1. The retraining or sublimating or symbolic alteration of id impulses in order to protect the integrity of the ego.
2. Protecting the ego by effecting harmony between id and superego. ¹⁾

“… one and the same ego can have at its disposal only a limited number of possible means of defense. …”

“At particular periods in life and according to its own specific structure, the individual ego selects now one defensive method, now another … and these in can employ both in its conflict with the instincts and in its defense against the liberation of affects.”²⁾

In psychodynamic theory, the ego is seen as an entity within the larger psyche. In other words, the ego is the core of the personality: the part that says “I, me, mine.”

An ego-defense, therefore, is any psychological move you make to protect your sense of self.

You can think of the ego as a bubble filled with all of the beliefs and ideas you hold about yourself. Some thoughts and ideas must be defended against because they threaten to pop this bubble.

This doesn’t mean that all of thoughts and ideas in the ego-bubble are postive, in fact the ego can be full of self-loathing. But even negative self-beliefs are central to your self-concept, and so must be protected.

If nothing else, this is why psychology is so confusing: a negative self-image will be protected just as intensely as a positive one, because you cannot survive with no self image at all. In other words, anything is better than nothing.

People have characteristic ways of responding to threats to their ego. This is in part what we mean by “personality”: each person responds to stress in more-or-less predictable ways.

Sometimes we choose our defenses for ourselves, but more often, they are knee-jerk reactions to early-life experiences that work well enough for us to rely on them. This reliability makes them sticky, and so we often respond using ego-defenses that either don’t fit the context, or simply don’t work at all any more.

For a larger discussion of defense mechanisms in general, please see Defense Mechanisms

For a list of all of the different kinds of defense mechanisms, please see List of Defenses