Defense Mechanisms
Psychological strategies used to manage internal conflict.
Defense mechanisms as described in the psychodynamic tradition that began with Freud and was systematized by Anna Freud and later clinicians: unconscious strategies for managing anxiety and conflict. Each entry is a short description of the move.
Use it when
- You are explaining psychodynamic vocabulary or reading clinical or literary material that uses it.
- You want a consistent set of named patterns when discussing coping behavior in plain language.
Watch out for
- This is an interpretive framework from clinical practice, not a list of experimentally isolated mechanisms; it is hard to falsify an individual attribution.
- Labeling a specific person's behavior with one of these terms is an inference, not an observation.
The data
20 rows
| Mechanism | Description |
|---|---|
| Repression | Keeping threatening thoughts from awareness. |
| Denial | Refusing to accept reality or facts. |
| Projection | Attributing one's own unacceptable impulses to others. |
| Displacement | Redirecting emotions from a threatening target to a safer one. |
| Sublimation | Channeling unacceptable impulses into socially acceptable actions. |
| Rationalization | Creating logical explanations to justify behavior. |
| Reaction Formation | Acting opposite to one's true feelings. |
| Regression | Reverting to behavior typical of an earlier developmental stage under stress. |
| Intellectualization | Dealing with an emotional situation through abstract analysis that avoids feeling it. |
| Isolation of Affect | Recalling an event accurately while detaching the emotion that belongs with it. |
| Undoing | Trying to cancel out a perceived wrong with a symbolic act or its opposite. |
| Compensation | Overachieving in one area to offset a perceived weakness in another. |
| Identification | Adopting the qualities of a person or group, often an admired or feared one, to relieve anxiety. |
| Splitting | Seeing people or situations as entirely good or entirely bad, without integrating both. |
| Suppression | Consciously deciding to put a distressing thought aside for later, in contrast to unconscious repression. |
| Humor | Expressing a painful or uncomfortable idea in a way that allows distance and shared relief. |
| Altruism | Meeting one's own needs indirectly by helping others, usually regarded as a mature defense. |
| Dissociation | A temporary disruption in the integration of consciousness, memory or identity under overwhelming stress. |
| Acting Out | Expressing an unconscious conflict through action instead of words or reflection. |
| Passive Aggression | Expressing hostility indirectly through procrastination, sulking or intentional inefficiency. |
Fields
The shape of this dataset, read from the data itself: every column, its type and a real value. Agents can use this to plan a query without fetching the whole document.
| Section | Field | Type | Example |
|---|---|---|---|
| data | mechanism | string | Repression |
| data | description | string | Keeping threatening thoughts from awareness. |
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