Psychoanalytic Theory: Anxiety and Defense Mechanisms

• The goal is to be able to distinguish between reality anxiety, neurotic anxiety, and moral anxiety and describe and generate examples of defense mechanisms.
• The associations between defense mechanisms and psychological adjustment should be considered.
• The techniques of psychoanalytic therapy should be reviewed.
• Key entities include: resistance, transference, processes of dream analysis, dream work, manifest content, latent content, condensation, displacement, symbolism, and secondary revision.
• It's important to discuss the contemporary applications and efficacy of psychoanalytic theory.

Types of Anxiety

• Anxiety first occurs when taken out of the womb and the id is threatened.
• Anxiety is object less fear- unconscious factors that give rise to anxiety.

Reality Anxiety

• Involves tangible, real dangers with conflict between the ego and constraints of external reality.

Neurotic Anxiety

• Involves punishment for the expression of id impulses, there's conflict between the id and ego.
• Safe expression doesn't sync with superego.

Moral Anxiety

• Fear of guilt and/or shame by superego, includes revenge by the superego with conflict between the ego and superego.
• The ego navigates demands of the id and rational for the superego in all three forms of anxiety.

Ego Strategies for anxiety

• Rational strategies that the ego may employ include removing from a threatening situation, inhibiting expression of id impulses and adhering to the moral codes of conscience
• Defence mechanisms are irrational strategies the ego employs when it cannot use rational ones.
• Defence mechanisms involve distortion of reality and operate in the unconscious mind.

Psychoanalytic Defense Mechanisms (Developed by Freud's Daughter Ana)

• Denial is when one refuses to acknowledge threatening information and refuses to acknowledge evidence linking smoking to mortality.
• Repression is shifting threatening information to the unconscious, such as in "motivated forgetting" or a lack of memory regarding childhood sexual abuse.
• Projection is attributing a threatening characteristic in oneself to other people, like paranoia.
• Rationalization is creating a seemingly logical explanation for shameful behavior, such as justification for tax evasion.
• Intellectualization is thinking about threatening information in a cold, analytical manner, like in the development of military strategy
• Displacement is redirecting a threatening impulse to a relatively safe target, such as child abuse
• Reaction formation is reacting in a manner that is the opposite of a threatening impulse, often exaggerated in form, such as homophobia
• Regression is using an immature pattern of gratification/coping like overeating in response to stress
• Sublimation is expressing a threatening impulse through "noble" action, like work of a surgeon.
• Denial is the most immature form of defence mechanism.
• Adults with denial tend to lack insight.
• Sublimation is the most adaptive defence mechanism.
• All defense mechanisms are associated with low self-esteem and are positively correlated with anxiety.
• Denial is an exception, since it is correlated with high levels of self-esteem and low levels of anxiety.

Therapeutic Methods

• Therapeutic Methods From psychoanalytic theory by Freud involves restructuring personality, overcoming fixations and maladaptive personality types and attempts to bring unconscious conflicts to conscious awareness, enabling insight.

Psychoanalytic Techniques

• Free association involves the therapist sitting where they cannot be seen by the patient, and the patient says whatever comes to mind (daydreaming).
• When a patient feels resistance towards a content, the therapist realizes they are close to an unconscious content.
• The therapist interprets the patients statements to identify unconscious conflicts
• The analyst reveals the conflicts, allowing the patients to resolve them.
• The goal of psychoanalysis is not to reduce distress but to bring insight for the patient.

Dream Analysis

• Involves patients recounting their dreams through free association.
• Manifest content refers to the narrative of the dream as it is consciously remembered.
• Latent content refers to the underlying meaning of the manifest content, including memories and fantasies.
• The therapist analyzes dreams and allocates conflicts.
• The core of dream work involves these mechanisms.

Mechanisms Of Dream Work

• Condensation compress several latent elements into a single manifest image (ex. Hostility represented by axe)
• Displacement replaces a safe content for something threatening (ex. Abusive father represented as old week men)
• Symbolism uses common and acceptable image to symbolize unacceptable latent element (ex. Stick representing a penis)

Importance and Applications of Psychoanalytic Theories

• Contemporary applications of psychoanalytic theory can be found in academic psychology, late psychology, study of childhood experience, unconscious experience, psychological conflict, defense mechanisms, emotional experience and expression, therapeutic intervention, resistance, transference and free association.
• Wishes, fantasies and dreams.
• Effect sizes of psychoanalytic therapies are at least as effective as CBT.
• Specifically for personality psychology. Neoanalytic theories include feminine psychology, analytical psychology, ego and object relations.