Do Now:
• What do you think about yawning?
• Is your nose itchy?
• Come on…just a little bit itchy?
Personality Adjustment and Conflict
The Healthy Personality
Self Defense Mechanisms
Who controls what happens in your life?
How strong is the power of suggestion?
• Psychological issues can impact biology
• Extreme examples: voo-doo, sudden death
syndrome, etc.
• Somatoform Disorders: condition in which
psychological issues are expressed in bodily
symptoms in the absence of any real physical
problem.
• Mild examples: man feels morning sickness
due to wife’s pregnancy, etc.
Hey, we only
have a week to
go!
Yes, but mine’s
going to be gone
after that.
What are Conversion Disorders?
• Serious psychological trauma that converts itself into
a real dysfunction.
• Severe examples: hysterical blindness, false
pregnancy, hysterical paralysis. These physical
symptoms DO exist, but are rare.
• Hypochondrasis: more common conversion disorder.
Over concern about health. Can begin from
childhood when great attention was paid to them
when they were sick, and not under healthy
conditions
• Munchausen’s By Proxy: attempting to get attention
by making your own child sick.
Defense Mechanisms
• Defense mechanisms help
us cope with unbearable thoughts, feelings
and wishes.
• The idea of this comes from Freud
Why do we use defense mechanisms?
• How do we keep our personalities from
getting beat up while we are building them?
• Defense Mechanisms do for anxiety, what
endorphins do for physical pain – reduce
impact
• They can be helpful – lead our lives in difficult
times
• They can be dangerous – distort reality, keep
us from taking action in bad situations
What is repression, suppression and
denial?
• Repression: first line of defense
• Pushing out of bad memories without
acknowledging them – they can be forgotten for
years.
• Often found in child abuse victims
• Suppression: pushing bad memories away while
being aware you are doing it.
• Denial: Totally denying a problem exists – both
repression and suppression are forms of denial
What is displacement?
I hate this pie!!!
I can’t believe
Bertha broke up
with me.
• Venting our feelings on someone other than
ourselves
Separation of emotion from its real object and redirection of the intense
emotion toward someone or something that is less offensive or threatening in
order to avoid dealing directly with what is frightening or threatening
What is Reaction Formation?
•Expressing the opposite
of what we really feel
•Sometimes someone
with very vocal and strong
opinions about a topic
actually practices the
opposite of what they
preach.
What is reaction formation?
You smell!
You have cooties!
She’s really
pretty, I wonder
if she likes me?
Wow, he’s
talking to me!!
The process of
expressing the
opposite of what we feel
What is intellectualization?
• The process of removing our feelings about an
event and discussing it in a calm rational and
unemotional way
…and then it burned down, can
you believe that? Yup, lost
everything. Can I have more iced
tea?
What is regression?
• The process of going backwards in thoughts
and behavior to a period when we were taken
care of as children.
Amnesia and Dissociative Fugue
• Amnesia: forgetting event due to
psychological trauma
• Retrograde and Anterograde:
• Retrograde: Forgetting everything in the past
• Anterograde: Forgetting new memories
Dissociative Fugue: Flight from home – forget
identity but NOT skills
What is projection?
• The process of attributing our own thoughts
to someone else.
Everyone’s staring at me
because they are jealous
of my wonderful fashion
sense!
What is sublimation
• The process of channeling
emotional energy into constructive or
creative activities
“Drive past any school playground and find the kid sitting by himself looking
miserable…that’s your future successful writer”
• Sublimation is probably the most useful and
constructive of the defense mechanisms as it
takes the energy of something that is
potentially harmful and turns it to doing
something good and useful.
What is rationalization?
• The process of explaining a problem so as not
to take any blame
Victims of domestic
violence are often told “You
deserved it” or “I didn’t
want to hit you, but you
asked for it”. This is a form
of rationalization. Victims
also sometimes exhibit the
defense mechanism
“Identification with
Aggressor”
Identification with aggressor
Taking on characteristics of someone who
• has mistreated us in order to
psychologically avoid abuse.
• Stockholm Syndrome: The behavior of kidnap victims who,
over time, become sympathetic to their captors. The name
derives from a 1973 hostage incident in Stockholm, Sweden.
The behavior is considered a common survival strategy for victims of
interpersonal abuse, and has been observed in battered spouses, abused
children, prisoners of war, and concentration camp survivors
Summary
• There is a strong connection between mind and body
• Psychological defense mechanisms are used to protect
us–
• Using them in moderation helps to protect our sense
of well-being to recover from: personality defects,
mistakes, emotional pain or problems.
Reign Over Me Test
Choose two (2) characters from Reign Over Me
and discuss:
• A defense mechanism they used and why?
• A definition of the defense mechanism
• Which of their defense mechanisms proved
helpful at first?
• Which was the most damaging?
• If you could write a conclusion for the film;
what would it be?