Stepping aside from the style of my usual postings, this post is a sort of slap-dash academic reaction to a statement in "Love Sick on Valentine's Day? You Already Have the Cure".
It's a great post about how we come equipped with implicit processes for managing affect. I wanted to supplement it by noting some neglected historical antecedents Psychoanalytic theories are often treated like skeletons in the closet of modern psychology...ignored or repudiated. Of course, some other people treat them like Biblical verse, but that is less frequently the case. There are aspects from those writings that may be flawed, built upon, sketchy or dismissed, but when an idea is handed down it's important to respect one's intellectual heritage.
An example of this benign neglect: "One reason, proposed originally by social psychologists Daniel Gilbert and Timothy Wilson, is that people are unaware of psychological defenses they have that reduce negative emotions."
The idea that outside of awareness there exist cognitive processes for the reduction of difficult affect was hardly proposed originally by Gilbert and Wilson. It's been kicked around in psychology for over a century.
For the easy run-down, see wikipedia's entry on "defence mechanism" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ego_defenses
Waaaay back in the 19th century, Freud talks about unconscious processes that separate unbearable affect from an idea. See Freud, S. (1894) The neuro-psychoses of defence.
Freud, S. (1896) Further remarks on the neuro-psychoses of defence.
Anna Freud described numerous forms of these defense mechanisms in The Ego and Mechanisms of Defense in 1936. Both Anna and Sigmund wrote about defenses occurring in reaction to unbearable affect arising from instinctual urges.
Even before Anna Freud, Alfred Adler wrote about "safeguarding tendencies"! Of Adler's writing, Heinz Ansbacher, in The Individual Psychology of Alfred Adler, said that "Freud's defenses provide protection of the Ego against instinctual demands. Whereas Adler's safeguards protect the self esteem from threats by outside demands and problems of life."
Over the years, social psychologists have done a great job of using experimental methodology to identify self-esteem enhancing behaviors.
Baumeister RF, Dale K, Sommer KL (1998) Freudian defense mechanisms and empirical findings in modern social psychology: Reaction formation, projection, displacement, undoing, isolation, sublimation and denial. J Pers. 66:1081-1124.
Phoebe Cramer has written about how the concept of "defense mechanisms" occurs throughout different branches of psychological discipline. Cramer P (2000) Defense mechanisms in psychology today: Further processes for adaptation. Am Psychol. 55:637– 646
One thing that consistently occurs throughout the writing on defenses, is that some defense use is adaptive (managing affect and building self-esteem) versus some use that is maladaptive (creating interpersonal discord, isolation, breaks in reality testing).
Our thinking about psychological defenses (or adaptive coping styles) has come a long way over the past century. Whatever one thinks about early psychoanalytic theories, and even flawed as they are, they often miss out on the the historical/intellectual credit and citation they deserve when discussing ideas that were derived from them.
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