Effective Helping: Interviewing and Counseling Techniques. 8th Edition. Chapter

Question

Effective Helping: Interviewing and Counseling Techniques. 8th Edition. Chapter 5 : Helping Theory Discuss briefly , the impact of the unconscious in human behavior according to the Freudien theory.
What is the role of defense mechanisms in Freudian theory? Effective Helping: Interviewing and Counseling Techniques. 8th Edition. Chapter 5 : Helping Theory Discuss briefly , the impact of the unconscious in human behavior according to the Freudien theory.
What is the role of defense mechanisms in Freudian theory? Discuss briefly , the impact of the unconscious in human behavior according to the Freudien theory.
What is the role of defense mechanisms in Freudian theory?

Explanation / Answer

Sigmund Freud founded psychodynamic approach which attempted to explain personality, motivation, and mental health by exploring 'unconscious' processes. Here, unconscious processes were thought to determine all our life experiences. Unconscious in psychological context can be defined as part of the mind wherein psychic activity takes place of which the person is unaware. According to Freud, our behavior is greatly influenced by 'unconscious' level of mind. If we interact with people in conscious manner, we might tend to mask our real emotions, feeling, intentions with others. Freud suggested that our behavior controlled by unconscious and subconscious processes.

Defense mechanism according to Freud is an unconscious psychological process to protect us from potentially threatening stimuli and thoughts resulting in anxiety. Here, various defense mechanisms try to reduce our anxiety due to threatening thought in our unconscious self.

Let us consider some defense mechanisms in given scenario as example:

Scenario: Person who was getting good incentives and recognition gets neglected and recognition as well as incentives shifts to new staff.

Defense mechanisms:

1. Repression: Pushing thoughts into unconscious. This is primary defense mechanism where unknowingly thoughts placed into unconscious, so that anxiety will not arise. Here, person may try to forget about this recognition shift and try to work as before.

2. Denial: Not accepting the scenario. Here person may not accept his recognition shifted to another staff and continue to feel well recognized as before.

3. Displacement: Redirection of feeling toward other people or task. Here, person may redirect frustration towards his family members (usually little ones) to cope up with anxiety.

4. Projection: Here person thinks about loyal contributions to performance at workplace and believes still organization has good consideration and patronage on him.

5. Reaction formation: This is the phase where person expresses the opposite of how one truly feels. Person may express that he is actually not interested in any recognition and he wants to be comfortable rather working hard.

6. Regression: In this phase, person may return back to his earlier stage of lifespan development and try to be comfortable by following old coping strategies.

7. Rationalization: Here, person may create some false excuses for low performance and may tell everyone will get bored performing the same task for long time, even new staff may get saturated after some time, etc.

8. Intellectualization: Here, the person may undertake some work study or research activity to support his own excuses and start researching on theories like 'burn-out syndrome or correlation analysis with stress and performance.'

9. Sublimation: This is process of channeling one's frustration into different goal. Social unacceptable impulses are replaced to socially acceptable behavior. Here, person may subscribe to gym and start working out. This reduces anxiety and transfers the passion from performing for recognition to working for healthy body.

Conclusion: By going through above defense mechanisms with the example, we can say that defense mechanism tries to protect an individual from getting overly anxious and having unpleasant/socially unacceptable thoughts by channelizing threat causing stimuli to other un-harmful activities. According to Freud, defense mechanisms prevents individual from becoming anxious and reduces anxiety through various techniques as discussed above.

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