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 psychoanalyst – and 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 mechanism – the 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 you – and
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 worthless – that’s why my parent is behaving this
way towards me. So, really – the thought goes – I still have a good parent.
It’s painful to think we’re bad and worthless, of course – but 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 on—into 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 company” or “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 reality—from 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.