- Unconscious, specific intrapsychic adoptive efforts which are employed by the individual to resolve emotional confict and to cope with anxiety.
- It is automatic
- It is not the defense mechanism that is pathological but it is the frequency of its use.
- Used by both mentally healthy and mentally ill individuals.
- Compensation - an attempt to overcome a real or imagined short coming.
- Conversion - emotional problems are converted to physical symptoms.
- Denial - failure to acknowledge an intolerable thought, feeling, experience or reality.
- Displacement - the redirection of feelings to a less threatening object.
- Dissociation - detachment of certain activities from normal consciousness which then function alone.
- Fantasy - conscious distortion of unconscious feelings or wishes.
- Fixation - arrest of maturation at certain stages of development
- Isolation - cutting of or blunting of an unacceptable aspect of a total experience.
- Introjection - symbolic assimilation or taking into oneself a love/hated object.
- Identification - conscious patterning of one's self from another person.
- Intellectualization - over use of intellectual concepts by an individual to avoid expression of feelings.
- Projection - attributing to others ones unconscious wishes/fear.
- Reaction-formation - expression of feeling that is the dir£ct opposite of one's real feeling.
- Rationalization - justifying one's action which are based on other motives.
- Regression - returning to an earlier level of develepment in the face of stress.
- Repression - unconscious forgetting.
- Suppression - "conscious forgetting", a deliberate process of thought blocking.
- Substitution - replacing the desired unattainabe goal with one that is attainable.
- Sublimation - the rechanneling of unacceptable instinctual drive with one that is acceptable.
- Symbolization - less threatening object is used to represent another.
- Undoing - an attempt to erase an act, thought, feeling or desire.
