Feist−Feist: Theories of
Personality, Seventh
EditionII. Psychodynamic
Theories- Freud: Psychoanalysis © The McGraw−Hill^41
Companies, 2009
impulses. This, of course, is precisely the ego’s purpose in establishing defense
mechanisms—to avoid dealing directly with sexual and aggressive implosives and to
defend itself against the anxiety that accompanies them (Freud, 1926/1959a).
The principal defense mechanisms identified by Freud include repression, re-
action formation, displacement, fixation, regression, projection, introjection, and
sublimation.
Repression
The most basic defense mechanism, because it is involved in each of the others, is
repression.Whenever the ego is threatened by undesirable id impulses, it protects it-
self by repressing those impulses; that is, it forces threatening feelings into the un-
conscious (Freud, 1926/1959a). In many cases the repression is then perpetuated for
a lifetime. For example, a young girl may permanently repress her hostility for a
younger sister because her hateful feelings create too much anxiety.
No society permits a complete and uninhibited expression of sex and aggres-
sion. When children have their hostile or sexual behaviors punished or otherwise
suppressed, they learn to be anxious whenever they experience these impulses. Al-
though this anxiety seldom leads to a complete repression of aggressive and sexual
drives, it often results in their partial repression.
What happens to these impulses after they have become unconscious? Freud
(1933/1964) believed that several possibilities exist. First, the impulses may remain
unchanged in the unconscious. Second, they could force their way into conscious-
ness in an unaltered form, in which case they would create more anxiety than the per-
son could handle, and the person would be overwhelmed with anxiety. A third and
much more common fate of repressed drives is that they are expressed in displaced
or disguised forms. The disguise, of course, must be clever enough to deceive the
ego. Repressed drives may be disguised as physical symptoms, for example, sexual
impotency in a man troubled by sexual guilt. The impotency prevents the man from
having to deal with the guilt and anxiety that would result from normal enjoyable
sexual activity. Repressed drives may also find an outlet in dreams, slips of the
tongue, or one of the other defense mechanisms.
Reaction Formation
One of the ways in which a repressed impulse may become conscious is through
adopting a disguise that is directly opposite its original form. This defense mecha-
nism is called a reaction formation.Reactive behavior can be identified by its ex-
aggerated character and by its obsessive and compulsive form (Freud, 1926/1959a).
An example of a reaction formation can be seen in a young woman who deeply re-
sents and hates her mother. Because she knows that society demands affection to-
ward parents, such conscious hatred for her mother would produce too much anxi-
ety. To avoid painful anxiety, the young woman concentrates on the opposite
impulse—love. Her “love” for her mother, however, is not genuine. It is showy, ex-
aggerated, and overdone. Other people may easily see the true nature of this love, but
the woman must deceive herself and cling to her reaction formation, which helps
conceal the anxiety-arousing truth that she unconsciously hates her mother.
Chapter 2 Freud: Psychoanalysis 35