“In all these situations of conflict the ego is seeking to repudiate a part of its own id. Thus the institution which sets up the defence and the invading force which is warded off are always the same; the variable factors are the motives which impel the ego to resort to defensive measures. Ultimately all such measures are designed to secure the ego and to save it from experiencing ‘pain.’”
“My patient was an exceptionally pretty and charming girl and already played a part in her social circle, but in spite of this she was tormented with a frantic jealousy of a sister who was still only a child. At puberty the patient gave up all her former interests and was thenceforth actuated by a single desire—to win the admiration and love of the boys and men who were her friends.”
In a nutshell
We do just about anything to avoid pain and preserve a sense of self, and this compulsion often results in us creating psychological defenses.
In a similar vein
Alfred Adler Understanding Human Nature (p 14)
Eric Berne Games People Play (p 26)
Sigmund Freud The Interpretation of Dreams (p 110)
Karen Horney Our Inner Conflicts (p 156)
V. S. Ramachandran Phantoms in the Brain (p 232)
Anna Freud was the youngest of her father Sigmund’s six children, and the only one to become a well-known psychologist in her own right. By the age of 14 she had read his books and was intent on following in his footsteps, and though inevitably tagged “Daddy’s girl,” in fact she was a pioneer in two important areas: ego psychology and child psychoanalysis.
While Sigmund famously focused on the unconscious (the id), Anna made the ego seem more important, particularly in respect of therapy and psychoanalysis. Her work looked at how exactly the ego, id, and superego interacted, and it was through this understanding that she was able to explore the concept of psychological defense mechanisms. In her work with children and adolescents, she demonstrated to her father why they were quite different to adults in terms of psychoanalytical practice.
The Ego and the Mechanisms of Defence is her best-known work. Although it presumes that the reader has some familiarity with psychoanalytical terms, laypeople can still read the book and it contains interesting case studies to spice up the theory. She used many classic Freudian terms such as “hatred of the mother,” “penis envy,” and “castration anxiety,” which contemporary readers will take with a grain of salt. Yet behind these notions is a compelling explanation of why some people act as they do, and despite much debunking of Freudian psychology in recent years, Anna Freud’s explanation of how defense mechanisms come about and their function is convincing.
The term “defense” in relation to psychology was first used by Sigmund Freud in 1894. He meant it to describe, as Anna Freud said, “the ego’s struggle against painful or unendurable ideas or effects,” which may lead to neurosis. The ego develops a defense in order to protect itself against being overcome by unconscious demands such as sex and aggression. The work of the psychoanalyst is to get the person to become conscious of their instinctual urges, which may involve isolating the pain experienced when they were originally confronted by an unsatisfied impulse.
The ego is always alert to the dangers that the unconscious may over-throw it. It may try to intellectualize away unconscious urges, inhibit them, project them onto others, or deny them. Freud noted that when someone succeeds in creating defense mechanisms against anxiety and pain, their ego has won the battle between the “three institutions” of ego, id, and superego. When they have lost an internal battle to unconscious instinct, or societal “musts” and “shoulds,” it is their ego that has lost. The ego continually endeavors to create harmony between itself, the unconscious, and the outside world, but this does not always lead to perfect mental health. In fact, sometimes when the ego “wins” the person as a whole may have lost, since the win may involve the creation of a defense in order to have the ego maintain its sense of itself at all costs.
While the ego is the normal thinking mind, and the id represents the unconscious, the superego in Freudian terminology is that part of us that responds to social or societal rules.
When a natural instinct surfaces, the ego wants to have it satisfied, but the superego does not allow that. The ego submits to the “higher” superego, but is left with the problem. It begins a struggle with the impulse and, to reduce the pain of not satisfying it, engineers a defense that allows itself to make sense of its decision to submit.
The superego, Freud wrote, is the “mischief maker which prevents the ego’s coming to a friendly understanding with the instincts.” It creates a high standard in which sex is seen as bad and aggression is antisocial. But renouncing the instincts may simply mean that the impulses are pushed out of the ego’s view, and what the ego cannot incorporate into its sense of self is expressed elsewhere as unhealthy personality traits or neuroses. When the ego becomes merely an instrument for the execution of the superego’s wishes, we get the bottled-up, prim-and-proper type of person, who lives in fear of being attacked and overcome by their instincts.
Freud described one woman whose life was shaped by her very strong superego, to the extent that her natural impulses, which she did not allow herself to fulfill, were “projected” into other areas of her life. As a child she was a passionate “wanter,” demanding certain objects and clothing in order to be as good as or better than other children. Her desires were everything to her. As an adult she became an unmarried and childless governess, dull in her outlook, not ambitious, and the wearer of rather plain clothing. What had happened? At some point, she felt she should attune herself to society’s values and standards, and so repressed her natural wishes and went to the other extreme. In place of her own concerns, she spent her time empathizing with others and looking out for them. She was highly interested in the love lives of her friends, and enjoyed talking about clothes, yet she did not allow herself these pleasures. Her defense mechanism against the perception that her desires were too strong was to gratify her desires through other people. Her ego and id had fully lost the battle with her superego, and this was the only way they could be expressed.
While this example involved projecting instincts onto the world, Freud argued that this is a comparatively healthy form of defense. A more powerful and often more damaging defense is repression, because it requires the most energy to keep it in place.
She told of a girl who, having grown up around brothers and resenting her mother’s continual pregnancies, developed a hatred of her mother. Repressing these feelings because she felt they were not nice, her ego tried to protect itself against their returning by evolving the opposite reaction: over-tenderness for her mother and concern for her safety. The girl’s envy and jealousy were transformed into unselfishness and thoughtfulness for others. Though this helped her fit in to the family environment, her repression of natural feelings led to a loss of normal reactions and spirit in a girl her age.
In another example, a young girl developed a fantasy of biting off her father’s penis, but to avoid this feeling her ego created a disinclination to bite altogether, which led to problems with eating.
In both cases, although the ego was “at peace” in the sense that it no longer had to resolve an inner conflict, the girls suffered at another level when the conflict was repressed. Repression is the most dangerous form of defense, Freud observed, because it takes away consciousness of a whole area of our instinctual life, so deadening the personality.
Not all defenses are necessarily bad; they may simply be a person’s way of coping with real external danger. When looking at defenses created by children, Freud noted that kids experience themselves as comparatively weak in a world of powerful adults and dangers, and as a result make up for this in fantasy and role playing. Often, when a child feels threatened by an image, perhaps a ghost or a violent man, they incorporate the characteristics of this external object by pretending they are a ghost themselves, or by dressing up like a cowboy or a robber. They pass from a passive to an active role. In this way they get back power from their environment.
Freud analyzed children’s stories in which a boy or a girl manages to tame a bad old man who is rich or powerful or fearsome, such as Little Lord Fauntleroy. The child touches the man’s heart like no one else has been able to, and as a result he is transformed into a real human being. In other stories, wild animals are tamed or beasts made human. What these fantasies commonly show is a reversal of reality. They may enable children to come to grips with the lack of power in a real relationship, such as between a son and his father, and they help children reconcile themselves to reality, paradoxically because they allow them to deny it.
Freud observed that teenagers often become antisocial and try to isolate themselves from other members of the family. Another feature of the adolescent is their changeable nature. At no other time in life do they so quickly and earnestly adopt new styles of clothing or hair, but also form intense attachment to particular political and religious ideals. At the same time, adolescents see themselves as the center of the world and are therefore narcissistic. They “identify” with things and people as opposed to clearly seeing them and loving them for what they are.
Freud noted that in every time of life in which there is a heightened sex drive there is a danger of neurotic or psychotic disease if the ego is not able to process the urges properly. To the ego, increased instinctual drives mean danger and in response it does anything it can to reassert itself. This was her explanation for why adolescents are so self-centered—it is how they maintain their identity against a barrage of new and powerful feelings that seem to come from nowhere.
Freud admitted that describing the various defenses that emerge in response to anxieties and fears is not an exact science. How can it be, when we are dealing with subterranean caverns of the mind, wishes and desires, and people’s response to social pressure? Freudian psychology has been accused of being unscientific, and in many respects it is. Psychoanalysts have been replaced by psychotherapists and cognitive psychologists who are not really interested in a person’s past or their longings. Their task is to fix erroneous ways of thinking that have led to unsatisfactory emotions or behavior.
This is all well and good, but perhaps we will come to miss some aspects of Freudian psychology: its “sex and aggression” take on humanity, its deep knowledge of dreams and mythological symbols, and its emphasis on the competing selves of ego, id, and superego. These concepts remain useful, and as for defense mechanisms, they are real enough that most of us can probably describe at least one of our own without trying too hard. The neurological reality of defense mechanisms has recently been noted (see V. S. Ramachandran, p 232), so maybe psychoanalysis has some scientific validity after all. Anna Freud’s main contribution was in putting her father’s theories into practice, and if Freudian psychology makes a comeback her work is set to become more influential.
Born in 1895 in Vienna, Anna Freud had a close relationship with her father from the start. She was restless at school, a voracious reader, and from guests in the family home she picked up several languages. Her older sister Sophie was considered the “beauty” and Anna the “brains” of the family.
Anna graduated from school in 1912, and after travels to Italy passed exams to be an elementary school teacher. Working on translations of her father’s writings, she became a sort of apprentice to Sigmund, but also continued her teaching career. In 1918 she underwent psychoanalysis with her father, and in 1922 was accepted as a member of the International Psychoanalytic Congress. The following year she began practicing as a psychoanalyst in Berlin, but Sigmund’s jaw cancer brought her back to Vienna, and until his death in 1939 she was his primary carer.
From 1927 to 1934 she headed the International Psychoanalytical Association and continued to develop her child analysis practice. In 1935 she became the director of the Vienna Psychoanalytical Training Institute, and from 1937 helped establish a nursery for poor children. When Austria was taken over by the Nazis, Anna organized for the Freuds to move to England. She established the Hampstead War Nursery for the children of single mothers, and in 1947 the Hampstead Child Therapy Clinic, a world center in child psychology.
Anna never married, and considered it her task to maintain and develop her father’s legacy. She received several honorary doctorates from American universities, where she gave many lectures and seminars. After she died in 1982, her home in London became the Freud Museum.