Psychology 101: Intro to Psychology

Do you think that defense mechanisms are what happen in the football field and coping mechanisms are what a team does when the quarterback is injured? Think again. These are just two of the list of Freud's terms used to categorize how we react to life's curve balls. Watch this lesson to get the whole picture.

So today we're going to talk about Freudian defense mechanisms and this is basically what Freud thought that you do when you're faced with stress. And he thought that stress and anxiety are basically caused by your three parts of your personality fighting with each other. He thought that there was basically an id, an ego and a superego, and that your id has lots of impulses and things it wants to do, it's kind of childish, it doesn't really have self control. Your superego is all self control so it's always limiting what the id wants to do, and your ego is the conscious part of you that has to deal with this conflict. And what Freud thought is when this anxiety gets out of hand, your ego starts to feel like it's under attack and so it tries to do one of these defense mechanisms to protect itself from having to deal with too much stress.

It's important to know that these are actually unconscious, so these are different than a coping strategy, which is something you decide to do to deal with stress. A defense mechanism is something that you're doing without really thinking about it to manage the conflict between your three parts of your personality.

So as an example (it's probably easiest to illustrate with something concrete), if your id is telling you that you're attracted to your nerdy best friend, your superego might tell you that World of Warcraft paladins aren't really boyfriend material and this would cause anxiety. So what you might do to deal with this stress that you're feeling, because you're attracted to someone inappropriate, is you tell your friends that you're worried that your best friend is attracted to you. Now, you can see this is a little weird, right? You're the one who's attracted to him, you have no idea if he's attracted to you, but what you're doing is you're projecting what you feel onto him, and that's one of Freud's defense mechanisms is called projection, where you basically take your unacceptable desire and you project it onto somebody else. And that's a way to sort of deal with the stress that's caused by wanting something that society tells you you shouldn't have.

And there are a bunch of these defense mechanisms. There's not just a couple. And some were originally developed by Freud, like projection, and others were actually added much later to the model, including ones added by a psychologist named George Vaillant. Not only did he add a bunch, but he actually classified them into levels - healthy ones, ones that are prone to being overused, etc.

So his four levels of defense mechanisms were ones that were pathological. And these are kind of like it sounds like - if you mostly use these ones, that's bad; you're distancing yourself from reality so much that you probably are going to seem a little bit irrational or even insane to other people around you.

He also classified some as immature. These are ones that are prevalent in mainly younger people, adolescents. If you use them too much, you are maybe unable to cope so effectively with reality, and people who are depressed or have personality disorders tend to use these as well.

Then he had a level of neurotic ones, which are actually pretty common. They're semi-effective in the short term, they might get you to feel a little better, but they're really not that effective in the long term and they also can cause problems if you use them too much. Again, these are pretty common, a lot of adults do use neurotic defense mechanisms.

And then there are the mature ones. These are obviously the good ones. They're healthy, they help you solve problems, and you integrate the conflicting impulses and everything is great.

So just to flesh this out a little bit, we can take a look at a couple defense mechanisms that are in each of these levels to really get a sense of what the levels mean and really what a defense mechanism does.

So as an example of the pathological one, you have denial, which is really what it sounds like. Something happens to you and you're saying that it doesn't, it just didn't happen. So if you failed a math test and you're really upset by it - this is maybe creating a conflict with your sense of self as being good at math - if you just told people that you did fine, that you didn't fail, that would be a real refusal to accept reality, and that's denial. And it's pathological because you're totally disconnecting yourself of what actually happened. You're not interacting with reality if you use this defense mechanism and that can lead to some serious problems.

The next one would be an example of an immature one, and that's actually what we were talking about before with projection with your nerdy friend and World of Warcraft and all that; that's an immature one because your kind of dealing with it, but again, you're getting away from reality a little bit because you're saying that he has a crush on you, which isn't...you have no idea. He might, but you don't know. So it's not quite as far from reality as just refusing to acknowledge that the situation exists (like with the math test) but it's still not...you're not quite there.

Another one - this is one of the ones that was added later, this isn't an original one of Freud's - is passive aggression. That's another immature one. You're upset with your roommate, let's say, you made a cake and she ate it. So you might forget to pick her up from work like you promised, but you really didn't forget, you just didn't do it. This is bad because you're expressing anger but you're not doing it in a way that's tied to anything that she can understand. You're not really dealing with the situation, you're just acting out.

Another level would be the neurotic ones. Let's look at an example of that. This is actually where a lot of Freud's original defense mechanisms were classed, and a classic one is displacement. If you were playing on a soccer team and your coach benches you and then you yell at everyone around you; you're really mad at your coach but you're taking it out on other people. That's displacement. You're displacing the anger you feel onto somebody else. It helps you deal with the anger but it's not really that productive.

Another one is repression. To take it back to your World of Warcraft crush again, if instead you dealt with it by refusing to think about him and avoiding him, that would be repression because you're basically not acknowledging the way that you feel at all, which is not as bad as denying that it exists, but it's still not that healthy.

Then we get to the last level, which is the mature ones. These are the ones that are good, these actually help you usually. One of them is sublimation. If you're a writer and you wrote a novel, you worked really hard on it, and it got rejected by everyone, that would be pretty depressing. But if when that happens you turn your disappointment and your sadness about it into work ethic; you decide to work really hard at fixing the book and making it the best you can, that would be a really healthy way to deal with it, and that's what sublimation is. It's turning negative emotions into real positive actions: making your book better because you were sad about it being rejected.

Another one is humor. You lose your job and then you joke about it with your friends. That's a way of expressing bad feelings but in a way that's easier to deal with. You're not denying it, but you're expressing it in a healthy way.

So that's basically an overview of a lot of defense mechanisms and then classified into those levels of basically 'are they healthy, or not?' in descending order from pathological to immature, to neurotic, to mature. And this is, again, to deal with anxiety that results from - at least how Freud theorized - your id, your ego and your superego fighting with each other. And that causes stress, and you use these mechanisms, these unconscious ways, to deal with that stress in varying effectiveness. So those are defense mechanisms.