defense mechanisms

Several readers responding to my recent post about a client who felt invisible have asked me to discuss the opposite experience — the person who fears being seen and desperately wants to remain invisible. It’s…

When an anti-Islamic loner explodes a bomb outside a government building, killing eight people, then travels to a nearby island where he guns down 69 more, we naturally view that man as a dangerous lunatic….

The upcoming revision to the APA’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual will purportedly eliminate Asperger’s Syndrome as a diagnosis, once again calling into question the scientific precision and validity of psychological diagnosis.

Mindfulness meditation techniques are a useful adjunct to psychotherapy, allowing you to see your defense mechanisms in action and to disengage from them, rather than a replacement for it.

Reaction formation, like all defense mechanisms, is an unconscious process. People with conscious but secret desires they publicly denounce in others are not resorting to reaction formation; they are hypocrites.