The irony is not lost that Sigmund Freud took a long time to accept that the Nazi party was a threat to him and his own family. The invasion of Austria, where he worked, and the arrest and interrogation of his daughter Anna by the Gestapo finally got him to leave Vienna. The ironic part of this is that Freud was still working through his theories on the defense mechanisms of the ego (Abwehrmechanismen). Here he was allowing his own ego to cloud the reality that was before him. German forces were rolling into Vienna draped in Nazi flags and he still felt people were overestimating the socialist party’s influence.
He died during the war due to cancer, but his work created an entire new science and Anna would carry this work forward and the era of psychoanalysis would begin. One of the most influential areas of this new area of human psychology was the concept of the unconscious defense mechanisms that people build overtime to help them reduce anxiety from potentially harmful stimulus. Freud and the next 100 years of psychology research would go on to define the strategies that the human self will employ to defend itself. These defense mechanisms are fun to analyze, because we all do them and everything I think through the concept, I can identify areas in my life that I am deliberately ignoring, distorting, or down playing to avoid the pain of thinking about it.
You will find that the inconvenient reality around you is truly being distorted by your own ego through this process. Throughout your childhood, you learn to manipulate, deny, distort that reality in order to defend yourself against stress, anxiety, and even embarrassing primal impulses that everyone experiences. The reason you do this is to effectively maintain your own self definition, and / or a definition of other things that you like or support. Freud and others have really dove into this over the years and our culture has these concepts embedded now. You hear terms like, repression, identification, and rationalization. All of these are the primary mechanisms that we has humans deploy to alter the reality we are faced with to defend ourselves. The interesting concept is that this is unavoidable. We all do it. Even if are to notice that someone else is very much “in denial” of a problem that are faced with, we at the same time are probably faced with a whole host of problems that we are also avoiding with the same tactics.
Have you ever wondered about the hypocrisy inherent when you see a politician calling another politician out for being unethical, while at the same time are guilty themselves of the same behavior? What seems so blatantly obvious to those of us on the sidelines, the politicians locked in an ego battle are oblivious to the fact that their defense mechanisms have warped and twisted realty so far that it is not recognizable by anyone outside of their contest. Most people, btw, go through life deploying these defense mechanisms in a healthy and natural way. They do not lead to psychotic behavior, irrational adaptive methods of coping that society finds repulsive. So feel comfortable with the fact that we are all doing this in some fashion and it is part of the reality we are dealing with. Everyone you talk to is warping and twisting reality to fit their own narrative so that they can ultimately defend their own ego.
You ever wonder why sometimes when you are in a conflict with someone that their interpretation of what is going on is so warped and twisted that you are just incredibly frustrated? The thing is, when that happens you are usually both at fault. You have both deployed defense mechanisms to warp reality to fit your defense and by so doing have created a giant chasm between their constructed reality and yours. A mediator or innocent bystander can sometimes take a look at your contest and quickly and easily see a solution that fits both your requirements. The reason is because they see reality closer to what it actually is and not from the extreme edges of an ego trying desperately to defend itself.
I bring this up because I find it extremely helpful in my own self analysis to take a look at reality through a different lens. If I find myself vigorously defending a position, and am at complete odds with another person then I like suspend my ego for a period of time and ask myself if I am really twisting reality. I usually find out that I am. This applies to interactions with people, but it also applies to my interpretation of the world around me.
When I am facing a challenge, an obstacle, or a new ambition I also find that these defense mechanisms are just as active. The rationalization, justification and procrastination that I do are all designed to reduce any harm to my ego. This is something to be conscious of because as we seek to take risks and accomplish better things in life our Abwehrmechanismen will kick in and try to convince ourselves that we had done enough, that what we have done is awesome. Be wary, success requires to push past those defense mechanisms and see reality for what it is.
Guy Reams
