Freud Defense Mechanisms

In reading this chapter about Freud, I found that his concepts of defense mechanisms were the most relevant to my own personality. I can definitely apply this theory to my own experiences and my personality because I have used probably about all of these to express my emotions. I can tell from my own personality that whenever I use a defense mechanism, mostly the ones that have to do with expressing an emotion, I tend to feel better about the situation, even though it may only be for a few minutes. These defense mechanisms help me understand my personality in relation to how and why I express my emotions the way I do. I can think of various examples where I’ve used a defense mechanism and for the most part, I was doing them consciously and

The most common one I see is displacement. Many people I know, myself included, tend to take our anger out on other things or other people. I know in watching way too many episodes of Law and Order: SVU, in most cases, the person committing the crime has underlying emotional or psychological problems and they tend to express those problems on other people. In episodes where there is a victim of domestic abuse, the abuser is taking their anger out on their significant other because they cannot seem to find another way to express that emotion. Another common one that I see and also use is repression. I tend to repress my actually feelings about things in order to not stress myself out more which I stress myself more by not actually expressing them. But I also know many people who do not like expressing their emotions so they repress them and keep it bottled up. In the book, it talked about repression can lead to slips of the tongue and I have learned first-hand that this is extremely true. I have been around a good amount of people who end up saying something that they did not mean to say out loud but said it anyway because they had repressed their emotions for so long that it just “slipped”