Freud developed defense mechanisms to explain how humans deal with anxiety. Defense mechanisms like repression, regression, and displacement redirect unwanted thoughts and feelings in socially acceptable ways or push them into the unconscious mind. This is important because anxiety can negatively impact mental health if not properly managed by defense mechanisms.

1. Freud's Defense Mechanisms
Defense mechanisms, developed by Sigmund Freud, explain how humans deal with
anxiety. This is very important because anxiety can dramatically and negatively affect
the ego, which can lead to future psychological illnesses and problems.
Defense Mechanisms:
1. Repression
Unacceptable or unpleasant impulses are pushed back into the unciousness.
2. Regression
People behave as if they were at an earlier stage of development
3. Displacement
The expression of an unwanted feeling or thought is redirected from a more threatening powerful person to a
weaker one
4.Rationalization
People provide self-justifying explanations in place of the actual, but threatening reason for their behavior
5. Denial
People refuse to accept or acknowledge an anxiety-producing piece of information
6. Projection
People attribute unwanted impulses and feelings to someone else
7. Sublimation
People divert unwanted impulses into socially approved thoughts, feelings, or behaviors
8. Reaction formation
Unconscious impulses are expressed as their opposite in consciousness

2. Repression
Can play a part in many mental illnesses,
most direct method.
Example:
A young adult forgets that she was yelled at by her father as a child
and he was sometimes abusive.

3. Regression
People tend to go back to their childhood to
days where they are not responsible for
their actions and find comfort in the actions
taken towards them.
Example:
A teen who is in college is very homesick,
so she sleeps with her teddy bear and
homemade blanket from her childhood
to comfort herself.

4. Displacement
Taking harsh feelings out on the wrong
person or people due to their own
chastizements.
Example:
A man gets fired from his job and comes home to his wife and starts
an argument over something frivilous and out of her control.

5. Denial
Mindset where an individual simply cannot
come to terms with an
event/feeling/emotion, etc. and that it did
happen.
A man is diagnoses to have
pancreatic cancer and then
imediately starts to make up
reasons that he couldn't have
it and that the doctors probably
misdiagnosed him.

6. Rationalization
Excuses for actions based on actual
behavior that may not necessarily be
producive.
Example:
A younger boy asks a girl in his class
to the dance the following weekend.
She turns him down. He then goes to his
friends telling them that he never really
liked her anyway, he just wanted to let
her down when she accepted.

7. Projection
An accusation of someone else, while it's
really the accuser themselves who is the
guilty one.
Example:
Someone has been stealing from a company and when it is found out,
a coworker who is actually guilty of the crime, accuses another
employee of the crime.

8. Sublimation
Actions taken out so that their 'desires' are
met but at a socially-accepted view.
Example:
A man who seems to love to take authority and be bossy in his daily
relationships decides to pursue a career as a judge so he can rightly make
decisions over others.

9. Reaction Formation
The unconscious feelings are directed
outward into conscious feelings by
demonstrating the opposite initial feeling.
Example:
A son tells his friends that he and his father are extremely close, even
though he secretely hold resentment towards him for cheating on his
mother

10. Sources
Information
Psychsmart by McGraw Hill
Wikipedia.com
Pictures
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