Psychology: Anxiety and Defense Mechanisms

The Nature of Anxiety

• Anxiety is a set of familiar, unpleasant physiological events, one may or may not know why they are afraid
• Anxiety is different from fear because one does not know what they are worried about, while fear is knowing what you are afraid of
• Anxiety can serve an important function by alerting one to possible danger
• In such cases, drives, such as sexual desire may cause anxiety

Freud's Theories of Anxiety

• First Theory: Anxiety is a manifestation of strangulated affect, where energy under pressure is released as anxiety
• Second Theory: Anxiety is the cause, not consequence of repression, the warning bell of danger to ward off evil thoughts
• Third Theory: Anxiety can be categorized as Realistic: Fear of the external world, **Moral:**Fear of punishment from the superego, Neurotic: Fear without a consciously recognized source (id)

Defense Mechanisms

• Defense mechanisms are unconscious activities of the ego used to regulate the psyche
• Repression is the process of pushing down psychic investment in an object, excluding libidinal desires from consciousness, pushing them out of the conscious.
• Denial shuts down threatening material from conscious, commonly seen in fainting. It shuts down traumatic memories to protect the psyche.
• Projection involves taking unwanted desires and projecting them onto others and seeing the world around us consumed with sex.
• Reaction Formation replaces urges by opposites, such as a homosexual preacher who is homophobic.
• Isolation involves repressing the affect associated with a threat, but the idea remains conscious such as violent obsessions
• Undoing is opposite of isolation, relieving the ego of obsessive thoughts, such as OCD
• Displacement transfers threatening drives to an easier target such as phobias and the "kick the dog" phenomenon.
• Sublimation redirects drive energy into something greater, such as a surgeon who loves to cut.

Psychoanalytic Therapy

• The ego strives to heal itself through awareness, accommodation and integration.
• The therapist aids the ego in its synthetic function through aligning it with the synthetic function of the patient.
• The therapist examines transference and repetition compulsion patterns
• Key components of therapeutic components are re-experiencing, area of safety, neutrality and equidistance, avoiding either-or thinking and analyzing the client.

Winnicott's Object Relations Theory

• Winnicott focused on the early mother-child relationship and saw maladaptive patterns emerging early in the relationship.
• Infants begin life in a non-integrated state with shifting sets of drives and needs, no sense of self at birth, only a mother-child dyad.
• The mother is biologically endowed to care for and help the infants develop toward psychological integration
• The holding environment is a responsibility to hold together the infant's psyche and create a place of calmness and security.
• A good mother responds to the child's needs and anticipates them, mirroring their needs and showing empathy through responsiveness.
• Caretakers fail to satisfy the child's needs through insensitivity, leading to the child losing touch with their own needs.
• True Self is promoted by a sensitive and responsive environment, while False Self is promoted by an insensitive mother.
• Good-enough Parenting is not about perfection, but about creating opportunities for the child to transition from subjective omnipotence to objective reality.

Kohut's Self Psychology

• Kohut believed that the self is the center of being, and that its development is necessary for healthy functioning.
• There are three main needs necessary for self-development: mirroring need, where the child needs to feel important and grandioase, idealizing need, where the child needs a caregiver to idealize, and the twinship need, where the child needs to feel connected to another.
• Transmuting internalization involves the child learning to satisfy their own needs in the absence of the parent.
• Kohut’s therapeutic technique focused on empathy, not need gratification, which satisfies the mirroring need of the patient and allows them to grapple with unmet needs without being overwhelmed.