Some Of Our Destructive Tricks :p

[Lauren]

Rationalization: Giving excuses for shortcomings and thereby avoiding self-condemnation, disappointments, or criticism by others. Examples: After stealing from a large company, "they won't miss it. Everybody does it." After getting about average grades on the GRE (not good enough to get into Ph. D. programs), "I would have hated five more years of research and theory anyway." This is called "sour grapes," from Aesop's tale about the fox who decided the grapes too high to reach were sour anyway. The reverse is "sweet lemons," an assumption that everything happens for the best, "failing the GRE's was a blessing in disguise, now I know I want to become a counselor--maybe a social worker--and not a Ph. D."

Projection: Attributing to others one's own unacceptable thoughts, feelings, impulses, etc. So, the white person with repressed sexual urges may believe that all blacks are preoccupied with sex. The moralistic spouse, who is tempted to have an affair, begins to suspicion that his/her partner has been unfaithful. A slightly different form of paranoid projection is when a self-critical feeling or idea is attributed to others. Suppose a young woman from a religious family has strong feelings against any sexual urges she might have and, thus, almost never has them. She might start to believe, however, that others are critical of her whenever she wears a dress that shows her shape.

Displacement: redirecting our impulses (often anger) from the real target (because that is too dangerous) to a safer but innocent person. The classic case is the frustrated worker, who can't yell at the boss but comes home and yells at the spouse, who yells at the children, who kick the dog, i.e. we take it out on the people we love. Suppose we were very envious of the relationship between our sister and our mother. Our feelings may never be expressed towards them directly but take the form of resentment and distrust of most other women.

Another form of displacement is what Anna Freud described as "turning-against-self." In the last example, instead of the hatred of one's sister and mother being turned on women in general, it could be turned against oneself. This is a commonly assumed dynamic in depression and suicide.

Reaction formation: a denial and reversal of our feelings. Love turns into hate or hate into love. "Hell has no fury like a spurned lover." Where there is intense friction between a child and a parent, it can be converted into exaggerated shows of affection, sometimes sickeningly sweet and overly polite. The feelings and actions resulting from a reaction formation are often excessive, for instance the loud, macho male may be concealing (from himself) sexual self-doubts or homosexual urges. Or, the person who is unconsciously attracted to the same sex may develop an intense hatred of gays. People, such as TV preachers, who become crusaders against "loose morals" may be struggling with their own sexual impulses.

Identification: allying with someone else and becoming like them in order to allay anxiety. Remember Freud's notion that the Oedipus and Electra Complexes are resolved by identification with the same sexed parent. Other examples: occasionally an oppressed person will identify with the oppressor, some Jews helped Hitler, some women want their husbands to be dominant and feel superior to them and other women. In other cases, a person may associate with and emulate an admired person or group to reduce anxiety. High school cliques serve this purpose. A new college freshman may feel tense and alone and out of place; she notices that most other students are "a little dressed up," not sloppy shirt and jeans. Her roommates insist on studying from 7:00 to 10:00 every night except Friday and Saturday; they are more serious than her old friends and their conversations reflect these differences. They commented about her "country" accent and the fact that she didn't watch the news. She started dressing up occasionally, watched the news, got more interested in politics, and studied a lot more than ever before. When she went home at Christmas, her friends told her she had changed and dad commented that he was losing his little girl. She didn't know it but she had identified with a new group and learned to feel more comfortable.

Sublimation: transforming unacceptable needs into acceptable ambitions and actions. One may convert a compelling interest in getting a parent's attention into a drive to do well in school. Sexual drives can be pored into sports. Anger and resentment of the advantages of others can be funneled into an obsession to excel in a lucrative career.

Fantasy: daydreams and their substitutes--novels and TV Soaps--are escapes, a way to avoid our real worries or boredom. We may imagine being highly successful when we feel unsuccessful; at least we feel better for the moment. Actually, we often benefit by rehearsing in fantasy for future successes. At other times, fantasies may provide a way to express feelings we need to get off our chest. Fantasy is only a defense when it is an escape. Anticipation of the future through fantasy is a mark of an intelligent species.

Many self-help methods use fantasy: covert rehearsal, covert sensitization, desensitization, venting feelings, decision making, empathy, increasing motivation and awareness and many others. If fantasies can be therapeutic, then they can be harmful, e.g. imagining awful consequences could create fears, sad thoughts may produce depression, reliving an insult in fantasy might build anger. Fantasy may be part of the problem or part of the solution.

Compensation or substitution: trying to make up for some feeling of inadequacy by excelling in some way. Alfred Adler, a free-thinking student of Freud, observed that feelings of weakness and inferiority are common when we are young. Much of life, he thought, was devoted to compensating for our real or imaginary weaknesses, i.e. striving for superiority. Both men and women strive for power, competency, courage, wealth, and independence. Karen Horney wrote, "The neurotic striving for power...is born of anxiety, hatred and feelings of inferiority. ...the normal striving for power is born of strength, the neurotic of weakness."

Sometimes we work on improving in the area we are weak in, so the skinny, shy child becomes Miss or Mr. America or the kid with speech problems becomes a politician (like Demosthenes with rocks in his mouth or Winston Churchill). Sometimes we find other areas to make up for our weaknesses; the unattractive student becomes an outstanding scholar, the average student becomes an outstanding athlete, the person in an unsatisfying marriage becomes deeply involved with the children. These are compensatory substitutions. Many are good ways of handling stress; some are not, as when an unloved teenager seeks love promiscuously.

Undoing: if you have done something bad, sometimes you can undo it or make up for it. Example: if you have said some very critical and hurtful things about one of your parents or a friend, later you may try to undo the harm by saying nice things about them or by be being nice to them and apologizing (sometimes it is the overdone apology that reveals the hostility). In essence it is having the decency to feel guilty and do something about it.

Freud used undoing to explain certain obsessive-compulsive acts, e.g. a 17-year-old with masturbation guilt felt compelled to recite the alphabet backwards every time he had a sexual thought. He thought that would undo the sin.

Intellectualization or isolation: hiding one's emotional responses or problems under a facade of big words and pretending one has no problem. Suppose you were listening to a friend describe going through his parents' divorce. He may tell about deeply hurtful situations but show no sadness or anger; he gives a superficial behavioral description of what happened; he might even clinically "analyze" his parents' underlying motives without showing his own emotions. Likewise, people may discuss war without vividly feeling the misery of many people dying. This is a repression of the painful parts. Freud believed that the compulsive hand-washer was trying to cleanse his hands of the guilt of masturbation but the feeling of guilt was separated from the hand-washing.

[LadyMacbeth]

Wow Lorna where are you finding this stuff I feel like its written about me! I can completely relate!

Rationalization: Giving excuses for shortcomings and thereby avoiding self-condemnation, disappointments, or criticism by others. Examples: After stealing from a large company, "they won't miss it. Everybody does it." After getting about average grades on the GRE (not good enough to get into Ph. D. programs), "I would have hated five more years of research and theory anyway." This is called "sour grapes," from Aesop's tale about the fox who decided the grapes too high to reach were sour anyway. The reverse is "sweet lemons," an assumption that everything happens for the best, "failing the GRE's was a blessing in disguise, now I know I want to become a counselor--maybe a social worker--and not a Ph. D."

Projection: Attributing to others one's own unacceptable thoughts, feelings, impulses, etc. So, the white person with repressed sexual urges may believe that all blacks are preoccupied with sex. The moralistic spouse, who is tempted to have an affair, begins to suspicion that his/her partner has been unfaithful. A slightly different form of paranoid projection is when a self-critical feeling or idea is attributed to others. Suppose a young woman from a religious family has strong feelings against any sexual urges she might have and, thus, almost never has them. She might start to believe, however, that others are critical of her whenever she wears a dress that shows her shape.

Displacement: redirecting our impulses (often anger) from the real target (because that is too dangerous) to a safer but innocent person. The classic case is the frustrated worker, who can't yell at the boss but comes home and yells at the spouse, who yells at the children, who kick the dog, i.e. we take it out on the people we love. Suppose we were very envious of the relationship between our sister and our mother. Our feelings may never be expressed towards them directly but take the form of resentment and distrust of most other women.

Another form of displacement is what Anna Freud described as "turning-against-self." In the last example, instead of the hatred of one's sister and mother being turned on women in general, it could be turned against oneself. This is a commonly assumed dynamic in depression and suicide.

Reaction formation: a denial and reversal of our feelings. Love turns into hate or hate into love. "Hell has no fury like a spurned lover." Where there is intense friction between a child and a parent, it can be converted into exaggerated shows of affection, sometimes sickeningly sweet and overly polite. The feelings and actions resulting from a reaction formation are often excessive, for instance the loud, macho male may be concealing (from himself) sexual self-doubts or homosexual urges. Or, the person who is unconsciously attracted to the same sex may develop an intense hatred of gays. People, such as TV preachers, who become crusaders against "loose morals" may be struggling with their own sexual impulses.

Identification: allying with someone else and becoming like them in order to allay anxiety. Remember Freud's notion that the Oedipus and Electra Complexes are resolved by identification with the same sexed parent. Other examples: occasionally an oppressed person will identify with the oppressor, some Jews helped Hitler, some women want their husbands to be dominant and feel superior to them and other women. In other cases, a person may associate with and emulate an admired person or group to reduce anxiety. High school cliques serve this purpose. A new college freshman may feel tense and alone and out of place; she notices that most other students are "a little dressed up," not sloppy shirt and jeans. Her roommates insist on studying from 7:00 to 10:00 every night except Friday and Saturday; they are more serious than her old friends and their conversations reflect these differences. They commented about her "country" accent and the fact that she didn't watch the news. She started dressing up occasionally, watched the news, got more interested in politics, and studied a lot more than ever before. When she went home at Christmas, her friends told her she had changed and dad commented that he was losing his little girl. She didn't know it but she had identified with a new group and learned to feel more comfortable.

Sublimation: transforming unacceptable needs into acceptable ambitions and actions. One may convert a compelling interest in getting a parent's attention into a drive to do well in school. Sexual drives can be pored into sports. Anger and resentment of the advantages of others can be funneled into an obsession to excel in a lucrative career.

Fantasy: daydreams and their substitutes--novels and TV Soaps--are escapes, a way to avoid our real worries or boredom. We may imagine being highly successful when we feel unsuccessful; at least we feel better for the moment. Actually, we often benefit by rehearsing in fantasy for future successes. At other times, fantasies may provide a way to express feelings we need to get off our chest. Fantasy is only a defense when it is an escape. Anticipation of the future through fantasy is a mark of an intelligent species.

Many self-help methods use fantasy: covert rehearsal, covert sensitization, desensitization, venting feelings, decision making, empathy, increasing motivation and awareness and many others. If fantasies can be therapeutic, then they can be harmful, e.g. imagining awful consequences could create fears, sad thoughts may produce depression, reliving an insult in fantasy might build anger. Fantasy may be part of the problem or part of the solution.

Compensation or substitution: trying to make up for some feeling of inadequacy by excelling in some way. Alfred Adler, a free-thinking student of Freud, observed that feelings of weakness and inferiority are common when we are young. Much of life, he thought, was devoted to compensating for our real or imaginary weaknesses, i.e. striving for superiority. Both men and women strive for power, competency, courage, wealth, and independence. Karen Horney wrote, "The neurotic striving for power...is born of anxiety, hatred and feelings of inferiority. ...the normal striving for power is born of strength, the neurotic of weakness."

Sometimes we work on improving in the area we are weak in, so the skinny, shy child becomes Miss or Mr. America or the kid with speech problems becomes a politician (like Demosthenes with rocks in his mouth or Winston Churchill). Sometimes we find other areas to make up for our weaknesses; the unattractive student becomes an outstanding scholar, the average student becomes an outstanding athlete, the person in an unsatisfying marriage becomes deeply involved with the children. These are compensatory substitutions. Many are good ways of handling stress; some are not, as when an unloved teenager seeks love promiscuously.

Undoing: if you have done something bad, sometimes you can undo it or make up for it. Example: if you have said some very critical and hurtful things about one of your parents or a friend, later you may try to undo the harm by saying nice things about them or by be being nice to them and apologizing (sometimes it is the overdone apology that reveals the hostility). In essence it is having the decency to feel guilty and do something about it.

Freud used undoing to explain certain obsessive-compulsive acts, e.g. a 17-year-old with masturbation guilt felt compelled to recite the alphabet backwards every time he had a sexual thought. He thought that would undo the sin.

Intellectualization or isolation: hiding one's emotional responses or problems under a facade of big words and pretending one has no problem. Suppose you were listening to a friend describe going through his parents' divorce. He may tell about deeply hurtful situations but show no sadness or anger; he gives a superficial behavioral description of what happened; he might even clinically "analyze" his parents' underlying motives without showing his own emotions. Likewise, people may discuss war without vividly feeling the misery of many people dying. This is a repression of the painful parts. Freud believed that the compulsive hand-washer was trying to cleanse his hands of the guilt of masturbation but the feeling of guilt was separated from the hand-washing.

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[lille_eskimit]

That's spooky!! It's me all over!!!

[Daisy]

You have som eGREAT Information - i can realte to so much it is scary - thnks so so much for sharing.