Story of Psychology - Morton Hunt [128]
He illustrated the process by citing one of his most famous case histories, that of Little Hans.84 At the Oedipal stage of childhood the boy developed a phobia that prevented him from going out to the street; he was afraid of horses (the streets were full of them in that era), which he thought would bite him. His inability to go out was, Freud says, “a restriction which his ego had imposed on itself so as not to arouse the anxiety-symptom.” But where had the fear of being bitten by horses come from? Analysis traced it back to Little Hans’s Oedipal desires, his wish to do away with his father, and the resultant fear that his father would harm him. Instead of resolving it in a healthy fashion, he had displaced it to horses (significantly, his father used to play the part of the horse and let Hans ride on him) and transformed his fear of castration into a fear of being bitten.
In short, an impermissible wish, repressed but maladaptively dealt with, becomes a neurotic symptom. The symptom is costly to the sufferer, but not as costly as the anxiety it allays:
An agoraphobic patient may start his illness with an attack of anxiety in the street. This would be repeated every time he went into the street again. He will now develop the symptom of agoraphobia; this may also be described as an inhibition, a restriction of the ego’s functioning, and by means of it he spares himself anxiety attacks. We can witness the converse of this if we interfere in the formation of symptoms, as is possible, for instance, with obsessions. If we prevent a patient from carrying out a washing ceremonial, he falls into a state of anxiety which he finds hard to tolerate and from which he had evidently been protected by his symptom.85
Repression is thus the fundamental defense against all anxiety-producing wishes, memories, or feelings, and the very bedrock of the psychological structure.86 It works unconsciously; the child who has repressed the wish that a little sibling would die does not know that he harbors such a wish and will react with scorn or rage to any suggestion that he does. (Suppression, a different mental act, is the conscious control of an impermissible desire; one wills oneself to avoid acting on the desire, but this does not get rid of the anxiety.)
As with the Oedipal conflict, repression can result in neurosis but normally does not; the psyche finds adaptive ways to handle the repressed material. It does so by means of a number of other defenses— again, all unconscious—that transmute the unacceptable into the acceptable. Freud named several and referred readers to a more complete treatment of the defense mechanisms by his daughter, Anna Freud.87 Among the more commonly used defenses named by Freud or discussed by Anna Freud are these:
Denial is a relatively primitive defense in which the individual simply fails to perceive or acknowledge an anxiety-producing reality. A woman who is forced to care for a dying husband may tell herself (contrary to all the evidence) that he will recover shortly, or she may say, “I want to keep him alive as long as possible,” when unconsciously she wishes the ordeal were over.
Rationalization is a more sophisticated version of denial. The individual acts out of one motive but justifies the act in terms of another that is more acceptable. A battered woman whose low self-esteem makes her too dependent to be alone tells herself that she stays with her abusive lover or husband because she loves him.
Reaction formation goes a step further, exaggerating and displaying for all to see a trait exactly opposite to the repressed one. The man repressing homosexual wishes may behave in a macho fashion or physically assault gays. The would-be sybarite