Commonly used defense mechanisms:
1. Repression
- Unconsciously expelling the anxiety provoking ideas or feeling from conscious awareness
Eg. Forgetting, Slips of tongues
Clinical Illustration : Psychogenic Amnesia
2. Regression
- Reversion to Childhoods psychological functioning
Eg. Playful childlike activities
Clinical Illustration : Neuroses, Psychoses
3. Denial
- Involuntary exclusion of unpleasant & painful reality from conscious awareness
Eg. Grief 3 6 years olds
Clinical Illustration : Psychoses, Terminal Illness
4. Conversion
- Repressed forbidden urge is simultaneously kept out of awareness & also expressed in disguised or symbolic form of Somatic Disturbance (Mostly sensory & Motor)
E.g. During Catastrophic stress
it always implies a psychopathology
Clinical Illustration : Hysteria (Conversion Disorder)
5. Dissociation
- Involuntary splitting of mental function from rest of the personality & allowing the forbidden impulses to express out without having any sense of responsibility for actions
Eg. Near Death Experience
Clinical Illustration : Fugue, Amnesia, Mulitiple Personality, Possesion Syndrome, Somnabulism, Dissociative Disorder.
6. Displacement
- Unconcious shifting of emotions aroused out of threatening external object.
Eg. Deflection of anger on a substitute target.
Clinical Illustration : Phobia, Obsessive Compulsive Disorder
7. Rationalization
- Providing Logical explanations for irrational behaviour motivated by unacceptable unconscious wishes.
Eg. a universal phenomenon
Clinical Illustration : Usually used to explain behaviours resulting from other defense mechanisms.
8. Projection
- Unconscious attributions of ones own attitudes and urges to other person.
Eg. A universal phenomenon
Clinical Illustration : Persecutory delusions and Hallucinations
9. Fixation
- Attaching oneself in an unreasonable or exaggerated way to some person or arresting emotional development.
Eg. A bacholor middle aged still depends on his mother to provide basic needs.
10. Hypochondriasis
- Unconscious transformation of unacceptable impulses into inappropriate somatic concern
Eg. Abnormal Illness Behaviour in Physically Disordered or Normal Individuals
Clinical Illustration : Hypochondriasis
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©2005 DR.M.RAJARAM
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