The SRA Symposium - College of Medicine

Papers
Coping involves the effort to overcome, reduce, or tolerate the demands created by our perceived
stressors. One type of coping technique is emotion-focused coping. Sigmund Freud believed that
anxiety was a stressful emotion. He observed that people would fend off this distressing emotion
with defense mechanisms (Weiten and Lloyd, 1990). Freud’s ideas were motivated by observing his
patients dealing with anxiety, an intense, negative emotional experience. Anxiety is an unpleasant
state experienced by a combination of an uneasy apprehensive feeling, and an increased physiological
arousal such as elevated heart rate and blood pressure. It gives rise to various reactions. For
example, are you defensive when coworkers criticize you or when you are not selected for a promotion?
When coping with a failure over a work project or a competitive loss or when someone
you care about disappoints you, do you tend to deny or distort the problem? Defensive coping is a
common method to handling stress. Defensive coping mechanisms defend against feeling anxious.
They protect our self-perceptions from ego-threatening stressors.
Question 2
The second common question SRA members are curious about regards the nature of defense
mechanisms. Are they normal? Answer – We all use ego defenses, to some degree, on a regular
basis. They fall within the action of normal patterns of emotional coping. Defense mechanisms
armor us from the emotional discomfort brought on by stress. Defensive maneuvers are largely in
the unconscious. Freud thought the unconscious contains thoughts, memories, and desires that
are well below the surface of conscious mindful awareness, but that they nonetheless exert great
influence on our behavior (Weiten and Lloyd, 1997). These unconscious defense mechanisms are
mental maneuvers that work through self-deception. The primary emotion guarded against is
anxiety, however anger and guilt are additional emotions people tend to evade through defensive
tactics. Ego defensive maneuvers succeed by self-deception to create a false perception to lessen
the threat to one’s self-esteem.
Question 3
Thirdly, people are curious to know if ego defenses are healthy. Freud developed the defensive
mechanism concept along with his formation of the personality components of id, ego, and superego.
The ego must defend the self from anxious feelings when the id demands pleasure and the superego’s
morals are conflicted. Defending the self-image is hard work for the ego particularly when
one’s sense of adequacy and worth are being challenged. Research administrators tell me they feel
pressure to please others, they fear failure, and they are anxious about disappointing losses. All of
these stressors threaten the ideal image of the superego. Defensive coping is an avoidance strategy
and as such often does not solve one’s conflicts.
Generally, defensive maneuvers are poor ways of coping with stress. This being a complicated issue,
the answer is not simple. More often than not defense mechanisms are not health inducing; however,
there is some suggestion (Taylor, 1989) that some self-deception may be adaptive to our wellbeing.
“Normal” people tend to have overly favorable self-images, overestimate the degree to which
they control chance events, and have unrealistic optimism about the future. Baumeister (1989)
suggests defensive coping is a matter of degree and that there is an “optimal margin of illusion”.
124 2005 Symposium Proceedings Book