What is a Defence?

A psychological defence mechanism is an unconscious strategy used by us to manage our internal conflicts, cope with emotional distress, and protect ourselves from unacceptable thoughts, feelings, or impulses. Simply put, defences are your mind’s way of distorting, denying, or reshaping reality to reduce anxiety and strong emotions, to maintain your psychological stability.

Why We Use Defences

We employ defences to handle information or feelings that threaten our self-image or cause intense anxiety. The core reasons are:

  • Anxiety and Emotion Reduction: Defences serve as shock absorbers against overwhelming anxiety and emotion arising from internal conflicts (e.g. between instinctual desires and moral conscience) or external threats (e.g., trauma or loss).

  • Self-Esteem Maintenance: They protect our self-esteem and sense of identity, helping us maintain an overly positive or functional view of ourselves when confronted with personal flaws, failures, or unacceptable desires.

  • Coping with Trauma and Loss: Defences allow the mind to process overwhelming events in manageable doses, preventing being emotionally overwhelmed.

How Do We Develop a Defence?

Different psychological schools offer distinct perspectives on how and when defences develop:

1. Psychoanalytic Theory (Sigmund Freud and Anna Freud)

The Psychoanalytic view links the development of defences directly to the stages of psychosexual development and the three-part psychic structure: the id (instincts), ego (reality principle), and superego (morality/conscience). Defences are primarily employed by the ego to mediate the conflict between the raw demands of the id and the strict prohibitions of the superego, which generates anxiety. Defences arise when the ego anticipates punishment or disapproval for allowing the id’s unacceptable impulses into consciousness.

2. Object Relations Theory (Klein and Kernberg)

Object Relations Theory emphasises the earliest relationships with primary caregivers and how those interactions shape the development of defences. Defences arise in infancy as a means of managing separation anxiety and the intense, conflicting feelings (love and hate) directed toward the primary caregiver. Splitting and Projective Identification are seen as the most primitive and crucial defences, used to keep the internal world safe by separating "all good" from "all bad" aspects of the self and others. Pathological defences result from a failure to progress past the earliest developmental stage (the paranoid-schizoid position), preventing the integration of conflicting qualities.

3. Cognitive Behavioural Theory (CBT)

CBT does not traditionally use the term "defence mechanism" but calls the same phenomena as maladaptive coping strategies or cognitive distortions (thinking errors). These strategies are learned patterns of behaviour or thinking developed to immediately avoid or escape emotional distress (e.g., fear, sadness, shame). The focus is on the conscious or pre-conscious behaviour and thought pattern that maintains the problem, rather than the unconscious drive. For example, "denial" is reframed as minimization or dichotomous thinking (the cognitive error). Therapy seeks to replace the maladaptive coping strategy with constructive, reality-based thoughts and behaviours.

The Most Commonly Used Defences

Defences are not inherently bad; they operate on a spectrum of maturity and effectiveness. Here is an overview of the most common, categorized by their maturity:

Primitive Defences (Highly distort reality)

These defences are considered primitive because they involve a heavy distortion of external reality.

Denial refuses to acknowledge an obvious, external reality because it is too painful; for example, a person with severe debt insists they "don't have a problem" and continues spending freely.

Splitting is seeing people or situations as all good or all bad, failing to integrate positive and negative qualities; an example is idealising a new friend immediately, only to devalue and discard them completely after one minor disappointment.

Projection attributes one's own unacceptable feelings or impulses to someone else; for instance, a hostile employee believes their boss "hates" them and is trying to get them fired.

Intermediate Defences (Distort reality moderately)

These defences are more subtle and involve complex internal manoeuvres.

Repression is an unconscious mechanism that blocks unacceptable thoughts or memories from conscious awareness, such as forgetting a painful, traumatic event from childhood.

Displacement redirects an impulse (usually aggression) from a dangerous target to a safer, less threatening one, like after being yelled at by your boss, then going home and yelling at your spouse or kicking the dog.

Rationalisation invents seemingly logical reasons to justify an unacceptable behaviour or outcome, such as saying you didn't get the job because you "didn't really want it anyway" ("sour grapes").

Reaction Formation transforms an unacceptable impulse into its direct, exaggerated opposite; this is seen when a person who secretly harbors strong aggressive feelings toward a peer, then acts overly sweet, polite, and solicitous toward them.

Mature Defences (Least distorting; most adaptive)

Mature defences are considered the most adaptive and least distorting of reality.

Sublimation channels unacceptable impulses (like aggression or sexual energy) into socially acceptable and constructive activities; an example is a person with intense aggressive feelings becoming a competitive boxer or a dedicated surgeon.

Suppression is the conscious decision to delay attention to a painful thought or need, representing a healthy management strategy, such as deciding to set aside worries about a medical test until after a major work presentation is finished.

Altruism dedicates oneself to helping others to manage one's own pain or needs, as when a parent who lost a child starts a foundation to help other children with the same illness.

Splitting: The All-or-Nothing Defence Mechanism

Splitting is a psychological defence mechanism that involves seeing yourself and others as either absolutely perfect and good or totally flawed and evil, without being able to hold those mixed qualities together.

This "all-or-nothing" thinking is a critical concept for understanding severe emotional difficulties. Splitting is essentially the way our mind deals with the intense anxiety brought on by ambivalence, such as the uncomfortable feeling of loving and being angry with the same person.

How Different Thinkers Explained Splitting

The idea of splitting has evolved across various schools of psychological thought, moving from a structural concept to a relational one.

Sigmund Freud: The Split in Reality

Freud when talking about splitting wasn't talking about "good vs. bad" people; he was talking about how the mind handles a shocking or unacceptable truth. He described the "Splitting of the Ego" as the mind's trick to manage a traumatic reality. One part of the mind accepts the reality and tries to deal with it, while another part completely denies it and acts as if it never happened. This was a structural division in how the mind related to truth, often seen in specific conditions like fetishism.

Melanie Klein: The Root of All-or-Nothing

Melanie Klein, a pioneer of Object Relations Theory, formalised splitting as a primitive defence used by infants. She believed a baby's immature mind can't cope with the anxiety of being dependent on a mother who is sometimes satisfying and available, and at other times frustrating and unavailable when needed.

To protect itself, the infant splits the world into two extremes:

  • The "Good Object": Completely satisfying, loving, and nurturing.

  • The "Bad Object": Completely frustrating, distant, and dangerous.

According to Klein, a failure to eventually integrate these two views—to realize that the "good" and "bad" parts belong to the same person, is the root of our serious emotional problems.

Otto Kernberg: The Borderline Defence

Otto Kernberg took Klein's idea and made it the central feature of his description of Borderline Personality Disorder. For Kernberg, splitting is a mature but unhealthy defence mechanism used to manage the overwhelming anxiety and intense, contradictory emotions associated with those feelings.

The splitting manifests as dramatic, rapid shifts in how a person views others. A romantic partner, friend, or therapist may be idealized (seen as faultless and perfect) one moment, only to be devalued (seen as treacherous and hateful) the next. This mechanism serves to prevent the emotional pain of ambivalence and keeps the person from having to deal with their own conflicting emotions.

Karen Horney: The Split Self

Karen Horney focused less on infant development and more on the internal damage caused by difficult social environments. Her perspective described a splitting of the self-concept. She noted that when a person's core needs for safety and acceptance are unmet, they develop crippling anxiety. To cope, they "split off" their Real Self (the authentic, flawed, but healthy core) and replace it with an Idealized Self-Image (an unattainable, perfect self, created out of neurotic needs). The person then lives under the "tyranny of the shoulds," constantly striving for the impossible perfection of the Idealized Self. The internal split is between a deeply despised, flawed self and a delusionally superior self.

Splitting in Therapy

In therapy, a client often describes a split view of their world. They cling to the belief that some people are pure and free of any negatives, while simultaneously only seeing threat and negatives in other people. This defence protects the client from the vulnerability of feeling deep, mixed emotions toward a person. Our work as therapists focuses on gently guiding the client to integrate the real experiences and emotions, they are trying to keep separate.

In contemporary psychology, splitting is best understood as a core failure to achieve emotional and relational integration. It prevents the individual from forming stable, realistic relationships with others and themselves because they cannot tolerate the simple human truth: no one is perfect. Everyone, including themselves, is a complicated mixture of positive and negative qualities.

Denial: The Mind's First Line of Defence

Denial is perhaps the most pervasive psychological defence mechanism. It involves an unconscious refusal to accept reality, facts, or external stimuli because the truth is too threatening, painful, or overwhelming. Denial is not consciously lying; it is a profound, unconscious conviction that what is true is simply not happening.

Classical Psychoanalytic Perspectives on Denial

The concept of denial is deeply rooted in psychoanalytic theory, primarily concerning in individuals attempts to manage anxiety.

Sigmund Freud: Shielding the Ego from Reality

Freud viewed denial as a primitive defence mechanism and a common neurotic symptom, focusing on its role in protecting the ego from external reality.

  • Mechanism: Denial operates by preventing the perception of a painful or anxiety-provoking reality from ever reaching conscious awareness. It is a defence against the external world, contrasting with repression, which defends against internal impulses.

  • The Wish to Believe: Denial is driven by a psychological wish. For example, a person may deny a physician's fatal diagnosis because the wish to live is stronger than the will to accept the facts.

Anna Freud: Categorizing the Defence

Anna Freud, building on her father’s work, clarified the structure and function of defence mechanisms. She placed denial at the lower end of the developmental spectrum—a primitive, less mature defence.

  • Denial in Fantasy: This involves escaping to an imaginary world where the distressing reality does not exist. A child who is consistently bullied may imagine they are a powerful superhero.

  • Denial in Word and Act: This involves outright refuting a known truth or acting in a manner that contradicts the reality. For example, a smoker with lung disease might continue chain-smoking while emphatically stating, "I'm perfectly healthy."

  • Denial through Restriction of the Ego: This is seen when a person selectively avoids situations that might trigger awareness of the painful reality, severely limiting their life experiences to maintain the denial.

Contemporary and Relational Perspectives

While psychoanalysis laid the groundwork, later theorists addressed the interpersonal and therapeutic implications of denial.

Melanie Klein: Denial in Early Development

Similar to splitting, Klein viewed denial as a primitive mechanism operating in the earliest developmental phase. The infant denies the existence of the "Bad Object" (the persecutory, frustrating part of the mother) to preserve the "Good Object" (the wholly gratifying mother). This profound early denial helps protect the child from overwhelming anxiety and emotions.

Jon Frederickson: Confronting the Emotional Avoidance

In the framework of Intensive Short-Term Dynamic Psychotherapy (ISTDP), Frederickson views denial as an individual’s way of avoiding the full force of their genuine, anxiety-laden emotions.

  • Focus: Frederickson focuses on how the client verbally and non-verbally avoids feeling, often by simply stating they "don't know" how they feel or "don't recall" a traumatic event. The denial isn't just about a fact, but about disavowing an inner emotional reality.

  • Intervention: The therapist confronts the denial directly but compassionately, guiding the client to shift their attention from the denial to the underlying blocked emotion (e.g., rage, grief, or guilt) that the denial is shielding.

Modern Therapy's Terminology: Denial by Other Names

In cognitive and behavioural therapies, the concept of denial is not typically used, but the behaviours and cognitive patterns associated with it are addressed as barriers to therapeutic progress.

1. Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT) and Misattribution

CBT addresses the core function of denial—avoiding responsibility or reality—through the lens of thinking errors:

  • Minimisation: The tendency to downplay the significance of an event, an emotion, or a consequence. This is a subtle form of denial. A person with an alcohol problem may minimize its impact by saying, "It's not that bad; I only drink on weekends."

  • Catastrophizing (Inverted Denial): While denial minimizes the negative, its counterpart—exaggerating the negative possibilities—can also be a defence, allowing the person to focus on an imagined future threat rather than a real, immediate, unbearable truth.

2. Dialectical Behaviour Therapy (DBT)

In DBT, which focuses on emotional regulation and distress tolerance, denial is addressed through:

  • Invalidation: Denial is functionally similar to self-invalidation—the refusal to acknowledge one's own emotional or psychological state. DBT skills like Mindfulness are designed to directly counter denial by teaching the patient to observe and describe internal and external reality without judgment, forcing an acknowledgement of the truth.

 

Working with Denial in Therapy

A therapist can help a client work through denial by gently and respectfully challenging the denial by pointing out inconsistencies between the client's words and their actions or external reality. For example, the therapist might say, "You tell me everything is fine with your marriage, but I notice you look down and shift nervously every time you mention your partner." The goal is not to shame the client, but to connect the feeling (anxiety) to the defence (denial), allowing the client to realize that the defence they are using is actually blocking them from facing an important truth.

In contemporary psychology, whether it's the outright refusal to acknowledge a crisis or the subtle minimization of an emotional truth, denial serves as a powerful short-term protector. However, by blocking reality, it often prevents the individual from taking the necessary adaptive actions for long-term survival and functional mental health.