Sixteen Psychoanalytic Concepts for Our Time

Psychological defenses operate individually and culturally.

Mental and emotional dysfunction take different forms in different places and times. For example, conversion symptoms—like psychologically-induced blindness, paralysis, or “glove anesthesia”—were common in Victorian-era Vienna, but not so much today.

Here’s a handful of psychoanalytic concepts that seem especially relevant to our own cultural moment:

1. Splitting: Perceiving others in black-and-white categories; seeing them as one-dimensional, all good or all bad.

2. Denial: Refusal to acknowledge reality when it doesn’t align with your wishes or preferences.

3. Omnipotent Control: Seeking to control others’ behavior, speech, and even their thoughts; insisting they think your thoughts instead of their own.

4. Devaluation: Denigrating or dismissing certain people or groups; seeing them as having lesser value or importance.

5. Moral Masochism: Believing your suffering makes you more important or more virtuous; for example, feeling morally superior in proportion to your suffering or victimization.

6. Projection: Being unaware of undesirable feelings and motives in oneself (for example, spite, hate, cruelty, envy) and mistakenly seeing them in someone else. (Goes hand-in-hand with splitting; see #1.)

7. Transference: Responding to someone in the present as if they were a figure from your past—for example, hating someone today because they unconsciously remind you of someone who hurt you growing up.

8. False Self: A false sense of identity created to gain approval or meet others’ expectations, in place of exploring and developing an authentic sense of self.

9. Omnipotence: Believing and insisting you have power over other people or circumstances; insistence that your desires and preferences can and should override reality.

10. Externalization: Blaming other people or circumstances for your own difficulties, instead of acknowledging responsibility for your own conduct and choices, or considering your role in shaping events.

11. Reaction Formation: Masking underlying feelings and attitudes by expressing their opposite to an exaggerated degree; for example, lavishing approval and praise on a person or group you unconsciously disdain.

12. Destructive envy: An impulse to attack or destroy what you cannot have or cannot be—as if to say, “If I can’t have it, it must not be allowed to exist.”

13. Repetition and Enactment: Something we don’t want to know or understand about ourselves gets played out with others over and over; repeating life or relationship patterns without insight or awareness.

14. External Splitting: Treating others in ways that push them into polarized, opposing camps, for or against you (generally accompanies internal splitting; see #1).

15. Displacement: Redirecting feelings from one person or situation to a different, safer target; for example, punishing someone who cannot defend themselves instead of someone powerful or needed.

16. Projective Identification: Projecting unacknowledged feelings or motives onto someone else—then treating them in ways that provoke the feelings you’ve projected; for example, projecting rage onto someone else, then provoking them until they actually become enraged (goes with splitting and projection; see #1 and #6).

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