and the feeling of discomfort are reduced, and the consistency of the "self-image" is preserved through an unconscious, distorted assessment of objective reality. Psychological defense arises when a person cannot correctly assess the discomfort that has arisen, its causes, and cannot cope with it.
Comments