The Ego and the Mechanisms of Defence
The systematic account of defence. Still the reference point for how the term is used clinically.
By impersonating the aggressor, assuming his attributes or imitating his aggression, the child transforms himself from the person threatened into the person who makes the threat.
Anna Freud turns the analytic lens from the id to the ego, treating defence itself as material for observation. First published in German in 1936 and in Cecil Baines's English translation in 1937, the book sets out how the ego wards off anxiety and instinctual demand, and why a given impulse comes to feel dangerous. It catalogues the ego's manoeuvres in working detail: denial in fantasy and in word and act, projection, reversal, turning against the self, and the identification with the aggressor by which a threatened child takes on the menace it fears. A closing study of altruistic surrender shows instinct rerouted through another person's life, and the account of defence against instinct in adolescence reads the upheavals of that period as the ego's response to a quantitative surge of drive. For the clinician it supplies a working vocabulary for what defence looks like in the consulting room.
About the author
Anna Freud
Anna Freud (1895 to 1982) was Sigmund Freud's youngest daughter and the founder of child psychoanalysis. Her 1936 work, The Ego and the Mechanisms of Defence, mapped the ego's defensive repertoire systematically and remains central to ego psychology; it argues that defences deserve analytic attention in their own right. At the Hampstead Clinic in London, which she directed, she developed a developmental, observation-led approach to treating children and to training the analysts who worked with them.
Details
- 1936
- 1937
- Das Ich und die Abwehrmechanismen
- German
- Cecil Baines
- Routledge
- Routledge, 1936
- 204
- 9781855750388