From Self-Protection to Relational Protectiveness: The Modification of Defensive Structures

Kohut was instrumental in shifting our attention from the removal of individual defenses in the service of making the unconscious conscious to emphasizing the importance of empathically understanding the healthy, self-protective usefulness of defenses, both developmentally and during the therapeutic process. Despite this pivotal change in reactive tone toward defenses, there have been few experiences near attempts to describe how we help patients to modify characterological defenses that interfere with the healing process. In this article, I suggest that one of the most important but unrecognized ways we work through these resistances is by facilitating a shift in the patient from the need for self-protective defensiveness to a felt relational protectiveness. Verbatim clinical examples illustrate a protective attitude and explain how relational protectiveness is actualized when dealing with characterological defenses.