Denial (psychoanalysis)

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In psychoanalysis, denial is a defense mechanism that supports the split or defense against splitting , i.e. the reactivation of an early childhood psychological state. The interaction of these two primitive defense mechanisms means that negative aspects of the self or the environment are not integrated with the corresponding positive aspects. In addition to denial, this group of mostly unconscious coping and compensation mechanisms also includes devaluation and idealization , projective identification , introjection and immature projection .

Denial can be used to ignore the perception of real sensory impressions and their meaning for the individual . In this way, threatening pieces of external reality can be recognized as non-existent (or replaced by wish-fulfilling fantasies ). Denial is therefore the inner psychological counterpart to averting one's gaze from a source of danger . This mechanism enables the individual to withdraw conscious or preconscious threatening content from consciousness in an emergency . Defense through denial is thus a spontaneously usable protective reaction with which the person can withdraw attention, even the reality status, of an unpleasant truth. However, denial cannot achieve the process of permanent transfer of aversive psychological content into the unconscious . For this purpose, the ego has the defense mechanism of repression at its disposal, which can permanently shift unpleasant ideas into the unconscious.

Another difference between these two defense mechanisms is that repression, as a coping process, is directed against specific content (e.g. impermissible aggressive or libidinal instinctual impulses), while denial, as a spontaneous protective reaction, hides broader parts of reality. As a result, denial disrupts logical thought processes , emotional perception , empathy and reality testing more than the repression . As a result, an individual's ability to learn can also be restricted in areas that are repeatedly subject to denial, because memories can not be built on this hidden content .

Even more hermetically than through denial and repression, unpleasant demands can be kept away from consciousness through avoidance . These three defense mechanisms thus form a continuum with regard to their effectiveness , with denial being the most unstable and least specific form of unconscious attitude towards aversive content.

genesis

Like the other primitive defense mechanisms, denial also belongs originally to the repertoire of early childhood defense. Even if the reality check is already intact in stressful situations, the child's ego has the opportunity to treat unpleasant or threatening aspects of external reality as if they did not exist. In this way, the child's still unstable psyche can protect itself from overly traumatic impressions, at least temporarily. The prerequisite for this important mechanism is the ability of the immature individual to reduce, in a regressive movement , the abstract psychic structures that are just emerging (feelings or conceptual ideas) to concrete object representations such as those that prevailed in an earlier stage of development. This regression can be useful because at this earlier stage the outer and inner objects were treated in the same way, although a distinction could already be made between self and objects . Put simply, feelings and ideas had a concrete object quality in this phase. If the child is confronted with a threat (for example an abusive mother), it can regress into the earlier phase of development and internally ignore the threatening object "mother" that has been desymbolized. This can temporarily avert harm to the child's psyche, even if the price for hiding a piece of reality is (see identification with the aggressor )

In the event of a pathological development of the self in this early development phase, for example through ongoing traumatic influences, the defense against denial is maintained even in adulthood under specific stresses in order to maintain a strict division of the object world and self-image into positive and negative areas. In the course of this, a remarkably frequent regressive desymbolization of psychic content can be observed in such individuals, presumably so that sufficient concrete material for denial is always available. A persistence of division and denial as preferred defense mechanisms ultimately means that inconsistencies as such cannot be tolerated for the most part. This is particularly the case when the more mature defense mechanism of repression, which does not keep ambivalence as such, but rather specific conflicts from consciousness, is only deficient.

Denial in everyday life

A use of denial defense that is not considered pathological can also be observed in adults, for example in the form of the denial that no serious accidents or violent crimes will happen to you yourself (“That doesn't happen to me”). In addition, daydreams, as well as the activity of the game, share similarities with the function of denial. Mind you, none of these examples are phenomena of repression, because the elements excluded from consciousness, unlike in repression, are in principle capable of being conscious at any time. On the other hand, systematic gaps in memory, frequent regression on concrete object conceptions and a pronounced variability of the affects are an indication of a fixed use of denial defense.

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