The human body is equipped with defence mechanisms that protect it from some external biological risks (the skin, lymph nodes, spleen and many others). In the same way, the psyche develops defense mechanisms that defend it from suffering or, in terms closer to psychoanalysis, from the tension that is generated in the conflict between the opposing tendencies that move it. The conflict that arises between desires and external reality produces in the individual a state of anguish, which is of variable intensity depending on the way in which the environment exercises the function of limit and control to the immediate satisfaction of the drive. In response to this conflict, the ego makes the defense mechanisms act. They are unconscious mechanisms implemented by the ego to defend itself and create a compromise to maintain a certain degree of balance and adaptation in response to the environment. Freud and psychoanalysis It is Freud who discovered and identified the defense mechanisms and traced their characteristics. Freud postulates that they are mechanisms that protect the ego and therefore are not pathological but adaptive, we need them to survive. After Freud, there have been numerous studies focused on understanding what defense mechanisms are and how they work, starting with the work of his daughter Anna who in her The Ego and the Mechanisms of Defense (1936) Anna Freud listed the defense mechanisms. his father's work. Numerous scholars later expanded and deepened the study of the ego and its defense mechanisms. What they are: The defense mechanisms are functions of the ego aimed at protecting it from impulses or experiences that are too intense or perceived as impossible to cope with. What they are: Although there is no definitive list that includes all the defense mechanisms, those identified and studied to date are: Denial, Dissociation or Splitting, Idealization, Devaluation, Identification, Identification with the aggressor, Projective identification: process of projection, Rationalization, Intellectualization: rational drive control, Introjection, Reactive formation, Removal, Projection, Displacement, Sublimation, Condensation, Repression , retroactive cancellation, Regression, Demerger. The defense mechanisms can be primary or secondary depending on the phase of psychic development in which they are formed. What they are for: in psychoanalytic theory those of defense are mechanisms that are formed during childhood and that help the ego to face reality. For this reason they are also defined as adaptive: in fact they protect the ego from what is perceived as unsustainable and disruptive and we need it to survive. How they work: A defense mechanism comes into action in ways outside the sphere of consciousness: in the face of a situation that generates excessive distress, for example, the ego resorts to various strategies to cope with the extreme anxious scope of the event , with the primary aim of excluding from conscience what is considered unacceptable and dangerous. They are unconscious mechanisms by which the person is not aware of them, he acts them without realizing it. Defense mechanisms rarely intervene separately: in most cases they are combined to cope with the event or effect under several profiles.
