Concept
Reaction formation
Adopting an attitude opposite to a repressed wish.
Development
1905
introduced by Sigmund Freud
In the Dora case Freud observes that repression is often achieved by excessively strengthening the opposite of the thought to be repressed. He calls this “reactive reinforcement” (Reaktionsverstärkung), and the over-strong conscious thought the “reactive thought”, which holds its objectionable counterpart in repression. The same year the Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality name the process “reaction formation” (Reaktionsbildung).
In Fragment of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria (1905)
1926
reworked by Sigmund Freud
In Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety Freud recasts reaction formation within the structural theory as an alteration of the ego: the countercathexis of obsessional neurosis, which reinforces the attitude opposed to the drive to be repressed (pity, conscientiousness, cleanliness). He ranks it as a mechanism of defence beside regression and repression, and contrasts the obsessional's generalised character traits with the hysteric's reaction formation, which clings to one particular object.
In Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety (1926)
Relations
- 1905 derives from Repression
Freud first conceives reaction formation as a way of carrying out repression: in the Dora case the opposite of the thought to be repressed is over-strengthened so that it keeps the repressed thought down. In Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety he still speaks of “repression by reaction formation”, though there he also ranks it as a mechanism of defence in its own right.
- 1905 introduced by Sigmund Freud
In the Dora case Freud observes that repression is often achieved by excessively strengthening the opposite of the thought to be repressed. He calls this “reactive reinforcement” (Reaktionsverstärkung), and the over-strong conscious thought the “reactive thought”, which holds its objectionable counterpart in repression. The same year the Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality name the process “reaction formation” (Reaktionsbildung).
- 1926 derives from Countercathexis
In the addenda to Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety Freud presents reaction formation as the form countercathexis takes in obsessional neurosis: an internal countercathexis that alters the ego, as against the external countercathexis of hysteria and phobia, which is turned against dangerous perceptions.
- 1926 reworked by Sigmund Freud
In Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety Freud recasts reaction formation within the structural theory as an alteration of the ego: the countercathexis of obsessional neurosis, which reinforces the attitude opposed to the drive to be repressed (pity, conscientiousness, cleanliness). He ranks it as a mechanism of defence beside regression and repression, and contrasts the obsessional's generalised character traits with the hysteric's reaction formation, which clings to one particular object.
Works
- 1905
Fragment of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria
Freud's case history of "Dora", an eighteen-year-old Viennese woman (later identified as Ida Bauer) whom he treated for about eleven weeks at the end of 1900; written in 1901, it appeared in 1905 in the Monatsschrift für Psychiatrie und Neurologie. Dora suffered from a nervous cough, loss of voice, shortness of breath and low moods, and her father brought her to Freud after her parents found a letter in which she hinted at suicide. Behind the symptoms Freud uncovers a family entanglement: her father's affair with Frau K., and the advances of Frau K.'s husband, Herr K., whom Dora slapped after a proposal by a lake and whose earlier kiss had filled her with disgust. Freud reads her symptoms as the expression of repressed sexual wishes — love for Herr K., a revived childhood attachment to her father and, at the deepest layer, love for Frau K. — and builds the case around the interpretation of two dreams: a burning house from which her father rescues her while her mother wants to save her jewel case, and a wandering through a strange town after her father's death. Dora broke off the treatment on 31 December. In the Postscript Freud attributes the failure to his not having recognised and interpreted in time the transference of her feelings for Herr K. onto himself, and gives his first sustained account of transference as a new edition of old impulses directed at the physician.
- 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
- Fragment of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria1905Evidence for a relation
- Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety1926Evidence for a relation