Defense Mechanisms and Their Patterns of Variation in Adolescence

An experimental study of defense mechanisms encounters a number of difficulties both in defining the phenomena and in the attempt to diagnose them. Psychoanalysis (Sjoback, 1973) is the principal context in which they are studied, but even in psychoanalytic theory there are different interpretations of both the concept of defense mechanisms and their specific expressions or varieties (Brenner, 1974, 1975). Moreover, the variance in their interpretation increases as notions of defense mechanisms evolve. For example, Vaillant (1971, 1976) provides a broad conception of defense mechanisms that includes quite complex types of activity, such as those that determine a person's social adaptation and lifestyle. At the other end of the scale, we have a narrow definition of defense mechanisms as intrapsychic phenomena directly responsible for the regulation of emotions of just one specific modality (Plutchik, Kellerman, & Conte, 1979; Kellerman, 1980). This poses the problem of how to conceptualize the processes de...