Whenever anxiety becomes overwhelming, the ego, which has to deal with reality, the id, and the superego to its fullest. has to protect itself. So it tries to block out all impulses or change them into more acceptable forms which are less anxiety provoking. These techniques are called the ego defense mechanisms.
Denial involves blocking external events from awareness. If some situation is just too much to handle, the person just refuses to experience it. Anna Freud also talks of denial in fantasy. Eg: Your’e fuming angry with your friend, but you completely reject the thought or feeling."I'm not angry with him!"
Repression, which Anna Freud also called "motivated forgetting," is just that: not being able to recall a threatening situation, person, or event. That is your unconscious chooses not to remember an event which produces anxiety and threaten the ego.
Asceticism, or the renunciation of needs. An example of this can be seen with the new age disease of anorexia. Preadolescents, when threatened by their emerging sexual desires, unconsciously try to protect themselves by denying all their desires.
Isolation (sometimes called intellectualization) involves stripping the emotion from a difficult memory or threatening impulse. A person may, in a very cavalier manner, acknowledge that they had been abused as a child, or may show a purely intellectual curiosity in their newly discovered sexual orientation. Something that should be a big deal is treated as if it were not. Many times in event of death you are able to continue with social obligations and you crumble with the knowledge of the loss later after the storm ceases. Your mad at your friend, you "think" the feeling but don't really feel it. "I guess I'm angry with him, sort of."
Displacement is the redirection of an impulse onto a substitute target. If the impulse, the desire, is okay with you, but the person you direct that desire towards is too threatening, you can displace to someone or something that can serve as a symbolic substitute. You are angry with your best friend, but you can’t hit him, you go out and kick the dog.
Turning against the self is a very special form of displacement, where the person becomes their own substitute target. It is normally used in reference to hatred, anger, and aggression, rather than more positive impulses, and it is the Freudian explanation for many of our feelings of inferiority, guilt, and depression. The idea that depression is often the result of the anger we refuse to acknowledge is accepted by many people, Freudians and non-Freudians alike.
Projection, which Anna Freud also called displacement outward, is almost the complete opposite of turning against the self. It involves the tendency to see your own unacceptable desires in other people. In other words, the desires are still there, but they're not your desires anymore. I confess that whenever I hear someone going on and on about how aggressive everybody is, or how perverted they all are, I tend to wonder if this person doesn't have an aggressive or sexual streak in themselves that they'd rather not acknowledge. You’re angry this time with you’re teacher, but you project that feeling as "That professor hates me."
Let me give you a couple of examples: A husband, a good and faithful one, finds himself terribly attracted to the charming and flirtatious lady next door. But rather than acknowledge his own, hardly abnormal, lusts, he becomes increasingly jealous of his wife, constantly worried about her faithfulness, and so on. Or a woman finds herself having vaguely sexual feelings about her girlfriends. Instead of acknowledging those feelings as quite normal, she becomes increasingly concerned with the presence of lesbians in her community.
Altruistic surrender is a form of projection that at first glance looks like its opposite: Here, the person attempts to fulfill his or her own needs vicariously, through other people.
A common example of this is the friend (we've all had one) who, while not seeking any relationship himself, is constantly pushing other people into them, and is particularly curious as to "what happened last night" and "how are things going?" The extreme example of altruistic surrender is the person who lives their whole life for and through another.
Reaction formation, which Anna Freud called "believing the opposite," is changing an unacceptable impulse into its opposite. So a child, angry at his or her mother, may become overly concerned with her and rather dramatically shower her with affection. An abused child may run to the abusing parent. Or someone who can't accept a homosexual impulse may claim to despise homosexuals. You don’t like a friend but you turn the feeling into its opposite. "I think he's really great!"
Undoing involves "magical" gestures or rituals that are meant to cancel out unpleasant thoughts or feelings after they've already occurred. Anna Freud mentions, for example, a boy who would recite the alphabet backwards whenever he had a sexual thought, or turn around and spit whenever meeting another boy who shared his passion for masturbation. Generally seen with Obsessive Compulsive Disorders. When your angry maybe a sorry may be your way to defuse the situation or even "I think I'll give that professor an apple."
Introjection, sometimes called identification, involves taking into your own personality characteristics of someone else, because doing so solves some emotional difficulty. For example, a child who is left alone frequently, may in some way try to become "mom" in order to lessen his or her fears. You can sometimes catch them telling their dolls or animals not to be afraid. And we find the older child or teenager imitating his or her favorite star, musician, or sports hero in an effort to establish an identity.
I must add here that identification is very important to Freudian theory as the mechanism by which we develop our superegos.
Identification with the aggressor is a version of introjection that focuses on the adoption, not of general or positive traits, but of negative or feared traits. If you are afraid of someone, you can partially conquer that fear by becoming more like them.
eg: Stockholm Syndrome. After a hostage crisis in Stockholm, psychologists were surprised to find that the hostages were not only not terribly angry at their captors, but often downright sympathetic. A more recent case involved a young woman named Patty Hearst, of the wealthy and influential Hearst family. She was captured by a very small group of self-proclaimed revolutionaries called the Symbionese Liberation Army. She was kept in closets, raped, and otherwise mistreated. Yet she apparently decided to join them, making little propaganda videos for them and even waving a machine gun around during a bank robbery. When she was later tried, psychologists strongly suggested she was a victim, not a criminal. She was nevertheless convicted of bank robbery and sentenced to 7 years in prison
Regression is a movement back in psychological time when one is faced with stress. When we are troubled or frightened, our behaviors often become more childish or primitive. A child may begin to suck their thumb again or wet the bed when they need to spend some time in the hospital. Where do we retreat when faced with stress? To the last time in life when we felt safe and secure, according to Freudian theory. When your angry with your buddy, you revert to an old, usually immature behavior to ventilate your feeling."Let's shoot spitballs at people!"
Rationalization : A better way of making excuses i.e. the cognitive distortion of "the facts" to make an event or an impulse less threatening.. But for many people, with sensitive egos, making excuses comes so easy that they never are truly aware of itA useful way of understanding the defenses is to see them as a combination of denial or repression with various kinds of rationalizations.
And yet Freud saw defenses as necessary. You can hardly expect a person, especially a child, to take the pain and sorrow of life full on! While some of his followers suggested that all of the defenses could be used positively, Freud himself suggested that there was one positive defense, which he called sublimation.
eg This time your’e angry, you come up with various explanations to justify the situation (while denying your feelings) "He's so critical because he's trying to help us do our best."
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