Coping Strategies

The famed psychiatrist Sigmund Freud described unconscious processes that defend an individual against anxiety. Importantly, the stressor that causes the anxiety remains unaltered, but simply the individual’s perception of the stressor changes. Although such mechanisms help the person cope with anxiety, there is an element of “self-deception” that is inherent within them. Thus, over-reliance on defence mechanisms may indicate personality maladjustment. We consider the main defence mechanisms below:

Repression

Repression involves exclusion of threatening and painful memories and impulses from conscious awareness. Freud considered repression to be the most fundamental defence mechanism and everyone is thought to repress some childhood memories. In adult life, thoughts that are inconsistent with one’s self-concept are repressed. To be differentiated from this is suppression, the process of deliberate self-control of these unwanted thoughts. Suppression is a conscious act.

Denial

Some people may deny that an unwanted reality may exist. For instance a person diagnosed with terminal illness may refuse to acknowledge the illness despite being fully informed. Denial may have some adaptive value in prolonging the time to prepare for a bad situation or giving a sense of hope in a desperate situation. The latter sentiment has been reported to be useful in prisoners of war.

Displacement

Displacement involves changing the object to which a feeling is directed. So, for instance, feelings of frustration that cannot be directed against the source (e.g. an employer), may be directed against a less threatening object (e.g. kicking a pet). Erotic feelings, according to Freud, may be more “socially appropriately” channelled through art, poetry and music. Combative sports may be a safe mode of displacement for feelings of hostility.

Reaction Formation

This involves acting in completely the opposite manner to conceal a motive from oneself. For example, a person who may harbour an interest in pornography may act in ways to give a strong impression of the opposite; campaigning for censorship of pornography. Another common example is the lavishing of attention on children to hide feelings of complacency towards them.

Projection

This defence mechanism bears similarity to displacement, but involves assigning unwanted personality traits from oneself to others. Therefore, if one has the inclination have a short temper, this virtue is extrapolated to everyone else so that they too appear to have short tempers. It is adaptive in making one’s own shortcomings less detrimental and assuaging guilt. People may rationalise crime if they are convinced everyone else partakes in criminal acts.

Rationalisation

Projection may actually be a form of rationalisation. The latter term alludes to assigning rational and socially acceptable motives so that we appear to have acted logically. For instance buying an expensive new car may be rationalised by stating “My old car was going to break anyway.” Its adaptive qualities are twofold: it relieves the anguish when we fail to meet goals: “I didn”t need that anyway;’ it provides acceptable reasons for certain behaviours: “I had to steal otherwise I would have starved.”

Intellectualisation

Emotional detachment as a way of dealing with traumatic events is a form of intellectualisation. This is the handling of threats in an abstract, intellectual fashion. For instance a soldier, persistently confronted with violent imagery may become emotionally detached and un-empathetic towards enemy soldiers as a way of coping with the stress of conflict.