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.

Continue "Defense Mechanisms III: Further Uses for Projection"

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.

Continue "Defense Mechanisms I: Splitting"