An Inductive Method of Analyzing Defense of Self- Esteem

Abstract

Clinical psychology today concerns itself to a large extent with defensive functions: the organism’s conscious and unconscious efforts to ward off and nullify threats to all aspects of its psychological integrity, which are analogous to physiological mechanisms of defense against threats to numerous vital biochemical equilibria. Psychoanalysts were the first to describe psychological defense “mechanisms” from their intensive clinical observations. More slowly, psychologists who are in a better position to use experimental techniques have followed in their wake, seeking objective empirical demonstration of such strategies as repression and projection, and (what is more important) studying their concrete manifestations in a variety of situations.