Concept
Defense
Unconscious operations that protect the ego from anxiety and from awareness of conflict.
Development
1894
Sigmund Freud introduced by
Introduces defence in “Die Abwehr-Neuropsychosen” (1894): faced with an incompatible idea, the ego sets out to fend it off, and the attempt gives rise to hysterical, obsessional or hallucinatory symptoms. In Studies on Hysteria he recalls how clinical work led him to the idea.
1895
Sigmund Freud developed by
Describes defence as turning a strong idea into a weak one by stripping it of its affect, and tentatively extends the concept to every form of hysteria.
Relations
- 1894 introduced by Sigmund Freud
Introduces defence in “Die Abwehr-Neuropsychosen” (1894): faced with an incompatible idea, the ego sets out to fend it off, and the attempt gives rise to hysterical, obsessional or hallucinatory symptoms. In Studies on Hysteria he recalls how clinical work led him to the idea.
- 1895 developed by Sigmund Freud
Describes defence as turning a strong idea into a weak one by stripping it of its affect, and tentatively extends the concept to every form of hysteria.
- 1895 diverges from Hypnoid state
Freud sets his defence hysteria, in which a psychical force keeps the idea from the ego, against Breuer’s hypnoid hysteria, in which the idea is left outside the ego by the state in which it arose and meets no resistance; he suspects that defence is the more basic of the two.
- 1895 gave rise to Resistance
Freud identifies the resistance met in treatment with the same force of the ego that first repelled the incompatible idea: resistance is defence as it shows itself in the work of recall.
- 1895 gave rise to Repression
Repression comes out of Freud's earlier theory of defence: in 1895 hysteria arises from the repression of an incompatible idea 'from the motive of defence'. Freud later let 'repression' stand for defence as a whole, and in 1926 he says so himself, bringing defence back as the general term of which repression is one kind.
Works
- 1895
- 1926
Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety
Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety (Hemmung, Symptom und Angst), published in 1926 by the Internationaler Psychoanalytischer Verlag, is Freud's major revision of his theory of anxiety and his first systematic account of defence within the structural model of ego, id and super-ego set out in The Ego and the Id (1923). The book opens by distinguishing inhibition, a restriction of an ego function undertaken as a precaution or through an impoverishment of energy, from the symptom, the sign and substitute of an instinctual satisfaction that has not taken place and the result of repression. Its central move reverses Freud's earlier view that repressed libido is transformed directly into anxiety. Re-examining the animal phobias of Little Hans and the Wolf Man, he concludes that in both the motive force of repression was castration anxiety, the ego's fear of an external danger: anxiety makes repression, not repression anxiety. The ego is the sole seat of anxiety. It produces anxiety as a signal when it anticipates danger, and through the pleasure principle the signal enables it to inhibit the threatening process in the id. Anxiety is traced to a situation of helplessness before mounting excitation, of which birth is the prototype. Freud separates the traumatic situation, in which anxiety arises automatically, as in the actual neuroses, from the danger situation, in which the ego reproduces a weakened form of it as a warning. The danger situations form a developmental series, each tied to a phase: psychical helplessness in the immature ego, loss of the object in early childhood, castration in the phallic phase, the super-ego's anger and loss of its love in latency, and finally the fear of death, read as the super-ego projected onto the powers of fate. Neurosis arises where people go on reacting to danger situations long outgrown; symptoms are formed to remove the ego from the danger situation that anxiety signals. Neurotic anxiety is anxiety about an instinctual danger the ego does not know, as realistic anxiety is about a known one. The book compares symptom formation in phobia, conversion hysteria and obsessional neurosis. In obsessional neurosis, regression to the anal-sadistic stage, a severe super-ego and reaction formations shape the symptoms, and Freud describes undoing and isolation as defensive techniques beside repression. He reinstates 'defence' as the general term for all the ego's protective techniques, repression being one of them. He discusses Otto Rank's The Trauma of Birth (1924), crediting it with linking every danger situation to separation from the mother but rejecting the claim that the severity of the birth trauma decides who becomes neurotic; he names instead the long helplessness of the human infant, the interruption of sexual development between early childhood and puberty, and the ego's imperfect means of guarding against internal danger. The addenda distinguish five kinds of resistance and separate anxiety, the reaction to the danger that object loss brings, from pain, the reaction to the loss itself, and from mourning.
See also
Linked from
People
References
- Studies on Hysteria1895 Evidence for a relation
- Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety1926 Evidence for a relation