The Ego and the Mechanisms of Defence by Anna Freud

Author:Anna Freud [Freud, Anna]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Karnac Books
Published: 1992-12-31T00:00:00+00:00

Note

1 Compare S. Rado’s (1933) notion of the “wish-penis” of little girls, which he describes as the hallucinatory reproduction of the male organ which they have seen.

2 “Impersonation” in children’s play, which I shall not attempt to analyze in detail here, comes halfway between “denial in word and act” and “denial in fantasy.”

3 Compare R. Laforgue’s notion of scotomization (1928).

CHAPTER 8

Restriction of the Ego

* * *

Our comparison of the mechanisms of denial and repression, fantasy formation and reaction formation has revealed a parallelism in the methods adopted by the ego for the avoidance of unpleasure from external and from internal sources. We trace the same parallelism when we study another, simpler defense mechanism. The method of denial, upon which is based the fantasy of the reversal of the real facts into their opposite, is employed in situations in which it is impossible to escape some painful external impression. When a child is somewhat older, his greater freedom of physical movement and his increased powers of psychic activity enable his ego to evade such stimuli and there is no need for him to perform so complicated a psychic operation as that of denial. Instead of perceiving the painful impression and subsequently canceling it by withdrawing its cathexis, it is open to the ego to refuse to encounter the dangerous external situation at all. It can take to flight and so, in the truest sense of the word, “avoid” the occasions of unpleasure. The mechanism of avoidance is so primitive and natural and, moreover, so inseparably associated with the normal development of the ego that it is not easy, for purposes of theoretical discussion, to detach it from its usual context and to view it in isolation.

When I was analyzing the little boy whom I introduced in the previous chapter as “the boy with the cap,” I was able to observe how his avoidance of unpleasure developed on these lines. One day, when he was at my house, he found a little magic drawing block, which appealed to him greatly. He began enthusiastically to rub the pages, one by one, with a colored pencil and was pleased when I did the same. Suddenly, however, he glanced at what I was doing, came to a stop, and was evidently upset The next moment he put down his pencil, pushed the whole apparatus (hitherto jealously guarded) across to me, stood up, and said, “You go on doing it; I would much rather watch/’ Obviously, when he looked at my drawing, it struck him as more beautiful, more skillful, or somehow more perfect than his own, and the comparison gave him a shock. He instantly decided that he would not compete with me any more, since the results were disagreeable, and thereupon he abandoned the activity which, a moment ago, had given him pleasure. He adopted the role of the spectator, who does nothing and so cannot have his performance compared with that of someone else. By imposing this restriction on himself the child avoided a repetition of the disagreeable impression.

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