0.4 Neo-freudian perspectives on personality  (Page 5/28)

The defense mechanisms are not all available to an individual at the same time. As originally proposed by her father, Anna Freud believed that the defense mechanisms develop with the structures of personality (the id, ego, and superego). For example, projection and introjection depend on the differentiation of the ego from the outside world, so they would not be available to the ego as defense mechanisms until the ego had sufficiently developed (and, perhaps, differentiated into the superego as well; A. Freud, 1936/1966). This became an important point of contention, however, with the English school of analysis that included Melanie Klein. Whereas Anna Freud and her colleagues believed that projection and introjection would not be available in early childhood, since the structures of personality have not adequately developed, members of the English school believed that projection and introjection were a necessary part of that development. Although this debate and others between Freudian and Kleinian theorists became rather bitter (Mitchell&Black, 1995), Anna Freud did acknowledge the following:

These differences of opinion bring home to us the fact that the chronology of psychic processes is still one of the most obscure fields of analytic theory…So a classification of the defense mechanisms according to position in time inevitably partakes of all the doubt and uncertainty which even today attach to chronological pronouncements in analysis. It will probably be best to abandon the attempt so to classify them and, instead, to study in detail the situations which call for the defensive reactions. (pg. 53; A. Freud, 1936/1966)

The final outcome of personality development, whether primarily normal or abnormal, depends on the overall process of these defense mechanisms throughout development. It is natural that defense mechanisms are called upon by the ego during both waves of psychosexual development. Whether or not the ego develops as a yielding and flexible structure depends on the strength of the instincts during development and the environment in which the individual develops. If instinctual demands are excessively urgent during development, the ego will redouble its defensive activities. This can stiffen the resistance of the ego to the instinctual impulses, leading to symptoms and inhibitions that remain throughout life (A. Freud, 1936/1966). At least, they might remain until the patient is successfully analyzed by a qualified psychoanalyst.

What is the status of defense mechanisms in psychology today? Clinical psychologists have always found the concept of defense mechanisms useful, but for a period of time defense mechanisms did not receive much attention from academic psychologists (Cramer, 2000). The primary reason for this was that early studies aimed at demonstrating the existence of the defense mechanisms and their processes were not promising. However, these are particularly difficult processes to study, since much of the processing occurs unconsciously (Cramer, 2000; Kernberg, 2004). According to Cramer (2000), as the various fields of psychology developed, they began to examine psychological processes that received new names within the particular field, even though the processes being studied were actually defense mechanisms that had already been discovered within psychoanalysis. Just to cite a few examples: what cognitive psychologists describe as selective attention may involve the defenses of splitting and dissociation, in social psychology scapegoating is a form of displacement, and in developmental psychology a child’s verbal report of positive emotion while their facial expression clearly represents negative emotion is a classic case of denial (for a variety of examples and references see Cramer, 2000). Therefore, one can conclude that defense mechanisms, and defensive processes, have remained an important aspect of psychology and psychotherapy since they were first described by Sigmund Freud and Josef Breuer in 1895 (Freud&Breuer, 1895/2004).