Defense Mechanisms Flashcards
Tantrums.
Acting out
expressing unacceptable feelings and thoughts through actions
Temporary, drastic change in personality, memory, consciousness, or motor behavior to avoid emotional distress.
Dissociation
Avoiding the awareness of some painful reality: common in AIDS or cancer pts
denial
A mother yells at her child b/c her husband yelled at her.
Displacement (transferring avoided ideas/feelings to some neutral person or object)
Partially remaining at a more childish level of development
Fixation (men fixating on sports games)
Abused child grows up and abuses his son
Identification
Describing a murder in graphic detail with no emotional response.
Isolation (of affect)
A man who wants another woman thinks his wife is cheating on him.
Projection
After getting fired, claiming that the job was not important anyway.
rationalization (proclaiming logical reasons for actions actually performed for other reasons, usually to avoid self-blame)
Turning back the maturational clock and going back to earlier ways of dealing with the world (seen in children under stress such as illness)
Regression
Involuntary withholding an idea or feeling from concious awareness
Repression
Mafia boss makes a large donation to charity
Altruism (alleviating guildty feelings by unsolicited generosity toward others)
Nervous medical student jokes about boards
Humor (appreciating amusing nature of an anxiety-provoking situation)
Teenagers’ aggression toward his father is redirected to perform well in sports
Sublimation (replacing unacceptable wish w/ another course of action that doesn’t conflict w/ value system)
Intentional withholding of an idea from conscious awareness
Suppression
What are the “mature” defense mechanisms?
Mature adults wear a SASH: Sublimation, Altruism, Suppression, Humor
