Hello.  My name is Sigmund- Sigmund Freud and
once again I am stepping in for your
instructor Pat Johnson.
Today I'm going to talk to
you about defense mechanisms.
Defense mechanisms are strategies the
ego used to distort reality in an effort
to protect itself from anxiety.  So the
ego, whose job is to balance the super
ego and the id,  also does other things to
protect itself from anxiety. And these
are defense mechanisms.  And we all use
defense mechanisms.  You can see in your
textbook a list of defense mechanisms, and
there are many many more that I came up
with, but defense mechanisms are just new
strategies to try to rid ourselves from  anxiety.
And so the first defense mechanism I
wish to talk about is called
repression.  And repression is banishing
anxiety arosing wishes and feelings from
consciousness.  So if something is too 
anxiety provoking (for example)  if I feel something
that makes me feel very bad, if there is
a loss of a relationship, if
something horrible happens to me-- I will
just push it down into the subconscious
and on into the unconscious and that is
repression.
The next defense mechanism I would like
to talk about is regression.
Regression is when we retreat to a more
infantile stage of development.  So here
you see an adult,  an adult who is crying
like a baby and so when we are
regressing we are going back to a
previous stage.  You've all seen
adults have temper tantrums.  You've all seen
adults act as infants.  That is my my
defense mechanism called regression.
The next defense mechanism I want to
talk about is called reaction formation.
In reaction formation we change
our unacceptable impulses into their
opposites.  So here we have a young
lady saying,  "Hey are we still on for tonight?"
And her friend says "I'm so sorry I
completely forgot about your plans and
already made other ones with Liz.  I
hope you aren't mad! And our little girl
is thinking to herself that she is very,
very mad, but that would cause anxiety
and so what she says instead is, "I'm not mad. I'm glad. I didn't want to hang out
anyways." She is switching unacceptable
impulses into their opposites.  Now
you hear this very often in the South.
You will hear a southern lady say
"bless your heart!"
Well 'bless your heart' doesn't really
mean bless your heart.
The woman is using reaction formation.
She really doesn't like you.   She's
really tell telling you to shove it.S o she can't say that.  That would bring
about anxiety and conflict. So she uses
reaction formation and says "bless your
heart" instead.
The next defense mechanism I want to
show you is projection.  In projection
we disguise are own threatening
impulses by attributing them to others.
So instead of dealing with our impulses--
they cause anxiety and so we see them in
other people.  So in this cartoon here
it says "I hate you."  (The response is)
"Well what if you are just projecting?" Maybe I
remind you of things you dislike about
yourself."
And then the person says "No I hate you
more."
And so Carl Jung, one of my followers, said
"we always see our own unavowed
mistakes in our opponent."
The last defense mechanism I would like
to share with you is rationalization.
When we rationalize we are offering self
justifying explanations in place of the
real more threatening unconscious
reasons for our actions.  This is much
like the (the social psych concept of) self-serving bias.  So when we
rationalize, we are coming up with
justifications for our unacceptable
behavior.
These are just some of the many defense
mechanisms that I came up with.  But they
are some of the main ones and you get
the point that these are strategies used
by the ego to block aanxiety from
coming into conscious awareness.
