NationStates Jolt Archive


Psychological defense mechanisms

Parratoga
13-09-2004, 11:48
Do you use any of these?


Compensation: an unconscious attempt to make up for real or imagined short-comings.

Denial: an unconscious attempt to reject unacceptable feelings, needs, thoughts, wishes, or external reality factors.

Displacement: the unconscious transfer of unacceptable thoughts, feelings or desires from the self to a more acceptable external substitute.

Dissociation: the unconscious separation and detachment of affect from a negatively charged thought, experience, memory, or object.

Idealization: the unconscious overvaluation of a desired attribute of another.

Identification: unconscious redirecting of unacceptable thoughts, feelings or impulses from the external to the self.

Intellectualization: unconscious control of affects or impulses by excessive thinking about them rather than affectively experiencing them.

Introjection: unconscious redirecting of unacceptable thoughts, feelings or impulses from the external to the self.

Minimization: unconscious lessening of importance of an experience or affect.

Projection: an unconscious phenomenon, in which that which is unacceptable or intolerable within the self is rejected and attributed to an external other or others.

Rationalization: the unconscious effort to justify or make consciously tolerable behaviors, feelings, thoughts or desires that are unacceptable.

Reaction formation: unconscious mechanism whereby an individual adopts the opposite thought, feeling or behavior from that which he truly holds.

Regression: unconscious return to more infantile behaviors or thoughts.

Repression: withholding from consciousness or expulsion from awareness of an idea or affect. This usually pertains to an internal reality, whereas denial more generally affects the perception of external reality.

Substitution: unconscious replacement of an unreachable or unacceptable goal by another more acceptable once.

Undoing: unconscious attempt to reverse an unacceptable thought, feeling or behavior by reenacting its opposite, usually repetitively.
Doasiwish
13-09-2004, 11:50
Ehm... if all of them are but unconscious things... how would I know whether I use'em or not?
Georgeton
13-09-2004, 11:50
Do you use any of these?
Denial: an unconscious attempt to reject unacceptable feelings, needs, thoughts, wishes, or external reality factors.

Nope
Almighty Sephiroth
13-09-2004, 11:51
I don't project! Just everyone else around me does!
Parratoga
13-09-2004, 11:53
Ehm... if all of them are but unconscious things... how would I know whether I use'em or not?

Well, you might notice after the fact, after you use one.
Doasiwish
13-09-2004, 12:03
Hm... but I would never be sure. Facts in the past are never seen under the same light they were when they were happening. So what now seems OK could be but a psychological defense mechanism... or the other way around.

Edit: I hope I make any sense... I'm tired, and my English is leaking
Parratoga
13-09-2004, 12:07
One defense mechanism I find most interesting is reaction formation. Basically a denial and reversal of your feelings. Love turns into hate or hate into love. Where there is intense friction between two people, it can be converted into exaggerated shows of affection, sometimes sickeningly sweet and overly polite.
Parratoga
13-09-2004, 12:15
I don't project! Just everyone else around me does!

Heh. Actaully projection is attributing to others one's own unacceptable thoughts, feelings, impulses, etc. So, for example (and you'll know to whom I'm reffering Seph) a certain Fundie Christian woman with repressed sexual urges may believe that all non-Christians are preoccupied with sex and that it's the end all of their existance because she's thinking about it all the time. Another example is of a person (yet again you know who I'm talking about Seph) A lover who is having an affair or two, begins to suspicion that his partner has been unfaithful because he is unfaithful himself.
Alinania
13-09-2004, 15:44
don't you think we all use most of these quite frequently?
Legless Pirates
13-09-2004, 15:50
I use intellectualization a lot
BLARGistania
13-09-2004, 15:55
We did that in psych last year. Most people use all of them at points, but its all unconcious so you don't think that you're doing it, but you are.
Demented Hamsters
13-09-2004, 16:02
any? When faced with a problem I use ALL of them!
Big Jim P
13-09-2004, 16:05
Parra, do you really want me to reply? I think I'm probably guilty of all of those things, but iI quit listening to the doctors years ago.

OK. I will read your post now.
Squi
13-09-2004, 16:14
I use them at various times, as most (all?) people do. I tend to stick to intellectualization/disassociation for the most part. What was that line from The Big Chill, "T don't know anyone who can go a day without two or three juicy rationalizations, they're more important than sex"?
Parratoga
13-09-2004, 17:37
don't you think we all use most of these quite frequently?


I think most people do, yes. I was more curious about if people could recognize which ones they tend to use (the most).
Bloodyheckovia
13-09-2004, 17:43
Do you use any of these?


Displacement: the unconscious transfer of unacceptable thoughts, feelings or desires from the self to a more acceptable external substitute.


No, but you obviously do.
Zahumlje
13-09-2004, 18:21
I use them at various times, as most (all?) people do. I tend to stick to intellectualization/disassociation for the most part. What was that line from The Big Chill, "T don't know anyone who can go a day without two or three juicy rationalizations, they're more important than sex"?

Not to mention, by useing a handy psychological defense mechanism or two, you don't HAVE to take a pill, your're probably not going to get pregnant, or get an STD, and no one is rageing from some pulpit someplace screaming at you to stop projecting, rationalizing, idealizing etc. You don't have to go down some seedy alley and pay some person money, and you don't even have to get your hands dirty for the most part.
There, have I done a good enough few rationalizations?
Actually, we all of us use psychological defense mechanisms, and if we knew we were doing it and knew it was unhealthy at the time most, people wouldn't be doing any of this stuff.

Then again since for most of us the mind isn't even as far away as the refrigerator, well I'm not so sure...

Even animals use psychological defenses, displacement behavior is obserable in animals such as cats or dogs, even in smarter birds. Snakes may spend much of their lives in a state of denial...

Perhaps to some extent psychological defenses might have a survival value, in helping people get through a day.

Traveling for the first time in an area that had recently been a war zone, I felt a strong reaction to one particular scene of destruction. A friend from the area, noticed that I was trying to conceal feelings of distress, he took my hand and said to me, 'Sometimes I not looking' He was just as aware of what that scene meant, perhaps more so, than I was, perhaps he knew the peeople who lived once in the burned house, perhaps he had even more need for a bit of denial than I did, perhaps the secret of overcoming terrible experiences is haveing some sense when to apply a psychological defense mechanism and knowing which one is most appropriate, moving from the automatic to the conscious. . .