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."  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.
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Defense Mechanisms IV: “Thinking”

In an early post entitled Breathe More, Think Less, I introduced the idea that thinking, particularly verbal thought, can serve as a type of psychological defense.  I'd like to revisit that subject today and explore it in greater detail as part of this series on the defense mechanisms.  One recent email from a site visitor mentioned non-stop "chatter" in his head; because so many people seem to suffer from an uncontrollable word-flow in their
thoughts, it seems an important subject to discuss.  Much of what I have to say appeared in an overly-condensed way in that earlier post.

As discussed in my piece on post-traumatic stress disorder, when the early experience of helplessness feels unbearable, for whatever reason, we may try to blot out awareness of that experience; that particular defense mechanism would be called denial, or more precisely, denial of psychic reality.  Another response might be to take flight into precocious intellectual development, which also involves a kind of denial:  I am not small, helpess and afraid; I'm really quite highly developed -- just listen to what I can do with words! In such cases, intellectual and verbal ability develop prematurely, but detached from authentic experience as a defense against it; words take on a life of their own and are often felt to have a magical ability to ward off pain.
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Defense Mechanisms III: Further Uses for Projection

In writing these posts about the defense mechanisms, two points have become clear to me.  First, it's easy to forget that our description of the processes we have named projection, denial, spitting etc. are simply the best way we have of talking about mysterious and intricate mental events.  It's important not to think about them too concretely and to bear in mind that our descriptions are merely approximations to a truth that may alter in appearance as we change our vantage point, the way a three-dimensional object presents a different aspect depending on the viewing angles.  A psychic event described as denial, for example, might just as easily be described as a form of splitting; it depends on how you look at it, though only our language and not the psychic event itself has changed.

Second, while we may talk about defenses in isolation as if they were discrete processes, they tend to occur together, as part of a global mental event.  A painful experience may be denied and at the same split-off and projected into the environment, then experienced as if it were coming from outside the self.  In my school of thought, we often use the phrase "splitting and projective identification" because those defense mechanisms usually occur in unison.

One of the earliest posts written for this site discussed two functions of projection:  as a primitive form of communication, and as a means to get rid of experience too painful to bear.  Building upon that article, I'd like to focus now on how we use projection to avoid
conflict rather than resolving or bearing with it.  I don't mean external conflict with other people but internal conflict where, for example, impulse comes into conflict with common sense or long-term goals.  If you have teenage children, this process should be easy to
recognize.

Say, for instance, your son or daughter has homework to do that conflicts with a social invitation.  With younger children, we simply insist they complete their school assignment before play; we may have to remain firm in the face of an ensuing tantrum.  By their mid-
teens, most kids have an internal parent who understands the need to defer gratification, though this doesn't mean they always listen to it.  Often the desire to have what they want right now leads them to split off and project the internal parent into the external one; in this way, they don't have to know what they know, don't have to give up an immediate pleasure for their longer-term benefit.  When this type of splitting and projection comes into play, it tends to occur in exaggerated terms of black-and-white:  your teenager is a free spirit who wants to embrace life; you're an unreasonable dictator who no longer remembers what it's like to be young.

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Defense Mechanisms II: Denial

Like projection and repression, denial is one of those psychological concepts that most people understand to some degree. It originated in the psychodynamic theories of Sigmund Freud, and his daughter Anna Freud wrote about it at length in The Ego and the Mechanisms of Defense.  Today,  virtually all psychotherapists recognize its existence, whether or not they regard it as clinically significant.  With the popularization of her Five Stages of Grief, Elisabeth Kubler-Ross raised the public profile of denial (the first of those stages) and the prevalence of 12-step programs has also promoted awareness of the concept:  a basic step in addressing addiction is to admit that you are, in fact, an addict, rather than to remain in denial about it.  The concept has become so much a part of our cultural knowledge that even  kids nowadays make joking reference to it:  The teenage son of a friend once told her (I no longer remember the occasion), "You are on that long river called Denial."  Search that phrase on Google and you'll get millions of results.

"You are in denial" is something most people have said or heard at one point or another in their lifetimes.  The expression generally refers to the denial of a fact.  "You're in denial -- can't you see she has no interest you?"  Or:  "He is never going to leave his wife -- you're in denial."  The concept is a simple one.  An unacceptable fact exists, one that conflicts with our wishes or beliefs, and so we deny that it is true.  We may also deny a feeling, especially if we've received cultural or parental messages that tell us such a feeling is unacceptable.   As a result of internalizing those messages, we may hide the existence of those feelings even from ourselves.  "I do not feel angry." Or:  "No, I don't hate my sister."

As with most defenses, the existence of a conflict often motivates denial:   a fact conflicts with our wishes, or a feeling conflicts with our values and so we deny it.  Such denial can occur on the individual or group level, as with individual Holocaust deniers and whole countries that insist it never occurred. The wish to avoid pain also drives us to use denial.  Feelings of guilt for something that occurred may be unbearable to us so we deny responsibility for it.  I believe this variety of denial can also occur on group and national levels:  unbearable guilt surely plays some part in Holocaust denial and other instances of genocide.

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Defense Mechanisms I: Splitting

Although this post will look at splitting as one of the defense mechanisms, I'd like to begin by noting that splitting also represents a normal and constructive part of our mental processes.  We couldn't think or process our experience without it.  To understand the useful functions that splitting serves, we need to go through the same kind of imaginative exercise I presented in my recent post on post-traumatic stress disorder -- that is, to try to envision the emotional life of an infant.

For centuries, philosophers and scientists have debated whether human beings enter the world with some kind of a priori knowledge, but for this exercise, let's just imagine a clean slate.  Nearly everything the newborn experiences is thus brand new and unfamiliar; a central need is to make sense of it all, to attempt to understand the environment and its powerful effects.  From the beginning, maybe even in utero, the infant divides its experiences into those that feel "good" or gratifying vs. those that cause pain and/or frustration and feel "bad".  Good vs. bad (though not in a moral sense) is therefore the first organizing principle.  It depends upon the infant splitting the confusing mass of its experience into good and bad, dividing it up so that it becomes more understandable and predictable.

The accumulation of "good" experiences, linked to repeated sensory gratification, eventually gives rise to the idea of "mother"; the bad ones (a bit later) give rise to the idea of her absence or failure to appear.  An important developmental milestone occurs when the infant can understand (on a very primitive level) that the "good" experiences largely occur when this mother-entity appears and tends to it, and the bad ones (hunger, cold, etc.) tend to occur when she is absent.  At this point, the infant becomes aware that other people exist, and if you're a parent, you know that there's a noticeable difference when this occurs.  (I'm not going to talk about the good mother/bad mother issue just now; I'll save that topic for another post.)

Splitting as a mental process thus enables us to makes distinctions.  Throughout life, splitting serves this exact function:  it allows us to take an undifferentiated, confusing mass of experience or information and divide it into categories that have meaning.  Without splitting, nothing would make sense to us.  We wouldn't be able to understand because we couldn't divide the mass of sensory input into meaningful categories.  Projection likewise has valuable and normal functions, as do other so-called defense mechanisms.

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