Primary Defensive Processes
Primary Defensive Processes
In this chapter and the next, I cover the major common defenses. The concept of defense has been central to psychoanalytic character diagnosis. The major diagnostic categories that have been used by analytic therapists to denote personality types refer implicitly to the persistent operation in an individual of a specific defense or constellation of defenses. Thus, a diagnostic label is a kind of shorthand for a person's habitual defensive pattern.
The term "defense" is in many ways unfortunate. What we refer to as defenses in adults begin as global, inevitable, adaptive ways of experiencing the world. Freud is responsible for originally observing and naming some of these processes; his choice of the term "defense" reflects at least two aspects of his thinking. First, he was fond of military metaphors. When he was trying to make psychoanalysis palatable to a skeptical public, he frequently made analogies, for pedagogical purposes, comparing psychological operations to army tactical maneuvers, or compromises over military objectives, or battles with complex outcomes.
Second, when he first encountered the most dramatic and memorable examples of processes that we now call defenses (repression, conversion, dissociation) he saw them when they were operating in their defensive function. The emotionally damaged, predominantly hysterical people he first became fascinated by were trying to avoid reexperiencing what they feared would be unbearable pain. They were doing so, Freud observed, at a high cost to their overall functioning. Ultimately it would be better for them to feel fully the overwhelming emotions they were afraid of, thereby liberating their energies for getting on with their lives. Thus, the earliest context in which the defenses were talked about was one in which the doctor's task was to diminish their power.
Construed that way, the therapeutic value of weakening or breaking down a person's maladaptive defenses was self-evident. Unfortunately, in the climate of excitement surrounding Freud's early observations, the idea that defenses are somehow by nature maladaptive spread among the lay public, and the word acquired an undeservedly negative cast. Calling someone "defensive" is universally understood to be a criticism. Analysts also use the word in that way in ordinary speech, but when they are discussing defense mechanisms in a scholarly, theoretical way, they do not necessarily assume that anything pathological is going on when a defense is operating. In fact, analytically influenced therapists have sometimes understood certain problems, notably psychotic and close-to-psychotic "decompensations," as evidence of insufficient defenses.
The phenomena that we refer to as defenses have many benign functions. They begin as healthy, creative adaptations, and they continue to work adaptively throughout life. When they are operating to protect the self against threat, they are discernible as "defenses," a label that seems under those circumstances to fit. The person using a defense is generally trying unconsciously to accomplish one or both of the following: (one) the avoidance or management of some powerful, threatening feeling, usually anxiety but sometimes overwhelming grief, shame, envy, and other disorganizing emotional experiences; and (two) the maintenance of self-esteem. The ego psychologists emphasized the function of defenses in dealing with anxiety; object relations theorists, who focus on attachment and separation, introduced the understanding that defenses operate against grief as well; and self psychologists have stressed the role of defenses in the effort to maintain a strong, consistent, positively valued sense of self. Analysts in the relational movement have emphasized the shared nature of defenses that emerge in couples and systems.
Psychoanalysts assume, although this is seldom explicitly stated, that we all have preferred defenses that have become integral to our individual styles of coping. This preferential and automatic reliance on a particular defense or set of defenses is the result of a complex interaction among at least four factors: (one) one's constitutional temperament, (two) the nature of the stresses that one suffered in early childhood, (three) the defenses modeled-and sometimes explicitly taught-by parents and other significant figures, and (four) the experienced consequences of using particular defenses (in the language of learning theory, reinforcement effects). In psychodynamic parlance, the unconscious choice of one's favorite modes of coping is "overdetermined," expressing the cardinal analytic principle of "multiple function."
Defenses have been extensively researched. Phoebe Cramer has reviewed empirical findings supporting seven core psychoanalytic observations; namely, that defenses (one) function outside of awareness; (two) develop in predictable order as children mature; (three) are present in normal personality; (four) become increasingly used in times of stress; (five) reduce the conscious experience of negative emotions; (six) operate via the autonomic nervous system; and (seven) when used excessively, are associated with psychopathology. Substantial agreement exists among psychoanalytic scholars that some defenses are less developmentally mature than others. Cramer has demonstrated, for example, that denial occurs very early, projection develops later, and identification arrives still later (though I discuss here the archaic precursors of both projection and identification as primary defensive processes). In general, defenses that are referred to as "primary" or "immature" or "primitive" or "lower order" involve the boundary between the self and the outer world. Those conceived as "secondary" or "more mature" or "advanced" or "higher order" deal with internal boundaries, such as those between the ego or superego and the id, or between the observing and the experiencing parts of the ego.
Primitive defenses operate in a global, undifferentiated way in a person's total sensorium, fusing cognitive, affective, and behavioral dimensions, whereas more advanced ones make specific transformations of thought, feeling, sensation, or behavior, or some combination of these. The conceptual division between more archaic and higher-order defenses is somewhat arbitrary. Ever since Kernberg called attention to borderline clients' use of archaic forms of projection and introjection (a precursor of identification), however, many therapists have followed him in identifying the following defenses as intrinsically "primitive": withdrawal, denial, omnipotent control, primitive idealization and devaluation, projective and introjective identification, and splitting. In nineteen ninety-four I suggested adding extreme forms of dissociation to that list. And now, based on the work of Vaillant and other researchers with which I was not so familiar in nineteen ninety-four, and at the suggestion of several colleagues, I have added somatization, acting out, and sexualization to the more primitive defenses. There are mature expressions of those processes, but that is also true of some other lower-order defenses, such as primitive idealization and withdrawal.
To be considered primary, a defense typically has two qualities associated with the preverbal phase of development: a lack of attainment of the reality principle and a lack of appreciation of the separateness and constancy of those outside the self. For example, denial is thought to be a manifestation of a more primitive process than repression. For something to be repressed, it has to have been known in some way and then consigned to unconsciousness. Denial is an instant, nonreflective process. "This is not happening" is a more magical way of dealing with something unpleasant than "This happened, but I'll forget about it because it's too painful."
Similarly, the defense mechanism known as "splitting," in which a person segregates experiences into all-good and all-bad categories, with no room for ambiguity and ambivalence, is considered primitive because it is believed to derive from a time before the child has developed object constancy. The perception of mother when one feels gratified is thought to be an overall sense of "good mother," whereas the perception of the same person when one is frustrated is "bad mother." Before the infant is mature enough to appreciate the reality that it is the same person in each situation, one whose presence sometimes feels good and sometimes feels bad, we assume each experience has a kind of total, discrete, defining quality. In contrast, a defense like rationalization is considered mature because it requires some sophisticated verbal and thinking skills and more attunement to reality for a person to make up reasonable explanations that justify a feeling.
Many defensive processes have more primitive and more mature forms. For example, "idealization" can denote an unquestioning, worshipful conviction that another person is perfect, or it can refer to a subtle, subdued sense that someone is special or admirable despite some visible limitations. "Withdrawal" can refer to the full renunciation of reality in favor of a psychotic state of mind, or it can refer to a mild tendency to deal with stress by daydreaming. For this chapter on primitive defenses, I have called a defense "extreme" if it also has more mature manifestations.
The so-called primitive defenses are ways we believe the infant naturally perceives the world. These ways of experiencing live on in all of us, whether or not we have significant psychopathology; we all deny, we all split, we all have omnipotent strivings. Such processes pose a problem only if we lack more mature psychological skills or if these defenses are used to the exclusion of possible others. Most of us also supplement them with more sophisticated means of processing anxiety and assimilating a complex and disturbing reality. It is the absence of mature defenses, not the presence of primitive ones, that characterizes borderline or psychotic structure.
It is much harder to describe the primitive defenses than the more advanced ones. The fact that they are preverbal, prelogical, comprehensive, imaginal, and magical (part of primary process thought) make them extremely hard to represent in prose; in fact, the representation of preverbal processes in words is to some degree an oxymoron. The following summary gives an overview of those defenses that are conventionally understood as primary.
EXTREME WITHDRAWAL
EXTREME WITHDRAWAL
An infant who is overstimulated or distressed will often simply fall asleep. Withdrawal into a different state of consciousness is an automatic, self-protective response that one sees in the tiniest of human beings. Adult versions of the same process can be observed in people who retreat from social or interpersonal situations, substituting the stimulation of their internal fantasy world for the stresses of relating to others. A propensity to use chemicals to alter one's consciousness can also be considered a kind of withdrawal. Some professionals, including contributors to recent editions of the DSM, prefer the term "autistic fantasy" to withdrawal; this label refers to a specific version of the general tendency to shrink from personal contact.
Some babies are temperamentally more inclined than others toward this way of responding to stress; observers of infants have sometimes noted that it is the babies who are especially sensitive who are most likely to withdraw. People with this constitutionally impressionable disposition may generate a rich internal fantasy life and regard the external world as problematic or affectively impoverished. Experiences of emotional intrusion or impingement by caregivers and other early objects can reinforce withdrawal; conversely, neglect and isolation can also foster that reaction by leaving a child dependent on what he or she can generate internally for stimulation. Schizoid personality styles are the characterological outcome of reliance on the defense of withdrawal.
The obvious disadvantage of withdrawal is that it removes the person from active participation in interpersonal problem solving. People with schizoid partners are frequently at a loss as to how to get them to show some kind of emotional responsiveness. "He just fiddles with the TV remote control and refuses to answer me" is a typical complaint. People who chronically withdraw into their own minds try the patience of those who love them by their resistance to engaging on a feeling level. Those with serious emotional disturbance are hard to help because of their apparent indifference to the mental health workers who try to win their attention and attachment.
The main advantage of withdrawal as a defensive strategy is that while it involves a psychological escape from reality, it requires little distortion of it. People who depend on withdrawal console themselves not by misunderstanding the world but by retreating from it. Consequently, they may be unusually sensitive, often to the great surprise of those who write them off as dull nonparticipants. And despite their lack of a disposition to express their own feelings, they may be highly perceptive of feelings in others. On the healthier end of the schizoid scale, one finds people of remarkable creativity: artists, writers, theoretical scientists, philosophers, religious mystics, and other highly talented onlookers whose capacity to stand aside from ordinary convention gives them a unique capacity for original commentary.