Why Do I Do That?: Psychological Defense Mechanisms and the Hidden Ways They Shape Our Lives by Joseph Burgo PhD

Author:Joseph Burgo PhD [Burgo PhD, Joseph]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
ISBN: 9780988443105
Publisher: New Rise Press
Published: 2013-12-30T18:30:00+00:00

These phrases all imply a kind of evacuation or emptying. Through impassioned speech (‘venting” or “letting off steam”), we may relieve emotional pressure; when we complain at great length to a friend (“dumping” or “unloading”) we transfer the burden of our feelings onto the other person. The wish to rid themselves of painful emotions, to shift them onto someone else, is what motivates people who make a habit of venting or dumping. They are projecting (that is, getting rid of something) in a larger sense than we typically use the term.

Without the benefit of words, infants do something similar, ridding themselves of painful emotion by screaming or crying it out. In the process, this evacuated (projected) pain makes their caretakers feel distressed. Just as you may have felt awful after an evening spent listening to a friend vent, the parents absorb the child’s pain and feel highly uncomfortable – so much so that they usually feel the need to do something. We feel an infant’s pain and try to figure out what it means. Do we need to feed the baby? Change its diaper? Comfort it?

So in an entirely appropriate way, babies evacuate or project their unbearable experience into us,18 evoking an empathic response so we’ll help them with their pain or discomfort. From an evolutionary perspective, you could say that projection came into being not only as the earliest defense mechanism, meant to help the struggling human infant cope with (get rid of) unbearable experience, but also as a form of communication that stimulates care-giving responses in the parents. Projection is a normal, everyday part of parent-child relationships and an intermittent feature of most other relationships as well.

In the normal course of things, when they’re tended well enough or they’re not too difficult for their parents to bear, babies learn to understand and tolerate their own experience. Over the years as they grow up, children don’t need constantly to project their experiences outside but can keep them inside and deal with those feelings themselves. In other words, with the help of its caretakers, the infant’s unbearable fear, pain, anxiety, etc. gradually become tolerable.

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