Defense Mechanisms Flashcards
Repression
Painful feelings are conscious initially and then forgotten, but return occasionally. Repression can range from momentary memory lapses to forgetting the details of a catastrophic event.
Suppression
Unpleasant feelings are suppressed through a conscious.
Fears can be replaced by thinking of a happy place, time, or event
Projection
In projection, the undesirable feelings are attributed to another person or persons
Ex: an angry person believes others are angry at him/her; a person who is critical of others believes they are critical of him/her.
Displacement
Object displacement, anger or another emotion is initially felt toward a person against whom it is unsafe to express it (in children, for example, toward a parent)
Reaction formation
Reduces anxiety by taking up the opposite feeling, impulse or behavior
Regression
When confronted by stressful events, people sometimes abandon coping strategies and revert to patterns of behavior used earlier in development
Fixation
Ex: people with an oral fixation have problems with drinking, smoking, and nail biting when they are experiencing stress.
Identification
Taking the characteristics of someone else
Rationalization
Is an attempt to deny one’s true motives by using a reason that is more logical or socially acceptable than one’s own reasons
Isolation
It involves compartmentalizing one’s experience so that an event becomes separated
Sublimation
involves rechanneling the energy connected with an unacceptable impulse into one that is more socially acceptable
Compensation
Devoting unusual efforts to achievement in order to overcome feelings of inferiority
Denial
unpleasant reality is ignored, and a realistic interpretation of potentially threatening events are replaced by benign but inaccurate ones.
