Who might we be without them?
Aim Inhibition involves desires and goals that we believe or realize that we are unable to achieve. In aim inhibition, we lower our sights, reducing our goals to something that we believe is actually more possible or realistic. Aim inhibition may well include elements of rationalization and displacement, although the primary drive is the creation of achievable goals.
Avoidance, also characterized as an Avoidant Personality, displays a number of symptoms that can include some or all of the following: The person tends to draw inward. They don’t wish to be involved in relationships or social activites, usually showing a fear of commitment. They fear of rejection from their peers, family, or even strangers. This withdrawal can create a sense of timidness and appear as a lack of confidence in their own beliefs, hopes or achievements.
Denial is a defense mechanism in which a person is faced with a fact that is too uncomfortable to accept and rejects it instead, insisting that it is not true despite what may be overwhelming evidence. A person may use:
- simple denial: deny the reality of the unpleasant fact altogether
- minimization: admit the fact but deny its seriousness (a combination of denial and rationalization)
- projection: admit both the fact and seriousness but deny responsibility. Think Sean Penn in Dead Man Walking.
Displacement is an unconscious defense mechanism whereby the mind redirects effects from an object felt to be dangerous or unacceptable to an object felt to be safe or acceptable. Displacement operates in the mind unconsciously and involves emotions, ideas, or wishes being transferred from their original object to a more acceptable substitute. It is most often used to allay anxiety; and can to the displacement of aggressive impulses or to the displacement of sexual impulses.
Intellectualization is a defense mechanism where reasoning is used to block confrontation with an unconscious conflict and its associated emotional stress, by using excessive and abstract thinking to avoid difficult feelings.It involves removing one’s self, emotionally, from a stressful event. Intellectualization is a ‘flight into reason’, where the person avoids uncomfortable emotions by focusing on facts and logic. It was one of Freud’s original defense mechanisms. Freud believed that memories have both conscious and unconscious aspects, and that intellectualization allows for the conscious analysis of an event in a way that does not provoke anxiety.
Projection is a psychological defense mechanism where a person subconsciously denies his or her own attributes, thoughts, and emotions, which are then ascribed to the outside world, usually to other people. Thus, projection involves imagining or projecting the belief that others originate those feelings. Projection reduces anxiety by allowing the expression of the unwanted unconscious impulses or desires without letting the conscious mind recognize them. An example of this behavior might be blaming someone else for self-failure.
Rationalization (also known as making excuses) is an unconscious defense mechanism in which perceived controversial behaviors or feelings are logically justified and explained in a rational or logical manner in order to avoid any true explanation, and are made consciously tolerable– or even admirable and superior– by plausible means. Rationalization encourages irrational or unacceptable behavior, motives, or feelings and often involves ad hoc hypothesizing. This process ranges from fully conscious (e.g. to present an external defense against ridicule from others) to mostly subconscious (e.g. to create a block against internal feelings of guilt). Sometimes rationalization occurs when we think we know ourselves better than we do.
Reaction Formation is a defensive process in which anxiety-producing or unacceptable emotions and impulses are mastered by exaggeration (hypertrophy) of the direct opposite tendency.
Repression is the psychological attempt by an individual to repel one’s own desires and impulses towards pleasurable instincts by excluding the desire from one’s conscious awareness and holding or subduing it in the unconscious.
Sublimation is a defense mechanism where socially unacceptable impulses or idealizations are consciously transformed into socially acceptable actions or behavior. As used by Freud, the word designated the concept of a spiritual redirection of the libido. A more sinister example might be when a sadist becomes a surgeon or a dentist.
Suppression arises when the threat of thinking fearful thoughts triggers anxious impulses. Suppression is the process of deliberately forcing the unwanted thoughts out of awareness and replacing them with less anxiety-producing thoughts.
Transference is a phenomenon characterized by unconscious redirection of feelings from one person to another. One definition of transference is “the redirection of feelings and desires and especially of those unconsciously retained from childhood toward a new person.” It is common for people to transfer feelings from their parents to their partners or children (i.e., cross-generational entanglements). For instance, one could mistrust somebody who resembles an ex-spouse in manners, voice, or external appearance; or be overly compliant to someone who resembles a childhood friend.
In The Psychology of the Transference, Carl Jung states that within the transference dyad both participants typically experience a variety of opposites, that in love and in psychological growth, the key to success is the ability to endure the tension of transference without abandoning the process, and that this tension allows one to grow and to transform.
A modern, social-cognitive perspective on transference, uncovered by Dr. Susan Andersen at New York University, explains how it occurs in everyday life. When we encounter a person who reminds us of someone whom we do or did like and who is or was important to us, we infer, unconsciously, that this person is indeed like our significant other (whether a lover, friend, relative, or other person). Myriad effects arise from this, including inferring that traits belong to the new person that in fact belong to the significant other.This perspective illuminates how we tend to repeat relationship patterns from the past in the present.
Most of this material was obtained from Wikipedia.
