Question

Anna Freud a child psychoanalyst, is widely credited with expanding upon psychoanalytic theory by the identifying and describing the following

Answer 1

''creative minds have always been known to survive any kind of bad training.''

- Anna Freud

Anna Freud was born in Vienna, Austria. She was the daughter of the famous psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud. She made contributions to the field of child psychoanalysis and ego psychology.

Sigmund Frued being a psychoanalyst, began to psychoanalyze his daughter, which eventually paved the way for Anna to enter into the field of psychoanalysis owing to the exposure that she had in the field. She authored her first psychoanalytic paper; Beating Fantasies and Daydreams, to the Vienna Psychoanalytical Society in 1922. She began practising child psychology from 1923.

In 1935, Anna Freud published her most famous work, The Ego and the Mechanisms of Defense in which she described repression and restrain to be the core of defense mechanisms. She laid emphasis on the role of ego and thedefenses developed by the ego inorder to avoid conflicts. Her work was evidently distinct from that of her father's.

In 1965 she published Normality and Pathology in Childhood, that spoke about the various developmental stages that children go through. She explained through this book, the developmental stages of childhood that eventually lead to the development of their personality and the interplay of ego and environment in this process.

During the later years of her life, she pursued studies on emotionally challenged, underpriviledged and disadvantaged children.

She coined the term 'defense mechanisms' and 'defensiveness' and added ten new ego defenses of her own. Repression, denial, projection, displacement, regression and sublimation are the main types of defense mechanisms. The ego defenses given by Freud include the following:-

1. Compensation: As the name suggests, in this type of mechanism, people compensate for what they think are their shortcomings to improve their weaknesses. For example, a person who is insecure about his looks compensates for it by excelling in his job.
2. Denial: When a person chooses to stay in denial, he lives inside a bubble where he denies obvious facts despite of irrefutable evidence. Avoiding denial is important in the treatment of various disorders and diseases.
3. Displacement: Emotions have the quality of displacement and sometimes they overpower the person so much that negative emotions such as anger are released on somebody else. For example, if a man gets humiliated by his boss at work and comes home and yells at his wife who in turn yells at the kids who then displace it on somebody else. Displacement finds suitable ways of expressing aggressive impulses.
4. Rationalization: This is a type of defense mechanism that people employ to justify failure or mistakes to evade criticism or disapproval either from others or themselves. Failure is not blatantly accepted as failure, instead, is ascribed to various factors. For example, a person who blames his failure on other things.
5. Reaction formation: This mechanism in the words of Anna Frued, is 'believing the opposite'. It is where inappropriate emotions are substituted with other more suitable emotions.
6. Regression: Somtimes, adults, when faced with a real problem tend to act juvenile and make bad decisions.This is due to regression where the person makes attempts to return to a place or a state of mind that is psychologically safe, such as their childhood or any such similar phases where there are no anxiety laden problems or tension. They tend to move away from stress by retracting to the past.
7. Identification: It involves emulating or adapting the characteristic traits of someone else. People start to identify themselves with somebody else. They do so to avoid anxiety or emotional crisis.
8. Intellectualization: It is where cogitation is employed to block confrontation that exists in the unconscious. Feeling of negative emotion is voluntarily avoided by thinking about something else. It involves disconnecting onself from a stressful situation by focussing on logic.
9. Repression: Repression is an unconsious force that prevents any painful memory, experience, or thought from entering the consciousness. The problem with repressed desires is that one can not get rid of them. The more we try to repress them, the more they emerge through the subconcsious and begin to reflect in our behaviour even though we may not be aware of it.
10. Sublimation: This invloves displacing emotions into a constructive activity. For example, people who've led damaged lives might express their emotions by writing poetry.