List of Ego-Defenses

The traditional way of categorising psychological defenses is by their maturity level; either primitive, neurotic, or mature. Mature here refers both to their complexity/sophistication, and how helpful/productive they are.

“Primitive” defenses are simple and effective, but rarely helpful in the long term; denial or escapism are good examples. Neurotic defenses are a bit more sophisticated and a little more effective in terms of solving problems; repression and rationalisation, for example. Mature defenses are the most effective and deal directly with problems and use planning and self-regulation skills to leverage strong emotions to achieve specific goals; sublimation and suppression are good examples.

The words primitive and mature are also unfortunate because they carry strong moral connotations, and the word primitive is associated with culturally insensitive and frankly racist views of non-European cultures. This contributes to the stigmatisation of people who rely most heavily on “primitive” defenses. In particular people struggling with bi-polar, borderline, and schizophrenia are often dismissed as “incurable” because their defenses are so “primitive.”

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.

Additionally, the mature/immature categorisation obscures the fact that many apparently independent defences actually perform the same function, just in more and less extreme ways. The “mature” defense suppression, for example, is a less severe form of of “neurotic” repression. Similarly, the “primitive” projection performs a similar function to the “neurotic” displacement, in that they both are ways of getting rid of bad feelings without dealing with them directly.

When you group the defenses functionally, rather than by their moral valuation, the system as a whole not only makes more sense, but the suffering person can get a clearer view not only of where they are, but of where they’re trying to get to.

I should also not that I will be 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 added them to the list because I am still formulating my thoughts on them, but I’ve noted them here a reminder to myself that I need to get around to them eventually :)