Defense Mechanisms V: Idealization
Once again we have a concept familiar to most people. Idealizing a new love interest, hero worship, excessive and unwarranted optimism -- these experiences all depend upon the process of idealization. They also illustrate the point I tried to make in my last post, that these individual defense mechanisms we're discussing are to a degree artificially distinct categories and don't occur one-by-one. Idealizing a loved object involves denial of the parts of reality that undermine perfection. Extreme optimism involves denial of our doubts or questions about the future. Both processes involve splitting to some degree, where the perceptions or ideas that might lead to a more nuanced view are projected outside.
The process of idealization may take aim at several different objects: self, experience or another person. I'll discuss each one of those processes separately, but first I'd like to say something about what drives idealization. In graduate school, one of my professors once told us, "The worse the object, the more the need to idealize it." I don't remember which professor said it, and whether he was quoting from another theorist, but the expression has remained with me for nearly 30 years. In this sentence, the word "object" is used in its
theoretical sense, to mean another person -- as in, "the object of my affections."Â Given the emphasis on the mother-infant relationship in my training, I'm quite sure this professor meant that the experience of having a grossly deficient mother is excrutiating for the infant; the more intolerable that pain, the more likely he or she would be to defend against it either by idealizing the actual mother or escaping from her into a relationship with a perfect one in fantasy.
If you pursued the latter defensive strategy, you might spend the rest of your life looking for a perfect object to love. As described in an earlier post on love junkies, you might cycle in and out of infatuation, believing you have finally found The One this time, only to succumb again to disillusionment. I'm sure this phenomenon will be familiar to most of you. Another way of conceptualizing that process is that the person uses the heady and idealized feeling of being in love as if it were a kind of drug to ward off pain. Perfect love as the antidote to other unbearable emotions. (Just don't call it an "addiction"; if you've been reading my site for a while, you know how I feel about the thoughtless way people use the language of addiction to describe everything.)
One of my clients, Kay, for several years dated the same two men in rotation. She'd spend an idyllic weekend with Rod and decide he must be her soul-mate. Then a week later, he'd begin to grate on her nerves and she'd "realize" that Danny was the right guy instead. The honeymoon period with Danny would eventually wear off, of course, and back she'd go to Rod. And on and on. Helping her to have a more realistic relationship with a man, and with her own pain, was extremely difficult. She kept me and our work together at a great distance through her preoccupation with these two men, and the continual dilemma over which one to choose.
Continue "Defense Mechanisms V: Idealization"