Freud's Defense Mechanisms - Essay Example

In the process, when the ego is overwhelmed by trying to cope with strong impulses that contradict social norms, or reality that is hard to accept, it generates anxiety. The ego uses defense mechanisms to cope with the anxiety and from preventing the anxiety from causing psychic imbalance. Defense mechanisms are therefore unconscious psychological processes that distort reality into a form that can be coped with by the ego. They can enable the individual to function normally, but in some cases they can be unhealthy or unhelpful.

This paper will discuss three common defense mechanisms proposed by Freud used every day. Discussion Denial Denial is a defense mechanism where an individual simply refuses to believe that a fact is true. It protects the person from experiencing the extreme distress, grief, fear or any other negative emotion that would accompany actual acceptance of the fact. An example is when I recently dropped my cell phone on the ground, and when I picked it up I found that it had stopped working. It was an expensive phone that I had bought recently with some of my savings, and I could not bear losing it.

I should have accepted that it was destroyed, but I denied it to myself that anything was wrong with it. I told myself that its battery must be discharged, and that it would start working after I charged it. I put it on charge, but it still didn’t work. I then took it to a cell phone shop for getting it repaired. They took the set and worked on it for a few weeks, and finally told me it could not be fixed. Again, I denied that it was true and took the phone to another store. After their reply that the phone was dead, I finally came to accept that it was true.

During the interval that I was waiting for the phone to be repaired, I was also thinking subconsciously about how to pay for a new phone. By the time I finally accepted that my phone was finished, I was ready to start the process of buying a new one without feeling too unhappy. Thus, the denial defense mechanism helped me cope with the situation by sparing me the grief and shock of suddenly losing my precious phone. Displacement In displacement, an individual who develops negative feelings towards one object but is not able to express them due to social or other reasons, displaces them to express them inappropriately on another object that was not involved in invoking those feelings.

Displacement commonly involves feelings that were felt for a threatening object, that are expressed on a less threatening object. For example, I was once stuck in traffic and was late in meeting some friends at a dinner. When I finally arrived at the joint, a couple of people I had been eager to see had left. I was also hungry and therefore angry at the traffic. However, as it was not possible to express that anger on the traffic, I found myself feeling annoyed towards the serving staff of the joint.

I complained loudly about minor issues, such missing my paper napkin. I did not realize this association at the time, but afterwards. Defense mechanisms such as displacement can be unhelpful and generate new problems, as in this scenario I was unnecessarily sharp with the staff. Sublimation In sublimation, an individual acts out on unacceptable impulses by adopting a culturally acceptable