In this video I describe several of the defense mechanisms theorized by Sigmund Freud and his daughter Anna Freud. These defense mechanisms provide ways of coping with anxiety, which could be reality anxiety, neurotic anxiety, or moral anxiety. While these defense mechanisms can easily be applied to everyday behaviors, literary or historical figures, or even oneself, it’s important to remember that this doesn’t mean these are necessarily correct explanations.
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Video Transcript
Hi, I’m Michael Corayer and this is Psych Exam Review. In this video we’re going to take a look at Freud’s defense mechanisms. So in the past two videos we’ve looked at some of the other psychoanalytic aspects of personality and these included Freud’s personality structure of the id, ego, and superego and his idea of the psychosexual stages of personality development and when we look at both of these topics we see that conflict and anxiety are a major part of both of these. So there’s conflict between the id, the ego, and the super-ego and then we have conflicts during these stages of development.
And so in Freud’s view conflict and anxiety are inevitable. They’re something that we all must experience and this means we have to have ways of dealing with anxiety. So Freud thought anxiety could be divided up into three main types. The first of these is reality anxiety and this is the idea that there are environmental dangers. So there are things in the world that can harm or kill us and these necessarily create some anxiety. The real world is dangerous, therefore we experience this reality anxiety.
But we also have neurotic anxiety and so this refers to the idea that we have this conflict between the parts of our personality; the id, the ego, and the super-ego. And we have this anxiety related to the idea that we could lose control, right? Particularly of the animal drives of the id and so this creates this neurotic anxiety.
Then lastly we have the idea of moral anxiety and this is the idea that we might have past or future behavior that’s considered immoral, right? So there could be something we’ve done in the past that’s considered immoral and this would cause us anxiety in the present or we might fear that we’re going to do something immoral in the future, right? We can think about our future in ways that other animals can’t and so we have this constant sense that we could do something wrong tomorrow, or next week, or next year and this could cause us some moral anxiety.
Ok, so these types of anxiety are all around us and we all experience them in some way to Freud and so we have to have ways to deal with these. This brings us to the idea of defense mechanisms. So these are techniques for reducing the impact of this anxiety. So we’ll go through these different Freudian defense mechanisms and when I say these are Freudian defense mechanisms, many of them come from Sigmund Freud but they were also developed by his daughter Anna Freud.
Ok, so the first of these is what Sigmund Freud considered the most fundamental and this is the idea of repression. And so repression refers to burying anything that causes anxiety into the unconscious, right? So we have thoughts or desires, wishes or fears, and these cause us anxiety and so we bury that into the unconscious in order to reduce the anxiety. And I said this is fundamental because this is how the unconscious gets filled with our wishes, desires, and fears is through this defense mechanism of repression.
Now another defense mechanism is regression and this is the idea that when we’re faced with some anxiety we revert to an earlier stage of development. Freud thought we could see this in behaviors like watching cartoons or sucking your thumb or acting childish, right? And this would indicate that a person was regressing back to an earlier stage of development, when they didn’t experience this anxiety. He also thought regression could be used as a therapeutic technique. So a psychoanalyst could encourage a patient to regress to a stage where they felt comfortable, where they weren’t experiencing the anxiety, and this would help identify the source of the conflict. In other words, the conflict must have been in a following stage rather than the stage that the person reverts to and so by regressing they could then work through the conflict and hopefully resolve it.
Alright, next we have the idea of reaction formation and this involves doing the opposite of whatever is causing the anxiety so it’s an opposite reaction. And so a common example for this would be somebody who is very anti-gay, right? And so the idea is maybe they have some unconscious homosexual desires and the way that they’re coping with the anxiety that these thoughts might be having is to act out in the opposite manner and to be homophobic or anti-gay, and this is their way of reducing the anxiety that their own homosexual feelings are causing. That’s a common example that’s used for reaction formation.
Ok, another defense mechanism is rationalization and so this refers to creating a logical excuse for a particular behavior that might be causing anxiety. So you have some thought or behavior that causes you anxiety and you come up with a reason for it that seems to be logical but it’s not the actual reason, right? It’s not the real source of the anxiety or the conflict but it sounds reasonable and therefore it allows you to dismiss the underlying cause without actually dealing with it. So for instance, you might have somebody who’s addicted to smoking cigarettes, right? And they might come up with some logical excuse for why they smoke right rather than saying “oh maybe I have some oral fixation or such-and-such happened during the oral stage of my development” instead they come up with a logical excuse for their smoking they say “well you know actually I only smoke because my co-workers smoke and it gives me an opportunity to socialize with them, you know, and my boss smokes and so I get more time and it’s actually helping my career by smoking because I’m getting this additional socializing and that’s the reason that I smoke. There’s not any other underlying reason”. That would be an example of rationalization.
Ok, next we have the idea of intellectualization and this is similar. This is one that was added by Anna Freud and the idea of intellectualization is that a person engages in academic study of the subject that’s causing anxiety. So they approach it in sort of a cold, dispassionate way as a way of avoiding the anxiety that might be caused by it. So the idea would be if you were diagnosed with an illness, rather than confronting the fear of death that you might be experiencing and the anxiety that’s going to be associated with all that, you engaged in a dry academic study of, you know, all the things, you know, the symptoms and aspects and treatments related to the disease instead of confronting the anxiety that it’s causing. That would be an example of intellectualization.
Alright, next we have the idea of displacement. The idea of displacement is that you take the anxiety and you redirect it onto something that’s less threatening. In other words, you can’t direct the anxiety appropriately because the source of the anxiety is too threatening for you. So instead you direct your anxiety onto something else that’s not as threatening. So we redirect anxiety to a less threatening object or situation or person. So the idea here will be, you know, a child in school gets berated by the teacher for making mistakes in their assignment or forgetting something or doing something wrong, right? They’re yelled at by the teacher and they can’t respond back, you know, the this is the source of the anxiety. But instead of lashing out at the teacher, who is maybe more threatening, instead, you know, when recess time comes they get into a fight with, you know, another student who maybe is weaker or smaller and is less threatening to them. So what they’re doing is they’re taking anxiety from, you know, one situation and displacing it to another situation.
Ok, next we have the idea of denial and so denial refers to refusing to admit the reality of a situation. So in this case we have something that causes anxiety and you simply refuse to admit to it and the idea here is that this is unconscious, right? These defense mechanisms are happening without our having knowledge of them, right? They’re operating at the unconscious level. So this is not a conscious strategy. So for instance, let’s say you have a partner who maybe is cheating on you but you overlook any possible evidence. To anybody else it would seem abundantly clear that an affair is going on, but you simply don’t even notice. You have no idea, you overlook all of these clues that should tell you that there’s something going on here but instead you are in denial and you don’t even notice them. Or you might engage in denial when it comes to thinking about the fact that your parents have a sex life and, you know, it’s easier to just simply deny that as being possible. Even though, of course, for you to exist it must be true, but that would be another example of denial. It’s not admitting to the reality of a situation in order to avoid the anxiety that that could provoke.
Ok, next we have the idea of projection. So in this case what you do is you project your feelings, your fears, or your anxieties onto other people. For instance if you believe that, you know, let’s say there’s a person that you dislike and you don’t want to really admit that you have these negative feelings about this person and so instead you claim that this person doesn’t like you. “Oh yeah, you know, she really hates me”, right? Rather than admitting to the fact that actually it’s you, you’re the one who’s harboring negative feelings towards this person and maybe they’re indifferent to you or maybe they even like you. But instead you insist that “no we don’t get along because she hates me”. That will be an example of projection.
Lastly we have the idea of sublimation and the idea here is that we redirect drives or impulses that are not socially acceptable. So this is generally going to refer to sexual and aggressive drives and we take the sort of energy from these sexual and aggressive drives and we redirect them onto socially approved behaviors. So we redirect them onto socially acceptable pursuits and so, you know, the sort of most obvious example of sublimation would be an artist who takes this, you know, sexual drive and they use it to create stunning visual displays. Or a writer who has, you know, violent, aggressive drives and rather than acting these out by getting into fist fights, he sublimates these into, you know, aggressive characters, right? So that’s a more socially acceptable way to express these drives, to put them out into artwork or some creative pursuit that society will be okay with. Whereas it’s not so okay with getting into fist fights in bars, so that would be an example of sublimation.
Alright, so there are some other defense mechanisms I’m not going to go over all of them but I think what we see from these is the appeal of Freud. We can see why Freud is so popular because when we get these descriptions, we have to remember that a lot of Freud’s work came from his own experiences and it came from the experiences of his patients. And so it’s immediately applicable to common everyday behaviors. We can quickly find examples of all of these defense mechanisms and we don’t have to worry about all of, you know, the other possible explanations or we don’t have any statistical analysis that we’re doing. We can say “oh yeah, here’s an example of projection. This seems like an example of sublimation. Yeah my professor is intellectualizing here” and we can come up with these sort of explanations for behavior in a very easy way and it’s kind of fun to do.
So I think that’s part of the reason why Freud is so appealing, why he became so popular. We can immediately apply these to characters in novels, right? We can suddenly have this new way of thinking about literature and we can apply it to historical figures, come up with whatever explanations that would explain, you know, they were regressing in this situation or they were rationalizing this other action, right? And it’s kind of fun to do and it shows us I think why Freud became so popular and it also sort of arms us with a new way of doing things. A new way of thinking about different things. Now this doesn’t mean that these explanations are correct. Of course, we can easily come up with them but that doesn’t mean that they’re accurate. Ok, so I hope you found this helpful, if so, please like the video and subscribe to the channel for more. Thanks for watching!
