Defense Mechanism

A Note on Terminology

The following terms are used more or less interchangeably in normal speech, but do in fact have important differences in meaning:

• defense
• defense-mechanism
• defense reaction
• ego-defense
• psychological defense
• defense strategy
• coping strategy
• coping mechanism

A particular writer or therapist’s choice of term often seems to depend mostly on which specific sect of psychology and psychotherapy they happen to have spent the most time studying, and how pedantic they generally are as a personality. As a result, it can seem as though these differences are generally relevant only to those looking for a nit to pick.

For most people’s purposes this is mostly true, and to me it’s not important that people talk about this theme perfectly, and rather more important that they talk about it at all.

That said, investigating words, terms, their meanings, and their etymologies is a wonderful way of deepening your engagement with your own mind and refining your understanding of yourself and how you work.

For the sake of nuance, therefore, I’ve included for each term the individual definitions to be found in my two favourite psychological dictionaries and various quotations from other theoretical and reference works.

Definitions

Defense Mechanism

Chaplin

1. Any behaviour pattern which protects the psyche from anxiety, shame, or guilt.¹

English & English

1. Any enduring structure of the psyche that enables a person to avoid awareness of the unpleasant or anxiety-arousing.

2. Defense reaction: this usage, while very common, blurs the distinction between the action and the mechanism for the action. ²

Coping Behavior

Chaplin

1. Any action in which the individual interacts with the environment for the purpose of accomplishing something.

English & English

1. Action that enables one to adjust to the environmental circumstances, to get something done.

Ego Defense

Chaplin

1. The utilisation of psychic energy arising from the id in order to protect the ego.

English & English

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.

Freud, Anna

“… 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 it can employ both in its conflict with the instincts and in its defense against the liberation of affects.”³

Defenses

English & English

1. Any psychological instrumentality by which a person automatically protects his self or ego against unpleasantness, shame, anxiety, or loss of self-esteem.
2. The defense is usually (if not always) fully unconscious—that is, it is not intentionally acquired, and it operates automatically, without voluntary inception or control and without a conscious signal that it is operating.
3. Its presence is betrayed by an otherwise unexplainable lack of relation between the circumstances and the behaviour.

Quotes

Freud, Anna

“Love, longing, jealousy, mortification, pain, and mourning accompany sexual wishes; hatred, anger, and rage accompany the impulses of aggression; if the instinctual demands with which they are associated are to be warded off, these affects must submit to all the various measures to which the ego resorts in its efforts to master them, i.e. they must undergo a metamorphosis.”

Gabbard, Glen

Defense mechanisms preserve “a sense of self-esteem in the face of shame and narcissistic vulnerability, ensuring a sense of safety when one feels dangerously threatened by abandonment or other perils, and insulating oneself from external dangers.” ⁴

Examples of Individual Defenses

Denial

Perhaps the most famous defense, denial is literally that: you deny that something is true. This is often the response to a Freudian slip, but can also be more serious, as in the case of someone who denies that they are dependent on alcohol.

Denial also plays out through overlooking unpleasant details of a larger phenomenon. For example, the person who expresses happiness at unseasonably warm autumn weather while making no comment on the potentially disastrous climate change which is its cause.

Rationalisation

Rationalisation is the trick of coming up with reasons to justify doing or not doing things. Often we rationalise not doing things we don’t want to do, but we are actually far better at coming up with “sensible” sounding reasons for doing short-sighted, stupid, or harmful things.

By inventing plausible-sounding reasons for our actions, we protect ourselves from the guilt and shame of being impulsive and acting without thinking. By rationalising, we demonstrate to ourselves and others that we really have thought it through and thereby “prove” that we’re not simply doing whatever we want because we want to. These often involve complex chains of reasoning, but can also be as simple as “but he hit me first!”

1. If I work really hard at school, I’ll get good grades and get a good job. Then I’ll have enough money to buy whatever I want.
2. I can’t quit smoking right now, I’m under too much stress already.
3. I know I have a kitchen full of unused gadgets, but I really need an air fryer because it will help me eat healthier.
4. Everyone else has Air Jordans, why shouldn’t I?
5. I didn’t mean what I said, I was drunk/high/angry.

The most elaborate rationalising structure is the legal code. While the Law is nominally intended to protect innocent people from other people’s bad behaviour, it is very often manipulated to justify bad behaviour, and bad actors in the business commuinity frequently campaign to have new laws added to the books to create loopholes and legal justification for harmful actions.

Humourisation

“Whatever roused his anxiety became an object of ridicule and, since everything around him was a source of anxiety, the whole world took on an aspect of absurdity.” Anna Freud.⁵

The impulse to make a joke out of a negative experience is a way to ward off the discomfort of an unpleasant situation, thought, or feeling.

Used appropriately, humour is an effective way of dissipating tension and making emotionally charged opinions more palatable. This is partly why one of the very few places where societal taboos can be openly spoken about is in stand-up comedy. It’s a fine line to walk, and many a comic has gone too far and incurred an offended audience’s wrath because their humourising efforts failed.

Relied on too heavily, humorisation easily becomes a means of avoiding real problems and threats by making them appear ridiculous and beneath consideration. This allows problems to be tolerated for longer than they should, allowing them to become far more serious than they really should have.

On an interpersonal level, over-use makes us difficult to connect with emotionally. While it’s often helpful and healthy to be able to “laugh things off,” making a joke of everything comes across as flippant and dismissive, which is often hurtful to others and damaging to relationships.

List of Defenses

Please see the List of Ego Defenses.

Discussion

Defense is yet another of those terms that has been adopted by different branches of psychology and used in subtly different ways. English & English differentiate, for example, between a defense proper and a defense mechansim. The former would be a specific defense like reaction formation, and the latter the structural feature of the personality which assesses the current situation for emotional risk and then deploys the specific defense. It is also possible to differentiate between a defense mechanism and an ego-defense, though the two are often used interchangeably.

Ego-Defense

Anything to do with the concept ego is almost by definition unclear and confusing (see It, Me, Over-Me for more) because the way the word is used creates overlapping conceptual boundaries that make any discussion of the theme quite messy.

The term “ego-defense” is almost synonymous with “defense mechanism,” with one important difference. Whereas a defense mechanism is typically levied against some unwanted or unpleasant external stimulus, an ego-defense blocks the awareness of internal stimuli. In other words, ego-defenses block internal impulses which our socially-conscious critical faculties (aka. superego) have deemed problematic, hurtful to others, or simply taboo.

As Anna Freud points out, the individual person will rely most heavily on one or two of their preferred ego-defenses. However, which exactly is employed depends on context, and the preference itself shifts naturally over time. This is also true of defense mechanisms and coping strategies (more on this below).

At any given moment in their individual timeline, the individual person is usually consistent enough in their ego-defences to be quite predictable in their reactions to thoughts and feelings they don’t want to deal with. This is in part what we mean when we refer to someone’s “personality” or “temperament.”

Making Sense of the Distinctions

Personally, I think of an individual defense as part of a larger defense mechanism. In other words, the defense is the shield, and the mechanism is the arm, shoulder, and nervous system which causes the shield to raise (or not). The “attacks” can be emotional or physical, real or perceived, and internal or external.

Internal and External

This is a bit of a tricky distinction, because in the theory there are events which are external to the person and therefore to external to the ego (the ego being a sub-personal particle, as it were), but there are also events which are external to the ego, but internal to the person (impulses, thoughts, feelings, moods, and emotions). This latter is what ego-defenses defend against: impulses internal to the person, but external to the ego “particle.”

This means that most of the time we are actually defending ourselves against ourselves!

Essential Points

The main thing to remember is that all defenses are a means of preventing unpleasant emotions. The cause of that emotion can be internal or external (to the person, or the ego), real or percieved, and the method of prevention can be direct or indirect, subtle or unsubtle.

While some defenses simply block emotion or the impulses/perceptions that threaten to cause them, others will instead deflect the impulse towards a more acceptable target, or transmogrify from one emotion into another.

Family situations with a domineering, aggressive, or violent parent provide a two good examples:

1. Deflection: The physically/emotionally abused child might be very angry about being mistreated, but experience has taught them that direct confrontation with the more powerful parent will only lead to more abuse. They might therefore displace their anger onto a younger sibling by being cruel or physically violent towards them, or they might become a bully towards other children at school.

2. Transmogrification: The physically/emotionally abused child might be in fact very angry, but respond instead with tears. This might simply be an expression of overwhelming helplessness and not being able to defend themselves. But it can also be a way of transforming their true desire to retaliate into a form which will not provoke further abuse. These are not “crocodile tears,” rather the only possible means of expressing overwhelming and dangerous feelings.

Above all it’s important not to dismiss someone’s behaviour as “just a defense mechanism.” The fact that they need the defense means that they are feeling vulnerable and are doing their best to protect themselves from emotional pain.

Even though this self protection can be hurtful to others (and even harmful, as in bullying), it is important also not to try and “break down” someone’s defenses. By doing so you you leave them utterly exposed and push them directly towards a panic reaction and perhaps complete mental breakdown. This, obviously, is counter-productive to the aims of therapy.

Maladaptive or problematic defenses must be replaced rather than eradicated. This is done by consciously building up resistance to the unwanted response and encouraging more effective ego-defenses, defense mechanisms, and coping strategies. The process is never quick, but it often takes on a natural momentum of its own once the person sees that their new defences actually work and in fact work better than their old ones.

Coping, or Defense?

The terms “coping strategy” and “defense mechanism” come out of different sects of psychological orthodoxy, Behaviorism and Psychoanalysis respectively. These two sects believe in their respective doctrines with a religious fervour which has generated a long history of bitter, unproductive, and, frankly, childish squabbling.

The essential difference between the two quasi-religious denominations is that whereas behaviourism has no interest in the emotional motivations for an action, psychoanalysis is interested almost exclusively in what they call the “psycho-dynamics” of an action; the emotions and impulses which motivated it, and the personal history which created those responses.

Personally, I have no patience for this squabbling because to me they are simply describing the same thing from different perspectives. Namely, the coping behavior is what the observer sees from the outside and the psycho-dynamics are what the behaving person feels on the inside.

You can see this perspective difference very clearly in the respective definitions above. The Behaviourist concept, “coping,” is about “getting something done.” On the other hand the Psychoanalytic “defence” is about protecting the ego from pain. To me, these are not mutually exclusive, and it is silly to ignore one just because you happen to like Skinner better than Freud, or vice versa. Excluding one or the other of these from our understanding because of allegiance to theoretical school is both foolish and irrational.

(un)Necessary Hair Splitting

However, there is an important difference between the “mechanisms” of coping and ego-defense which can help us better understand the nature of our own feelings and actions, as well as the fundamental goal of psychotherapy, regardless of which modality one practices. The PDM points out that,

“In contrast to”coping” mechanisms, defenses operate in a mostly automatic manner, partially or wholly out of awareness.”⁶

In other words, the main difference between coping and defense is whether or not we know we’re doing it.

To me, this explains why the average person (and many therapists!) use the terms interchangeably, because functionally speaking, they’re different strata of the same psychological process. The so-called “mature defenses” like anticipation and sublimation are just “coping strategies” by a different name: delayed gratification and creative productivity (aka. art, work, entertainment, and sport).

Eyes on the Prize

The primary goal of all psychotherapy is to become more emotionally aware and flexible by developing mature defenses and coping strategies, and thereby relying less on the more “primitive” ones like denial, splitting, and projection.

In other words, the goal is to move from defense to coping, and then from coping to living.

Splitting these hairs is an important emotional and intellectual exercise, but it’s important not to get caught up in (and confused by!) the posturing and silly controversies of intellectual dispute.

References