Defense Mechanisms Are The Most Important Of The Ego Function

Freud established the term defense mechanism, which helps cope with anxiety produced by the ego. People frequently have desires and urges that are deemed unacceptable within society. Cersei Lannister exhibits the use of defense mechanisms such as denial, displacement, and regression.

In the movie “Antwone Fisher” it’s clear that Antwone presents with several overlapping disorders, Post-traumatic Disorder, generalized anxiety disorders and depression. He suffered psychological, verbal, physical and sexual abuse early in his childhood. Deprived of several psychological developmental stages, trust vs mistrust (oral), autonomy vs shame and doubt (anal), initiative vs guilt (phallic), industry vs inferiority (latency), intimacy vs isolation (genital), as a young child was the cause of his neurodevelopmental disorders. Throughout his childhood Antwone adopted a vast number of defense mechanisms ego defense mechanisms to cope with his disorders specifically anxiety disorder. Several therapies are used to assist is in recover person-centered

People are exposed to struggles in life on a daily basis, although some individuals’ experiences are more traumatic than others’. The way people react to their challenges differs with trauma as well. In Daniel Gilbert’s Immune to Reality, Gilbert describes the psychological immune system, which is a defense mechanism of the mind. The psychological immune system is recognized as a way for the brain to find ways to deal with the harsh realities of life. Contrastingly, Martha Stout in When I Woke Up Tuesday Morning, It Was Friday focuses on dissociation, which is common in people who have experienced trauma. It is similar to Gilbert’s psychological immune system, as they are both mental systems of defense, but instead of helping an individual cope with hard times, dissociation causes complete separation of the mind from the body as an escape from reality. Dissociation from non-traumatic events is harmful to people’s psychological well-being because it makes

Jayawickreme, Foa, Sposato, and Williams, (2012) suggests that the ordeal of a stressful incident can have an undesirable influence on the manner people contemplate and perceive their individuality, other people, and the domain in which they reside. Point of view and emotional state are frequently correlated; therefore, trauma awareness may perform a part in choosing an

In chapter 15 of Exploring Psychology, the author discuss the basics of psychological disorders. Within this assignment, the psychological disorder of my choosing is Dissociative Identity Disorder. The commonality of the disorder is rare. Although we’ve disassociated ourselves in some form or the other with our ability to daydream, Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID) is more severe and is usually linked to trauma. Formerly the disorder was known as Multiple Personality Disorder (MPD). Individuals who suffer from this disorder usually have more than one aspect of themselves or personalities, whom he or she is completely unaware of. Sufferers of the disorder have to deal with a variety of symptoms such as memory loss, depression, anxiety, hallucinations, black-outs, impulsiveness, and perception of being detached from the self. The severity of the trauma is usually extreme, repetitive, and long-term. The individual may have an extensive history of physical, emotional, and/or sexual abuse.

She constantly tried to harm her brother and showed signs of dominance when she would abuse him and hurt his genitals. Since she was so engrossed on her body and discovering herself, she became stuck in this stage and as a result of not being able to move on she became aggressive, abusive, and wanting to harm others. Since she was so fixated on harming others, it led to this sadistic behavior and she had this conflict between the drives of the Id and the drives of the Ego. She had impulses to harm others as a result of her being harmed as a child. Being as though she wasn 't cared for and nurtured, she didn 't have loving relationships. She didn 't have the ability to trust others nor did she have the ability to be caring, towards anybody. Since she dealt with a lot of traumatic experiences, she’s been having the same recurring nightmares. She said she has this nightmare where “a man is falling on her and hurting her with a part of himself.” This was a familiar story that I 've once done but on Hysteria with a girl by the name of Bertha Pappenheim. She suffered from hysteria her symptoms are often the surface manifestations of deeply repressed conflicts. I later wrote about her in Studies in Hysteria” (1895). Bertha’s symptoms of this surface manifestation were due to her being sexually abused.

The bizarre fact regarding people, is they can be given everything necessary to live: food, water, shelter yet the way a person interacts with the world is majorly influenced by numerous other factors. Intimate relationships, such as the consistent involvement of family, is one factor that has an immense impact on how humans respond to different situations in life. Melinda Sordino, a high school student at Merryweather high, had been raped, at a party a couple weeks before freshman year. She deeply felt that nobody cared leading her to have socially distant herself from everyone and no longer putting any mindfulness into her outward appearance. Just in the matter of a few weeks, an entirely new Melinda had been fashioned without even the slightest acknowledgment or concern from her parents causing a chain of followed reactions.

Children need guidance and personal example from the adults around them to help them learn what is acceptable and what behaviour isn’t acceptable. Behaviour is greatly influenced by primary socialisation and children will react and take in how close family members act. Bandura developed the modelling idea where children would copy the adults around them. “There is much evidence that a child who witnesses or experiences violence at home may develop aggressive tendencies.” There are a number of different types of behaviour these include assertive, aggressive, submissive and manipulative behaviour.

The ego must make a balance between the id and the superego; trying to satisfy our needs whilst not offending the superego. The ego sometimes uses defence mechanisms to remove problems. Some examples are:

Jackson appeared withdrawn, and was somewhat embarrassed before stating that he did not do well in school. Jackson knows that he can perform better in school. When the other children began to tease Jackson, he was ready to fight some of them. This is typical behavior for Jackson, and is also a pattern of disorganized attachment. Children with a disorganized pattern in infancy tend to show disturbed patterns of relationships, subsequently, their relationships with peers can often be characterized by a “fight or flight” pattern of alternate aggression and withdrawal. Jackson’s coping skills when upset, threatened, or embarrassed is fight, unless the person is physically bigger than him. If this is the case, Jackson uses flight to cope, and seeks his grandmother for protection and comfort.

Freud saw the psyche structure into three parts, the id, ego and superego, all developing at different stages in our lives (McLeod). Freud's id can relate to my experience because when when the id is denied we will feel unpleasure or tension. When this situation was happening I was not happy and very tensed about the situation. This situation could question on how I look at relationships as I begin to grow older into that stage. Ericksons ideas were influenced by Freud’s theory regarding the structure of personality (McLeod). Erickson stated that the ego develops at it successfully resolves crises that are distinctly social in nature (McLeod). These involve establishing a sense of trust in other people and developing a new identity in society (McLeod). Erikson thought that if you witness others making decisions that you will follow and make that decision. During this hard time I did not know if I was going to be able to trust my uncle again because of the situation and stress he caused in our family, but I learned that you have to forgive others and to trust them again. I hope that I will never have to experience this situation myself even though I had witnessed this in my childhood. Vygotsky's theories stress the fundamental role of social interaction in the development of cognition, he believed that community plays a role in the process of “making meaning” (McLeod).

The defenses can also give us insight into our own mental processes--sometimes mental gymnastics or contortions. All defenses involve distortions of reality; they are ways of feeling better by fooling ourselves. If we realized these defenses in our lives, we might handle reality better. Almost all adjustment books mention these defense mechanisms, even the writers who are arrogantly critical of Freud. An excellent text about Sigmund and Anna Freud and the ego defenses is by Christopher Monte (1980).

Harding and Meldon-Smith (1999) and Sharman, Cross and Vennis (2007) provide milestones for children’s emotional development. When comparing these milestones to C’s development, it can be seen that C has only managed to reach about half of the milestones for her age in emotional development and all but a few of those for cognitive development. With regards to emotional development, C displayed a tendency to sulk rather than have an outburst (see appendix 2) and throughout time sampling observation (see appendix 1) was often seen to be watching what was going on around her. However, she failed to show an ability to control her emotions, and did not appear to be developing concepts such as forgiveness and fairness. C also appeared to have failed to reach one particular milestone for

In 1935 Anna became the director of the Vienna Psychoanalytical Training Institute and the following year she published another book, which was a very influential study of the “ways and means by which the ego wards off unpleasure and anxiety”, called The Ego and the Mechanisms of Defense. This book was different from the “traditional bases of psychoanalytical through in the drives: it became a founding work of ego psychology and established her reputation as a pioneering theoretician” (“Anna Freud - Life," n.d.).

According to Freud, there are three kinds of anxiety – reality, moral and neurotic. Reality anxiety is experienced when there is an actual danger coming from the external world. Moral anxiety arises when there is a conflict between one’s behavior and what the superego is demanding one to do. Finally, neurotic anxiety is felt when the ego feels incapable of controlling the id and the urges hiding in it. The tools people use to get rid of anxiety is what psychoanalysts call “Defense Mechanisms” (Schultz and Schultz, 2009). Defense mechanisms are different behavioral patterns, some of them are considered mature (for example humor) and some immature but what is important for this paper is that in psychoanalytic therapy, defense mechanisms are identified and the goal of the therapy is to overcome them and access the unconscious conflicts which are according to the Freudians the root of any mental problem. Moreover, all problems’ origin can be found in childhood - most often in a faulty relationship with one of the primary caregivers (Hough,