That Was Then, This is Now: An Introduction to Contemporary Psychodynamic Psychotherapy (Part 6)

Part 6 of 7: Defense

This work is in seven parts. Here are links to each section.

Part 1: Roots of misunderstanding
Part 2: Unconscious mental life
Part 3: The mind in conflict
Part 4: The past lives on in the present
Part 5: Transference
Part 6: Defense ◀
Part 7: Psychological causation

Defense

Once we recognize there are things we prefer not to know, we find ourselves thinking about how it is that we avoid knowing. Anything a person does that serves to distract his or her attention from something unsettling or dissonant can be said to serve a defensive function. There is nothing at all mysterious about defensive processes. Defense is as simple as not noticing something, not thinking about something, not putting two and two together, or simply distracting ourselves with something else. The psychoanalyst Herbert Schlesinger (2003) described defense in the context of systems theory. Systems (biological and psychological) regulate themselves to maintain equilibrium or homeostasis (for example, biological regulatory processes work to keep our body temperature near 98.6 degrees Fahrenheit despite large variations in outside temperature). When something is sufficiently dissonant with our habitual ways of thinking, feeling, and perceiving that it would disrupt psychological equilibrium, we tend to avoid, deny, disregard, minimize, or otherwise disavow it. Family systems therapists work to disrupt homeostatic processes that maintain dysfunctional family patterns, expecting that the system will reorganize in a more adaptive way. Analogously, psychoanalytic therapists work to disrupt homeostatic processes that maintain problems in living.