Whether healthy or sick, we all have defences. Incoherent speech, shyness, aggression, unpredictability... We defend ourselves with these. They must be analysed to understand others and oneself.
In difficult situations, we naturally use defence mechanisms, unconscious psychological mechanisms that reduce psychological tensions, especially anxiety about potentially dangerous stimuli, for the body, personality, and organism.
They protect the psychological apparatus and help the patient adjust to the outside world. They are used everyday and routinely. These defence mechanisms provide healthy people their famous “character traits”.
Psychoanalysis pioneer Sigmund Freud defended this construction. Anna Freud refined it in the Psychology of the Ego, but Freudian theory underpins it.
Most defences include regression, negation, separation, reaction formation, displacement, rationalisation, isolation, identification, sublimation, cancellation, and compensation.
The defence works temporarily: the subject forgets the irreconcilable and lives normally. When defence systems are no longer adaptive, the structure collapses, causing symptoms.
This underpins the idea. Anna Freud added many years later that the Ego uses these partially unconscious modes to repress its internal excitations, memories, and fantasies.
It is important to note that a list of mechanisms is not exhaustive and that we use multiple mechanisms at once for different memories and experiences.
The processes are "secondary" defences, although "repression" acts before and erases negative memories and experiences, so the Ego defends itself before resurfacing. employing psychic tools.
Primary and secondary suppression are its two functions as the psychological apparatus's foundation. It helps you forget an experience and is a stress response.
It only acts in the Unconscious to imprint the sexual urge in the psyche, allowing the person to crave and pursue his desires.
It creates a void or flaw that the subject may want to fill while giving the mental apparatus the power to keep the memories of this fault unconscious. exist.
Known as repression proper, it occurs when the Self cannot tolerate a representation. The person "forgets" it because the psychological machinery represses it, making it unconscious.
The Ego acts as if the event never happened until the defence falls, then tries again to repress the representation or uses various methods to erase it.
Lacan says this process is similar repression but more extreme and at the same level (before the repressed returns). It resembles denial.
Foreclosure occurs when the subject faces a representation or signifier that causes him so much distress that he cannot repress it, but he must first accept it. The person accepts reality but denies it.
The subject rejects this experience, robbing it of its existence and preventing it from entering unconscious representations.