Defense Mechanisms

Defense mechanisms can be useful or destructive.

healthy defense mechanisms

conscious decision not to think about troubling things

helping others

turning a negative drive into a positive, such as channeling aggressive energy into sport

ability to see absurdity of one's self or situation

expulsion of unacceptible wishes from conscious awareness

process by which feelings attached to one source are redirected toward another

adopting an opposite reaction, ie the child that "smothers with love" a baby sibling (INTERESTING)

separation of feeling (affect) from thought: similar to defense of intellectualization

transfer of emotional into physical feelings. May be more a phsycial response to autonomic changes than an psychological process

belief that one's own feelings are held by another

acting in a way so as to elicit an expected behaviour from another, ie the patient who enrages the therapist by acting in a victimized manner

conversion of psycholgical conflict into neurological symptoms, such as paralysis