List of Ego-Defenses

The traditional way of categorising the defenses is by their “maturity level.” Maturity here refers both to their complexity/sophistication and how helpful/productive they are.

This categorisation is somewhat misleading because it implies that a “mature” defense is always and necessarily used towards a “mature” end. However, this isn’t always the case, as with suppression, which can be used as a temporary stress manager to reduce emotional overload, or it can be employed in perpetuity to hide from something that makes you anxious; which has a decidedly “primitive” feeling.

The words primitive and mature are also unfortunate because they carry strong moral connotations, which contribute to the stigmatisation of those personality organisations which rely most heavily on “primitive” defenses. All human beings, no matter how intelligent, educated, cultured, and “civilised” use the most primitive defenses on a daily basis. And in our irrationally competitive modern society, those who typically use the word primitive in a judgemental way have usually only achieved their power, status, influence, and affluence by way of those very same primitive and neurotic defenses.

So personally, I prefer to group them functionally, rather than by their moral valuation.

I’m also toying with the idea of adding number of defenses that seem to me to have been overlooked or left out for whatever reason. These include lying, dissimulation, lying-by-omission, prevarication, web-weaving, smoke-screening, diversion creating, complexifying, problematising, and mystifying. I haven’t included them in the list yet, beacuse it will take me some time to formulate my thoughts on them.

By Function

Ignoring

Deflecting

Internalising

Externalising

Transforming

Delaying/Resisting

Distracting

Re-Interpretation

Segmenting/Reducing/Simplifying

By Maturity Level

Primitive

Neurotic

Mature