Psychoanalysis - Defense Mechanism & Anxiety Flashcards
Anxiety -
- uncomfy feeling of fear, worry or nervousness
- ID tries avoiding anxiety as it does not bring pleasure.
- ego helps us tolerate anxiety, but we all have a limit to how much we can withstand
- superego is the cause of anxiety because of its exaggerated demands and the guilt it creates.
- tension can be mild (feeling of uneasiness), or very severe (feeling of death or fainting) - these can interfere with how the body functions.
Sources of anxiety -
- external - ex: car losing control and coming towards you. A friend caught you lying. You have a test.
- internal - inner conflict and uncertainty, body signals like pain & fears ex: failures, inadequacy.
Freud’s definition of anxiety -
Anxiety starts as a signal …
- Signal anxiety - sense of uneasiness warning the ego of a threat. Signal/warning that something awful is about to happen and you first instinct is to protect yourself.
Ex: hunger pang, raised voices amongst family or friends which brings on tension, news of an upcoming natural disaster will make you feel tense. - Primary anxiety - prime, automatic emotion we get when the ego is breaking down.
- traumatic experience - as if the world is about to end that bring on tension.
- new parents that become overwhelmed with responsibilities.
- parent whose child is missing
- a person who helps clear out an accident site.
Reality and neurotic anxiety -
Reality - objective and real
Neurotic - complicated worry, anxiety with no immediate source. It arises from the unconscious fear that ID impulses will take over at unacceptable time, bringing on fear of punishment.
Ex: a sexually inhibited person who sees a naked person at the beach might fear losing control of his sexual impulses.
Ex: a father who might fear he is a child abuser might withhold from showing affection to his own kids.
Reducing anxiety -
Ego’s job to reduce anxiety by removing person from source of anxiety, finding solution to reducing anxiety or by using defence mechanisms
Defence mechanisms put source of anxiety in the unconscious and then uses several measures of keeping it there.
How it happens
- Event
- Threat
- Anxiety
- Defence
- Reduction of threat
- Gratification
With defence comes denying, falsifying and distortion of reality ex: ‘it did not happen…it’s all in the mind…not my fault’. These interfere with our perception of reality and reduces flexibility and adaptability, impeding dev of personality.
Basic defence mechanism (Sig Freud, Anna Freud, Ernest Jones)
DENIAL
- Denial - denial of facts, by blocking off the messages that are coming from the senses. Can be exercised through behaviour or fantasy.
Typical Denials: of death, violence in the family, wife denies husband abuses kids.
Stages of grief by Elizabeth Kubler Ross:
Denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance (or withdrawal) DABDA.
Victims of abuse let it go on because they put themselves in a state of denial. They would not have consented to it, but they feel that they did bringing lots of suffering and self-blame.
Dangers of extreme denial - confused ideas of reality, loses touch, difficult to function in real world.
Basic defence mechanisms
REPRESSION
- all dm’s involve repression
- unconscious forgetting
- barring traumatic memories, emotions, fantasies from consciousness ex: forgetting a part of childhood.
Repressed material tends to remain charged with energy so it needs to be repressed continually. The stronger the repression, the more energy a person must tie up in maintaining the repression.
Defences are lowered (drugs, drinking) or when cathexis is strengthened (through seduction, temptation) it comes out. Ex: extreme violence, bullied teen loses it and does a mass killing - all when the repression breaks down completely.
A person who is repressing would not want to talk about it.
Difference between repression and denial is that denial involves the senses and reality and through denial we block off reality.
Repression -
- most basic defence mechanism because it is involved in each of the others.
- when ego feels threatened, it protects itself by repressing impulses coming from the ID - forcing threatening feelings into the unconscious.
Displacement -
- people redirect unacceptable urges into a variety of people or objects so that the original impulse is disguised or concealed. Ex: a woman angry at her husband takes it out on her co-workers etc, whilst remaining friendly to her husband. Freud used the term ‘displacement’ in several ways ie: sexual objects can be displaced or transformed onto a variety of other objects, including one’s self. He used displacement to refer to the replacement of one neurotic symptom for another ie: compulsive urge to masturbate replaced by compulsive hand washing.
- displacement is involved in dream formation
Fixation -
- physical growing comes with stressful and anxious moments.
- when taking the next step becomes too anxious of a step, the ego resorts to sticking to the present giving a comfier psychological state. This defence is called fixation.
- fixations are universal
- people who get continuous pleasure from eating, smoking, talking may have an oral fixation, people who are obsessed with neatness and orderliness may possess an anal fixation.
- are more permanent
Regression
- during times of stress, one may revert back to a stage the libido has already passed at an earlier stage. This reversion is called regression.
- regressions are normal and visible in kids ex: a child might regress to wanting a bottle or nipple back when a younger sibling is born as the kid sees the baby as a threat.
- also common in older kids and adults
- adults react to anxiety-producing situations by reverting to earlier, safer patterns
- similar to fixated behaviour because both mechanisms are rigid and infantile, but regressions are more temporary.
Projection
- when an internal impulse provokes too much anxiety, the ego reduces that anxiety by attributing that impulse to an external object or more commonly, another person. Linking an unacceptable quality, thought or emotion in oneself to another person or object.
- the defence mechanism were we deny other people’s feelings or tendencies that reside in our unconscious.
- extreme type of projection is paranoia (characterised by jealousy and persecution)
- projection changes internal anxiety to external anxiety by putting the fault on someone or something else.
- someone who projects cannot bear having neg qualities, has unrealistic self image.
Introjection or identification
- people incorporate positive qualities of another person into their own ego ex: adols may adopt mannerisms, values etc of a celeb.
- freud - the oedipus complex is a prototype of introjection as during this stage the kid introjects authority and values of a parent, which sets into motion the start of the superego.
- to avoid fear, pain, doubt. Increases security.
Sublimination
- helps both the individual and social groups
- positive type of displacement
- venting aggression and get rewarded for it ex: martial arts, artists sublimate their emotions.
Undoing
- performing an act to undo an unacceptable impulse
- ex: dad beats his child but buys the kid a gift later to preserve the good father image.
- can lead to obsession
- is ritualistic and symbolical
Isolation of affect encapsulation -
- person goes through an experience without feeling the accompanying emotion attached to that experience.
- ex: smiling when narrating something painful
- protects us from intense feelings.
