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  • Anna Freud was the daughter of the founder of Psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud.

  • She was born in Vienna in 1895 – when her father's radical theories of sex and the

  • mind were starting to make him famous across Europe. She became a school teacher and then

  • a psychoanalystand pioneered the treatment of children, establishing clinics and nurseries

  • for children who were war victims, survivors of the holocaust or just generally troubled

  • by their lives.

  • Perhaps most importantly for us, she is our finest guide to what we call

  • DEFENCE MECHANISMS

  • which she described best in her 1936 book The Ego and Mechanisms of Defence.

  • The book laid out for the first time the core idea that we instinctively try to protect

  • our 'ego' (our acceptable picture of who we are) with a variety of defences.

  • The problem is that in the act of defending ourselves against pain in the immediate term,

  • we harm our longer-term chances of dealing with reality and therefore of developing and

  • maturing as a result.

  • Anna Freud highlighted ten key types of defence mechanisms.

  • Firstly, Denial

  • Denial is when we don't admit there is a problem. We think things like: 'I enjoy

  • drinking very much and I sometimes get quite bad hangovers. But I can handle it.'

  • If other people try to get us to face up to the problem, we tend to react very badly. The

  • immediate survival mechanismthe short term instinct to feel alright about oneself

  • means refusing to recognise our need for change.

  • Projection

  • In projection, you attribute a bad feeling you have in someone else. For example, you

  • might develop the impression that your partner is going to be extremely critical if you don't

  • make more money this year than last. But in reality they may be quite understanding and

  • sympathetic. The harsh, bitter thoughts are not in your partner. They are in youand

  • they came from, let's say, your mother. But you have given the negative feelings,

  • which you don't want to recognise in yourself, to someone else. That's projection.

  • Turning against the self

  • This is when we think badly of ourselves as a way of escaping from an even worse thought:

  • that someone we hope loves us doesn't actually.

  • Anna Freud learnt that children do this a lot. A child abused by a parent will typically

  • seek refuge in a thought which, though grim, is less awful than the alternatives. He or

  • she will think: I must be bad and worthlessthat's why my parent is behaving this

  • way towards me. So, reallythe thought goes – I still have a good parent.

  • It's painful to think we're bad and worthless, of coursebut for a fragile child especially,

  • it can feel less catastrophic than the alternative: thinking we're in the hands of a parent

  • who doesn't care.

  • Sublimation.

  • We sublimate when we redirect unacceptable thoughts or emotions - often about sex or

  • violence - into 'higher' and finer channels. Many artists and especially musicians have

  • used sublimation to turn negative life experiences like - drug addiction, social ills, family problems, and

  • so oninto popular and resonant works of art. Sublimation is still a defence mechanism,

  • but it's one of the very best.

  • Regression

  • Anna Freud believed that when things become tough, we often regress to a way of behaving

  • that we practiced when we were a younger. In particular, we do what children typically

  • do, which is evade responsibility. It is - for the child - always someone else's fault,

  • usually the parents - and they should put it right.

  • IN regression, we adopt an infantile sense of our own purity and innocence: the rest

  • of the world is to blame. They should sort it out. For Anna Freud, it's normal for

  • many otherwise perfectly sane adults to go through regressive moments when under pressure.

  • It only beco mes a problem when it goes on too long.

  • Rationalisation.

  • Rationalisation is a smart sounding excuse

  • for our actions (or what happens to us). But it's carefully tailored to get the conclusion

  • we feel we need: that we are innocent, nice, worthy. After being rejected for a job, for

  • example, the defensive rationaliser will say: “it was a boring companyor “I never

  • wanted the job anyway”. They may have very much desired the job,

  • but it can be agonising and deeply humiliating to admit this to the ego.

  • Intellectualisation

  • Intellectualisation is similar. The scarring

  • sense of loss, guilt, betrayal and anger on breaking up with a partner might be neutralised

  • by thinking about the history of the late Roman Empire or the government's plan to

  • raise interest rates. Many intellectuals are not merely thinking a lot. They are also guilty

  • of 'intellectualisation'; which means making sure their researches keep a range of more pertinent

  • issues at bay.

  • Reaction formation

  • Reaction formation involves doing the opposite of our initial, unacceptable feelings. Someone

  • who has a strong interest in the sexuality of teenagers may, for instance, join a religion

  • with a particular emphasis on abstinence among the young.

  • We are often guilty of reaction formation in childhood. When we are embarrassed about

  • being attracted to a classmate, we might be mean or aggressive towards them, instead of

  • admitting that we like them.

  • Displacement

  • Displacement is the redirection of a (usually aggressive) desire to a substitute recipient,

  • usually someone who is less threatening or easier to blame. So a classic case is someone

  • who may feel threatened by their boss, comes home and starts shouting at their partner.

  • Fantasy

  • Fantasy avoids problems by imagining them

  • away or disassociating oneself from realityfrom daydreaming to reading literature to looking

  • at porn. We use these moments to transport ourselves from the threatening world to find

  • comfort elsewhere. ***

  • Anna Freud's tone when writing about defence mechanisms is tender and generous.

  • She knows these defences are natural, but she also observes how many difficulties they

  • bring in their wake. They hold back our careers, are boring for others and hurt those who love us.

  • Freud argued that most of us employ at least

  • 5 of her 10 defence mechanisms every day - without being in any way aware of it.

  • She wrote her great book as a way of helping us see a little better what we're doing,

  • in the hope that we would, in future, be a little more mature and a little less - as

  • we still say in unknowing tribute to her

  • defensive towards those around us.

Anna Freud was the daughter of the founder of Psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud.

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PSYCHOTHERAPY - Anna Freud

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    erinfong7212 に公開 2022 年 02 月 18 日
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