Defence Mechanisms

A June, 2009 article in Atlantic describes how Harvard researchers have undertaken one of the longest longitudinal studies in psychology. The researchers have been following 268 men for 72 years. The author of the article gained access to the archives of the unfinished project.

The leader of the study (Vaillant), has gained some views of defence mechanisms — those personal reactions to life’s misfortunes, big and small. Such a long-term study offers us an evolved understanding of a basic human trait. This is nice to see for two reasons. First, defence mechanisms are finally being positioned as things that evolve over a person’s life rather than being about the (sexual) relationship of a child with a parent. Second, they are coming out of the closet; no longer are defence mechanisms the stuff of deep psychiatric theory. They are responses to life’s stuff -- responses that you and I have and can talk openly about. The idea is that in the same way the body automatically responds to a bruised ankle, or a sore throat, the brain’s circuitry has its own, at-least-initially unconscious, patterned response to things like pain, conflict, or uncertainty.

So you’ve got them and I’ve got them.

He divides them into four categories. Going from not-so healthy, to optimal (productive in the long-term, conducive to a happy life), here they are: psychotic responses (paranoia, hallucination, megalomania); immature responses (acting out, passive aggression, hypochondria, fantasy, and blame or other sorts of projection); common neurotic responses (intellectualization, removal from one’s feelings, and repression such as seemingly inexplicable naivete, memory lapse, or failure to acknowledge input from a sense organ); and, healthy responses (altruism, humour, choosing to wait until later to process an emotion, and finding another outlet — such as sport — to express or otherwise process feelings).

Defense mechanisms operate unconsciously, but that doesn’t mean we can't be aware of our patterns. And tweak them.